Lewis Hamilton counts 'blessing' after snatching Spa pole from Sebastian Vettel

Watch adrenaline-filled tour of Spa track

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Lewis Hamilton claims his fourth successive pole position this season
• Mercedes driver denies championship leader Sebastian Vettel at Spa
• Vettel qualifies second ahead of Red Bull teammate Mark Webber
• Title contenders Kimi Raikkonen and Fernando Alonso off the pace

(CNN) -- Lewis Hamilton couldn't believe his luck after snatching a fourth successive pole position at a rain-affected qualifying session for Sunday's Belgian Grand Prix.

The Mercedes driver, who won the last race in Hungary before Formula One's four-week mid-season break, gave himself a great chance of reducing Sebastian Vettel's championship lead after his last-minute heroics at Spa on Saturday.

Force India's Paul Di Resta had been poised for the first pole position of his career after making a bold tire gamble, but as the rain eased and the track dried his best time was beaten by Mark Webber.

Vettel looked to have edged out his Red Bull teammate as he set the quickest time of two minutes 1.2 seconds, only for Hamilton to charge through right at the end with 2:1.012.

F1 interactive: Explore Spa circuit

"When I started that last lap I thought, 'Oh my God!' as I was seventh or eighth and about three seconds down," the 2008 world champion said after claiming the 31st pole of his career -- putting him seventh on the all-time list.

"I ran slightly wide at the first corner and I dropped to five, six seconds back, so I didn't know what was going on," Hamilton, who won at Spa in 2010, told reporters.

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"But I kept pushing. It's a blessing I am up here. Generally I feel comfortable in changing conditions when I can find the limit.

"I pushed through the middle sector and really caned it. I feel so fortunate to get pole."

Vettel, who leads fourth-placed Hamilton by 48 points, expects similar entertainment during the race with mixed weather again forecast.

Read: GP of America 'is off'

"We all went out on slicks -- which was entertaining when it started to rain heavily," the German said.

"Then it stopped raining and the circuit came back quickly, but I saw Lewis catching me up in the last lap, so I could have gone quicker.

"I was quite close to pole, but all in all it was a good day for the team. Let's now see what happens tomorrow when we expect similar conditions."

Di Resta had to settle for fifth -- behind Mercedes' Nico Rosberg but ahead of Hamilton's former McLaren teammate Jenson Button, who won the race last year.

Romain Grosjean qualified seventh ahead of Lotus teammate Kimi Raikkonen, second in the championship and a four-time winner at Spa.

Read: F1's half-term report

Fernando Alonso, a point behind the Finn in the standings, was another place back in qualifying as the Spaniard took ninth ahead of Ferrari teammate Felipe Massa.

Meanwhile, Pirelli's investigation into punctures suffered by Vettel and Alonso during Friday's practice revealed that the cause was a piece of metal that had fallen off a car -- not the tires.

Drivers had been concerned after earlier problems with the rubber compounds at July's British Grand Prix and were worried there may be a repeat at the high-speed Belgian track.

"There are certainly no tire-related issues," Pirelli's motorsport director Paul Hembery said.

"We've seen no signs of fatigue. From our point of view there is no reason to be concerned."

Hembery did express concern at reports Michelin may return to F1 as a tire supplier, despite Pirelli having a deal in place with F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone.

For Michelin to be involved for the first time since 2006, governing body the FIA would have to announce a tender at next month's World Motor Sport Council in Croatia.

"We've contracts in place and we'd hope people would respect them," Hembery told the UK Press Association.

"Quite frankly, a tender in September, when we will be running in January, would be farcical.

"If you wanted to do that then it should have been done in September of last year. Everybody will look ridiculous in that scenario."

Meanwhile, in motorcycling's elite MotoGP competition, Cal Crutchlow set a new lap record at Brno as he claimed a surprise pole position for Sunday's Czech Grand Prix.

The British rider beat the quickest time set last year by world champion Jorge Lorenzo, and will head the grid for the second time this season for Monster Yamaha Tech 3.

Lorenzo qualified fifth for the Yamaha factory team, with seven-time world champion teammate Valentino Rossi seventh.

The Honda factory team's riders Marc Marquez and Dani Pedrosa were third and fourth, though they too were upstaged by an independent entry as Alvaro Bautista took second on the timesheets for Honda Gresini.

China's Bo Xilai rebuts testimony of ex-police chief key to his downfall

Bo Xilai trial wraps third day

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Bo Xilai slams his former police chief as a "liar with extremely bad character"
• Trial adjourned after half a day on Sunday, to resume for day 5 on Monday
• Bo facing trial for corruption, embezzlement and abuse of power
• Wang says he tried to seek U.S. asylum because he feared for his safety

Jinan, China (CNN) -- Calling his former deputy a "liar with extremely bad character," fallen high-flying politician Bo Xilai on Sunday rebutted the testimony of the prosecution's star witness as his increasingly dramatic trial stretched into a fourth day.

The former Communist Party chief of the sprawling southwestern metropolis of Chongqing has denied abusing his power -- the third and final charge being heard in court in Jinan, eastern China, more than a year after he was stripped of his post and expelled from the party.

Prosecutors accuse Bo of threatening and improperly firing his former police chief Wang Lijun after learning about a murder investigation involving Bo's wife Gu Kailai, who is currently serving a suspended life sentence for killing British businessman Neil Heywood.

On Sunday, Bo insisted that Wang was lying throughout his court appearance, and said his words lacked any credibility or legal standing.

Fallen political star Bo Xilai stands for trial at the Jinan Intermediate People's Court on Thursday, August 22.

An overview of the courtroom on August 22 where Bo is standing trial on charges of bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power.

Tight security is in place around the courthouse in Jinan, China, on Wednesday, August 21 -- the day before China's so-called "trial of the century."

Police detain an elderly demonstrator on August 21 who was protesting against the Chinese justice system outside the court in Jinan.

Police escort protesters away from the courthouse on August 21.

Police march outside the courthouse in Jinan on August 21.

Security barriers are put in place on August 21 outside the courthouse.

A notice about Bo Xilai's trial is posted outside the courthouse on August 21.

Bo Xilai: China's 'trial of the century'

Bo Xilai: China's 'trial of the century'

China's "trial of the century"

China's "trial of the century"

Bo Xilai: China's 'trial of the century'

China's "trial of the century"

China's "trial of the century"

China's "trial of the century"

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Wang took the witness stand Saturday, providing the first opportunity for the two former allies to confront each other since Wang's attemption defection to the United States in early February 2012.

Wang told the court he fled to the U.S. consulate in Chengdu because after he feared for his safety after Bo struck him during a tense encounter in his office, just one day after Wang told Bo about his wife's suspected involvement in murder.

"He started verbally assaulting me... and about three minutes later, he walked around the left side of his desk and stood in front me. He suddenly attacked me with his fist, hitting on my left ear -- it was not just a slap," Wang recalled, according to a court transcript.

On Sunday, Bo said: "He said I didn't just slap him but punched him. I never practiced martial arts -- I don't possess such striking power," according to a transcript released by the Jinan Intermediate People's court.

Bo added: "After being convicted for abuse of power and defection, he still argued that he didn't defect but engaged in diplomacy in accordance with regulations.

"All this shows this man has extremely bad character and lies on the spot."

The trial was adjourned after the Sunday morning session and will resume Monday morning.

The story behind the 'slap'

On Saturday, Bo conceded he had made mistakes but denied he broke the law to protect his wife.

"I have made mistakes. I feel regret and I'm willing to take responsibility," Bo said. "But whether or not I've committed a crime is a different issue."

"I didn't bend the law to protect Gu Kailai," he said. "I didn't force Wang Lijun out or force him to defect to the United States."

Bo did acknowledge slapping Wang in the face -- a key moment long considered a turning point in the two men's relationship -- during a confrontation, claiming he believed Wang was trumping up charges against Gu and thus furious at his "double-faced" deputy who had faked his loyalty to the Bo family.

According to a court transcript, Wang said it was more than a slap and that the blow had caused a "discharge" from his ear.

"My body shook a little... and I found blood at the corner of my mouth and discharge in my ear," he continued. "I wiped the blood off with a tissue, but when he heard me calmly tell him again that he had to face the reality, he threw a glass on the ground while saying 'I'll never accept it.'"

Wang told prosecutors that Bo's physical violence against him as well as the disappearance of his aides and investigators led to his decision to seek refuge in the U.S. diplomatic mission in Chengdu.

When Bo was allowed to question the witness, Wang revealed in an exchange that Gu had told him about her intention to kill a day before the murder. And when Bo asked Wang: "Did you think I was forcing you out in an attempt to cover up (my wife's murder) case?" Wang replied: "Yes."

Embezzlement and corruption charges

Earlier Saturday, Bo kept up his vigorous defense against embezzlement charges and, as he did Friday on corruption charges, and dismissed testimony from his jailed wife as a desperate attempt to reduce her own sentencing.

Gu was jailed last August for killing Heywood in a Chongqing hotel room in November 2011. She gave her testimony to the court via video and said that Bo was well aware of multi-million dollar dealings to fund their and their younger son's jet-setting lifestyle.

"I have feelings for Gu Kailai," Bo said Saturday morning, after admitting to an extramarital affair. "She is a vulnerable woman... and who else could she turn in? That's why all accusations against me originated from her."

Prosecutors allege that Bo received five million renminbi ($820,000) of public funds from a local urban planning official in Dalian, Liaoning Province, in the early 2000s when he was mayor and later the provincial governor.

Bo slammed the allegations as "contradictory" and denied that he needed to take the money as his wife earned millions of dollars from her five law firms.

Under the bribery indictment, prosecutors accuse Bo of using his political posts to secure influence for others. They say that between 2000 and 2012, Bo, Gu and their son, Bo Guagua, received about 22 million renminbi ($3.6 million) in bribes from businessmen in Dalian.

Bo's fall from grace

Bo is a princeling, a term that refers to the children of revolutionary veterans who boast of political connections and influence. His late father, Bo Yibo, was a revolutionary contemporary of Chairman Mao Zedong and the late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping.

Over the past three decades, Bo rose to power as a city mayor, provincial governor, minister of commerce and member of the Politburo, the powerful policy-making body of the Communist Party.

A charismatic and urbane politician, Bo -- with the help of Wang -- was credited with a spectacular, albeit brutal, crackdown on organized crime during his time as the top party official of Chongqing.

Bo's glittering career, in which he drew admirers and detractors for his populist policies, fell apart last year amid a scandal involving murder, corruption and betrayal.

Wang's attempted defection precipitated Bo's political demise. After Gu's sentencing last August, Wang was convicted of bending the law for selfish ends, defection, abuse of power and bribe-taking. He received a 15-year prison sentence.

Bo's trial is seen as a potentially concluding chapter in the scandal.

His high profile and connections among the nation's ruling elite have made his case -- with its tales of greed and wrongdoing by a top official and his family -- an extremely delicate matter for Chinese authorities.

It's taken more than a year, during which time the Communist Party has undergone a major leadership change, to bring him to trial.

Many observers had expected proceedings to stick closely to a pre-planned script, seeing the trial's outcome as the result of a political deal struck between Bo and China's top leaders.

But as he often did in his political career, Bo has so far stolen the show, mounting a robust attack on the prosecution's case and ridiculing witness testimony. That has left China watchers trying to figure out how far he's veered off script.

Journalists from the international news media haven't been allowed inside the courtroom. But the court's official microblog account has delivered updates on developments inside, attracting more than half a million followers on Weibo, China's Twitter-like service.

CNN hasn't been able to verify how accurate and comprehensive the court's version of proceedings has been. But many observers have interpreted it as a reasonably close, albeit filtered, account.

China's Bo Xilai: From rising star to scandal

Political star at center of murder trial

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Charismatic politician Bo Xilai promoted Chinese communist culture
• His populist policies were seen to challenge a faction of the Party
• Bo was dismissed from his positions and faces trial on August 22
• Bo's wife and family aide serving time for murdering Neil Heywood

Beijing (CNN) -- In a country where the image of Mao Zedong is still revered and taxi drivers hang Mao medallions from their rear-view mirrors almost like lucky talismans, Bo Xilai's 'red culture' revival was always going to have traction.

In the sprawling riverside megalopolis of Chongqing, the charismatic and urbane politician Bo launched a "smash black, sing red" campaign that promoted Chinese communist culture as zealously as it cracked down on organized crime.

From June 2009, Bo led a law and order drive that resulted in the arrest of thousands of suspected gangsters, but critics claim it also targeted his political adversaries.

The crackdown may have thrilled many in Chongqing's massive municipality of 32.8 million people -- almost four million of whom are rural migrant workers seeking work in the urban center -- but Bo's law-and-order campaign touched on one of China's growing social and political fault lines.

Bo Xilai prepares for corruption trial

Politician's wife charged with murder

Will scandal bring change to China?

Infighting in Chinese Communist Party

While many are becoming fabulously wealthy in the new China, millions more feel they are missing out on the country's economic transformation.

Bo's red-tinged economic policies -- which have included millions spent on social housing -- may have garnered him a rock star status in Chongqing, but almost 1,000 miles from the Yangtze River city in Beijing, some party chiefs were taking a different view.

His populist policies and high-profile personal style were seen as a challenge to the economically liberal and reform-oriented faction within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The division emerged in the famous "cake theory" spat between Bo and Guangdong party chief Wang Yang in 2011.

Wang at the time stated that China needed to pursue economic growth before it could worry about how to divide the wealth, saying that "one must bake a bigger cake first before dividing it."

Bo was said to have responded: "Some people think [...] that one must bake a large cake before dividing it; but this is wrong in practice. If the distribution of the cake is unfair, those who make the cake won't feel motivated to bake it." Political analysts say the spat, which was widely aired on Chinese media last year, drives to the heart of the factional problems besetting the CCP.

The political divisions came to a boil in March 2012, when China's national legislature convened its annual meeting in Beijing.

Speaking to reporters on March 9 on the sidelines of a panel discussion of Chongqing delegates, Bo defended his policies. "Ask any citizen on the street if they support fighting corruption and they'll say 'yes'," he boomed. Addressing the rich-poor divide, he said: ''If only a few people are rich then we are capitalists, we've failed."

That may have been Bo's last stand.

Timeline: Bo's fall from grace

Bo Xilai's wife arrested in Briton death

Probing China's political drama

Bo Xilai insider goes public

A few weeks earlier, Wang Lijun, his handpicked former police chief, had tried to defect to the U.S. consulate in the neighboring Sichuan city of Chengdu, triggering a political crisis that rocked the leadership in Beijing.

On March 14, Premier Wen Jiabao obliquely reprimanded Chongqing's leadership over the Wang incident during the premier's annual press conference. Wen also refered to the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution - a reference that alluded to Bo's red revival in Chongqing - and said that the city's stellar double-digit economic performance had been the fruits of several administrations and not just Bo's work alone.

On March 15, the state-run Xinhua news service announced that Bo had been dismissed as Chongqing party chief and, almost a month later, he was suspended from the CCP's Central Committee and its Politburo-- the second-highest decision-making body in China -- ahead of investigations for "serious disciplinary violations."

Bo's dismissal is the most sensational political scandal to hit the Chinese Communist Party in recent years.

As a "princeling" - a son of a revolutionary veteran -- Bo was considered a strong contender for promotion into the Standing Committee of the party's Politburo, whose nine members decide how to run China.

But then, things were always likely to be different for the maverick cadre.

His father Bo Yibo, who had a similar relaxed and open style, was imprisoned and tortured during the Cultural Revolution as a "capitalist roader."

His credentials as an economic reformer were cemented during the 1980s when he famously visited the Boeing factory in the United States. Seeing just two planes on the tarmac, Bo senior asked if they were the only planes the factory planned to produce. When he was told that Boeing only made the planes that were on its order books, he immediately saw the problems of China's planned economy which produced goods regardless of whether there was a market or not.

Bo Xilai himself spent five years in jail during the Cultural Revolution and was said to have denounced his father during the tumultuous political upheaval -- an action that some argue may have cost him political allies in a culture that strongly values family ties.

After his release, Bo entered Peking University's history department in 1977 and two years later, after gaining a degree, Bo got into the master's degree program in journalism, the first ever, at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

"His top ambition then was to be a Chinese journalist posted overseas," recalls a classmate and close friend of Bo.

He shows too much personality and charisma in the post-Mao political culture that emphasizes collective leadership.
Wenfang Tang, a political science professor at the University of Iowa

After graduation, however, Bo did not pursue his ambition to become a foreign correspondent. Instead, he worked his way up as a local party and government official.

He spent 17 years in Dalian, a charming but gritty coastal city in northeastern China. He became Dalian mayor in 1993 and transformed it into a popular investment and tourism destination.

As early as 1999, Bo was expected to move to Beijing for a ministerial post but his promotion was aborted when he failed to get elected into the Central Committee, the Communist Party's ruling elite.

Bo served as the governor and later party chief of Liaoning, a rust-belt region in northeast China which then boasted of large but mostly money-losing state-owned enterprises. In Liaoning, Bo dealt with high unemployment and endemic corruption.

In 2004, when Bo finally got elected into the elite Central Committee, he moved to Beijing as minister of trade and commerce.

"He was a tough and effective negotiator in terms of defending China's global trade policies and interests," said Wenran Jiang, a professor at the University of Alberta and Bo's former classmate at Peking University.

For decades, Jiang recalled that Bo stood out as one of China's most dynamic and maverick politicians. Instead of reading prepared speeches, for example, he often spoke extemporaneously.

"He would have had a chance to become China's top leader, if China had direct elections. But he shows too much personality and charisma in the post-Mao political culture that emphasizes collective leadership," said Wenfang Tang, a political science professor at the University of Iowa.

During Bo's anti-corruption crackdown, Bo relied mainly on Wang Lijun, a tough and decorated policeman who served as Chongqing's police chief from 2009 to 2011.

The campaign led to thousands of arrests and several executions. Wang was promoted to vice mayor as a reward.

Wang Lijun fled to the U.S. consulate in Chengdu in February.

Ironically, it was also Wang who torpedoed Bo's career.

On February 8, 2012, Wang was unexpectedly reported to be "on leave" for health reasons. Days later, Wang mysteriously fled into the U.S. consulate in Chengdu, six hours' drive away from Chongqing.

The next day, Wang left the consulate "of his own volition," U.S. officials said, and was taken into custody by security officials. His revelations led to a murder investigation involving Bo's family.

In April of the same year, Bo's wife Gu Kailai and a family aide, Zhang Xiaojun, were detained on suspicion of having murdered British businessman Neil Heywood.

During her one-day trial that August, Gu issued a statement saying she didn't deny the accusations levied against her, but "accepted all the facts written in the indictment" -- including poisoning Heywood at a time when she thought her son's life was in danger, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.

Gu received a suspended death sentence, which is expected to be commuted to life in prison after two years. Zhang was sentenced to nine years in prison.

A year later, Bo, now stripped of his party positions and membership, faces his own trial on August 22, on charges of bribery, corruption, and abuse of power.