Lewis Hamilton won a tight battle for pole position between Mercedes and Ferrari at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix.
Briton Hamilton took pole position by 0.268 seconds as Ferrari's Sebastian Vettel joined him on the front row.
The German pipped Hamilton's team-mate Valtteri Bottas by just 0.025secs as the new era of faster,
more demanding cars got off to a promising start.
Ferrari's Kimi Raikkonen took fourth ahead of Red Bull's Max Verstappen.
A real battle in store
The tightness of the battle in qualifying between Mercedes and Ferrari is what was expected after
pre-season testing but an impressive performance by Mercedes on Friday led to fears the world champions may dominate again.
But Ferrari were in much better shape on Saturday and gave every sign they will be able to push
Mercedes hard this season, as testing had promised.
A slightly scruffy final lap from Bottas might have stopped him joining his team-mate on the front
row but even so the margins were slight and a fair bit of Hamilton's advantage may well have been in
the driver on a circuit on which the three-time champion has always excelled.
Bottas, though, was impressive in his debut for Mercedes, qualifying closer to Hamilton than his former team-mate Nico Rosberg did at this race last year.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the comment writers alone and does not surface or represent the views of Thomasloaded.