Azerbaijan Grand Prix: Lewis Hamilton saves the best until last as he claims pole in Baku

Hamilton made it count when it mattered most to finish nearly half-a-second clear of his team-mate Valtteri Bottas

Lewis Hamilton celebrates after claiming pole (Getty)

Just when you think a pattern is emerging in this topsy turvy F1 season, it still has the power to surprise you. And Lewis Hamilton certainly surprised everyone here this evening as he snatched the 66th pole position of his career.

In every race so far this year it’s been possible to detect reasons why there really isn’t a gap between the two top teams. Coming here, by the Caspian Sea, Sebastian Vettel had won three races, and so had Lewis Hamilton. But on each occasion that one failed to get the big result, it was possible to see how they might have, where small things had unravelled for them and made the critical difference. The true gap between them seemed miniscule.

And then came Baku, the weird ‘circuit of two halves’. Where one half is about minimising drag for maximum speed on the two big straights, and the other about getting the most downforce and grip in the slow stuff.

Yesterday Mercedes were struggling, as Red Bull’s Max Verstappen rose brilliantly to the challenge to go fastest in both sessions. Ferrari weren’t far off either, and things even seemed to favour them in the long run given that it was an odd day with lots of incidents preventing any consistent running.

But Mercedes’ engineers and mechanics worked long into the night, reasoning where they’d gone wrong. In the final practice session Valtteri Bottas was fastest, but only by a tenth from Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen as traffic hampered Hamilton and a water leak had sent Vettel to the garage.

So how did the driver of Mercedes #44 manage to win that 66th pole position of his career by 0.434s from his own team-mate, and a whopping 1.1s from the leading red car?

The script for the final session of qualifying had Hollywood overtones all the way through.

Hamilton dominated Q1 and Q2, by half a second over Verstappen in the former, by a couple of tenths over Bottas in the latter. But just when it seemed that he was going to carry on in that vein in Q3, he made a mistake in the final corner on his first run, and suddenly it was Bottas on the pole, with 1m 41.274s to 1m 41.428s.

And then Daniel Ricciardo broadsided his Red Bull coming out of Turn 6, kissed the outer wall, and came to a stop. Out came the red flag as his stricken machine was recovered, and up went the pressure on everyone. Both Ferrari drivers had messed up their runs, going off in to the escape road in Turn 2, so Verstappen was third. And there were only three and a half minutes left when the session restarted. Surely not sufficient time in which to get the tyres and brakes back into their narrow operating windows, in order to avoid the dramas enacted all through Friday evening when car after car went sliding off the road?

Hamilton finished half-a-second clear of his teammate (Getty)

Verstappen ran first on the road, but perhaps because his car had been standing at the head of a non-existent queue at the end of the pit road his tyres weren’t as hot as they could have been. He failed to go quicker.

But the Mercedes and the Ferraris had been in their garages, their tyres wrapped in electric warmers until the last moment before they were unleashed.

And Bottas was on it, improving to 1m 41.027s on a great, confident lap that was surely enough to keep the pole.

But Hamilton was on an even better lap, which stopped the clocks in 1m 40.593s to snatch pole by an incredible margin. You had to feel sorry for Bottas, who must have been devastated.

“I’m so pumped with that, that’s how qualifying should be!” Hamilton exclaimed. “We started in the wrong place yesterday and the guys made a lot of changes to the set-up overnight, and though I have every faith in the team we didn’t know if we’d be right today because of the way that the tyres we have here this weekend are. But they made some fantastic changes that put us in the right direction, and we made more after the third practice session.

Lewis Hamilton leads the way with the city of Baku in the background (Getty)

“Then, after Q1 and Q2, the pressure was on in that first lap in Q3. I knew it was very good, and that I was well up going into the final corner, and it’s so weird. I told myself not to be greedy, but of course I was, and I locked up and lost the pole right there.

“So there was even more pressure, going into that final run, just to get the time in. I gave it everything I had. I could see Valtteri up ahead was on a great lap as well. So thanks to the guys who worked super-late, for helping me to get an awesome single lap I’m really proud of. That last lap in Montreal was pretty special, but this one knocked it.”

Montreal’s was the lap that brought his tally of poles equal to that of his hero, Ayrton Senna. Today’s was the one that beat him. And it was one of which Senna himself would have been proud.

“It was already an amazing thing to equal Ayrton,” Hamilton said, and then he admitted: “And I thought when I matched him that maybe the hunger for yet another pole would fade. But it didn’t…”

Hamilton heads into Sunday's race in charge (Getty)

Bottas, who himself had risen superbly to the occasion in Q3, took the psychological blow well.

“I’m disappointed, obviously, because I was going for pole,” he said, “but Lewis pulled out that lap. Mine wasn’t clean enough, and I didn’t get the tyres to work as well as he did.”

Behind the Silver Arrows, Raikkonen and Vettel also improved, their respective laps of 1m 41.693s and 1m 41.841s taking them ahead of Verstappen’s previous best of 1m 41.879s. Ferrari still have to process the remarkable speed of the Mercedes, which cannot be explained purely by the well-known fact that they can always turn up their engines a little for Q3, but at least they would start from the second row.

Red Bull were left wounded and disappointed, their best-paced car now fifth instead of third, the other 10th, with the duelling Force Indias of Sergio Perez and splendid upstart team-mate Esteban Ocon, and the Williamses of improving rookie Lance Stroll and veteran Felipe Massa, separating it from its sister.

It was the best qualifying session so far in a gripping season; whether we will be saying the same of a race that might still hold surprise given the curious nature of the track, remains to be seen.