Brazil Grand Prix: Lewis Hamilton takes pole after qualifying showcases the best of Interlagos

Hamilton secured his 10th pole of the season, and the 82nd of his career

The battle for the drivers’ world championship might be over, but today’s qualifying session for the Brazilian GP had all the drama you could have asked for. Unpredictable weather. Lap times in which positions were literally decided by fractions of a second. And Sebastian Vettel getting into trouble again over his behaviour on the weighbridge.

In the end the German just didn’t quite have what he needed to stop Lewis Hamilton from grabbing a record 82nd pole position and his 10th of the season, but with a margin of just 0.093s between the two rivals, you get the picture. Especially as Vettel qualified in Q2 on the soft-compound Pirelli tyres, rather than the faster supersofts everybody else opted for, which should confer a longevity advantage in the early stage of the race.

Rain was predicted all through the three qualifying sessions but it held off in Q1 as Max Verstappen aced everyone with a lap of 1m 08.205s for Red Bull to head the Ferraris of Kimi Raikkonen and Vettel (1m 08.452s apiece), Hamilton’s Mercedes (1m 08.464s) a surprise Kevin Magnussen for Haas (1m 08.474s) and Valtteri Bottas in the second Mercedes (1m 08.492s).

But it was Q2 that was the nailbiter, with the rain holding off until there was a heavy shower that affected Turns 13 and 14. But that came after Bottas, last year’s winner, had gone fastest with 1m 17.727s ahead of Vettel on 1m 07.776s and Hamilton on 1m 07.795s. The interesting part here was that Vettel was on the slower tyre… Perhaps the most extraordinary performance then came from Ferrari-bound Charles Leclerc (note to anglofiles: though the second c is silent, he’s decided to help Brits by pronouncing his name for them as Lecler-k).

(AFP/Getty Images (AFP/Getty Images)

With fewer than two minutes remaining and the track damp in the fastest section on the climb back up to the pit straight, he jumped his Sauber from 11th to eighth with a superb lap of 1m 08.335s, as others, including Vettel, decided discretion was the better part of valour and did not improve. So it all came down to Q3, as ever, but now the threat of rain had finally receded, though conditions remained relatively cool and quite windy.

Raikkonen set the initial pace with 1m 07.456s, but then Vettel beat that with 1m 07.374s only to have Hamilton go faster still with 1m 07.301s. This time all of the top four runners – Hamikton, Vettel, Bottas and Raikkonen - were on the supersofts, and their individual sector times all read 17.4s, 34.2s, 15.6s, apart from Bottas whose sector two time was 34.3s. The fractions literally determined their positions.

That left everything to shoot for on the second runs, and both Ferrari drivers started well with first sector times of 1m 17.3s, but gradually their laps went away, Vettel’s after he locked up in Turn 8. Hamilton was the only top runner to improve, squeezing his middle sector time down to 34.1s for an overall lap of 1m 07.281s. Vettel remained second, ahead of Bottas, Raikkonen, Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo in the second Red Bull. But the luckless Australian will drop five grid places for having a turbocharger replaced on his Renault power unit.

“That was a tough qualifying session, with the weather going up and down and Ferrari being incredibly quick throughout,” Hamilton said. “A lot of work has gone on here this weekend, so I’m really happy. I didn’t know whether I had pole until the end of my lap, but it was great work by the team.” His one moment had come partway through Q2, when he nearly pulled left into the path of Williams’ Russian driver Sergey Siroktin, but just avoided a collision.

Lewis Hamilton says it was not a straightforward qualifying session (AFP/Getty Images)

“Everyone was on an out lap, and Valtteri was ahead of me, backing off to get his gap to the car ahead of him, so I backed off to keep my gap to him and as far as I was aware no-one behind me was on a quick lap,” he explained. “Then as I came out of Turn 11 I spotted a car at high speed, so I went left to keep out of his way but that was where he had decided to go. He wasn’t on a quick lap, and normally we all respect keeping our space, so that was genuinely quite a strange move and completely unnecessary as he had space behind him to maintain his own gap to me.”

Vettel was disappointed to miss pole by 0.093s, but admitted that he had not perfected Turn 8. “I had a good start to the lap, but then lost some time locking a brake there. It was very close…” His second place on the grid may yet be threatened however, after an incident during a mandatory random weight check in Q2. FIA technical delegate Jo Bauer reported to the stewards that: ‘During the second qualifying session at 15:27 hrs, the driver of car number 05, when called for weighing, refused to turn off the engine. The car was pushed on to the scales and weighed with running engine, which makes it difficult to get a stable result. After weighing, the driver drove off the scales under its own power, and by doing so, he destroyed the scales. As the driver was not following the instructions and further compromised the continuation of the weighing procedure, I am referring this matter to the stewards for their consideration.’

“It’s better if I don’t say anything about that,” Vettel said with a sheepish grin, but added: “When conditions are changing like that it’s unfair if somebody gets called in [to the scales].” It is, however, something that can happen randomly to any driver during such sessions.

Bottas was also disappointed. “I was not far away and the margin here is always small, but I didn’t have the pace to be on pole. It was there for me to grab but I couldn’t take it. I was two tenths up on my last lap but lost it all in the final sector because I was the car running first and there was no slipstream tow from anyone else to help me. The beginning of the lap was very good, the middle was average, but then I lost more than a tenth without a tow on the straight.”

So now we wait to see whether Mercedes have cured the tyre wear problems that cost Hamilton his chances of winning both the US and Mexican GPs recently. “I guess we’ll see in the race,” the newly crowned champion said. “We’ll see whether we can make the supersoft tyre last, and where Ferrari are. But they appeared to have a lot more blistering than we did yesterday, so hopefully we can do the best we can. It’s going to be an interesting scenario.”

Vettel believes that he can make a good start even on the harder tyre, and build an advantage by running longer in the first stint. “I was surprised,” he said of the soft tyre’s performance, which all but matched Bottas’s on the supersofts in Q2.

“The lap felt really good, and the tyre felt really good. I thought I would have been much slower. And it still felt really good when I crossed the line, so I could have gone faster on it. Let’s hope that they work out tomorrow.” Ideally, Ferrari need a 1-2 result to prolong the constructors’ world championship fight until the seasonal finale in Abu Dhabi in a fortnight. With a 55-point lead, a 1-2 for Mercedes will throw the issue beyond further dispute.