Bottas’ blistering lap at Yas Marina Circuit impresses pole king Lewis Hamilton

Valtteri Bottas’ blistering lap to clinch pole position for the Formula One Etihad Airways Abu Dhabi Grand Prix impressed his Mercedes teammate Lewis Hamilton so much, with the newly-crowned four-time world champion exclaiming: “What a lap!”

Bottas lapped the 5.55km Yas Marina Circuit with the fastest lap of 1:36.231 seconds, 0.172 seconds quicker than Hamilton.

Hamilton, who has been the king of pole positions with 11 this season, was pleased for his teammate.

“He just had an incredible qualifying and congratulations to him. It’s good to see him performing at this level, particularly at the end of the season which puts him into a great position for next year,” he added. As for himself, Hamilton said that it was all that he could muster, despite topping the timesheets in two sessions of free practice.

“I gave it everything, but I seemed to have lost a little pace going into qualifying, just overall, just little bits here and there,” Hamilton said after qualifying.

“For me, practice was great. Then I made some changes in anticipation of the track cooling which I think were not the right ones in hindsight. But it was good to experiment a little which I hadn’t really done all year long. However, that’s why I struggled a little bit with the balance in qualifying. I think in the end I was up about a tenth and a half out of Turn 1, but then I lost it somewhere else through the rest of the lap. Nonetheless, it was fun to be out there, challenging in the last qualifying of the year. Now we can get on with the race tomorrow. It’s a very hard track to overtake, but I will give it everything for sure,” added the Briton. Sunday’s race is over 55 laps.