QUALIFYING
VALTTERI BOTTAS’S FIRST POLE POSITION OF THE 2018 season was greeted with uncharacteristic exuberance by the Finn. Best described as a combination of laughter, ‘woo-wooing’ and shouts of ‘yes!’, this was a deserved reward for a strong but unlucky season. He had to beat Mercedes team-mate Lewis Hamilton in a straight fight to do it. But given that the average qualifying gap between the pair is just 29 thousandths of a second in 2018, we shouldn’t have been surprised.
The Red Bull Ring is a happy hunting ground for
Bottas. It’s where he first led a grand prix and finished on the podium, and he won from pole last year. Bottas was almost half a second clear after the first runs in Q3, ahead of Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen. This was thanks to mistakes from both Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel at Turn 4 that left them third and seventh respectively. On the second runs it wasn’t going to be so easy.
“The first lap was really good, but I think there was a tiny bit of track improvement for the second run,” said Bottas. “It’s always difficult to say how much, but I think the second lap was very similar to the first one. The car really allowed me to push – we’ve found a very good balance with the car.”
Hamilton had run too deep into the Turn 3 right-hand hairpin on that run, but this time there was no such error. Bottas was seven thousandths faster in the first sector, then lost two of those thousandths in the middle sector. But a strong run through the final sector, which includes the tricky double-right at Turns 9 and 10, gave him his fifth F1 pole by 0.019s.
Vettel was 0.334s down in third, which became sixth on the grid thanks to his penalty for impeding Carlos Sainz’s Renault in Q2 (see page 31). In fact, Vettel was fractionally faster than Bottas out of Turn 4 on his lap, but lost time through the quicker corners in the second half of the run.
The real star of qualifying was Romain Grosjean – he split the two Red Bull drivers, who were too busy bickering about track position (see page 28), in sixth place. The Haas worked well in the medium-speed turns in the second half of the lap, and Grosjean nailed a great lap on his first Q3 run, almost matching Vettel in the final sector.