QUALIFYING

“WOLFF SUGGESTED FERRARI WAS GAINING 0.5s ON THE STRAIGHTS”

LEWIS HAMILTON, CROUCHED DOWN BETWEEN THE front-right wheel and the sidepod of his stricken Mercedes with his head resting on the car after suffering a hydraulic failure during Q1, will be one of the enduring images of the 2018 season. The reigning world champion, perhaps showing signs of the pressure of an intense title fight, ended qualifying 14th. Watching Sebastian Vettel take a triumphant home pole position won’t have helped his mood.

But the big question was whether the hydraulic failure was the cause of his wide run at Turn 1 and wild ride over the kerbing as he returned the track, or the effect?

“It’s always quite difficult to define cause and consequence,” said team boss Toto Wolff. “What we saw is that in the previous lap, running wide but completely within the boundaries of what you can do, we saw some overloads.

“And on the next lap, going over the kerbs, a hydraulic leak that caused a power-steering failure. And then that power-steering failure made a spectacular off over the kerbs.”

What had failed was a seal in the power-steering hydraulics, which went on the first trip across the kerb, similar to the problem that put Hamilton out of the Austrian Grand Prix.

With Hamilton no longer in the picture, it boiled down to a battle between his Mercedes team-mate Valtteri Bottas and the Ferraris of Kimi Raikkonen and Sebastian Vettel.

It was a battle Vettel won by 0.204 seconds. Wolff suggested Ferrari was gaining half a second on the straights, which was an exaggeration, but a comparison of Vettel and Bottas’s laps showed the difference was around a quarter of a second. Enough to make the difference, especially with Bottas’s mighty run through the stadium section, gaining a quarter of a second on Vettel, meaning he was a serious pole-position threat.

Raikkonen was third. On his first lap, he hit the kerb on the inside of the Turn 12 right-hander that leads into the stadium and had a moment, which led to a more conservative run there the second time. He ended up

0.335s off his team-mate but ahead of Max Verstappen.

The Red Bull driver managed to take the Turn 1 righthander flat-out, but could do no better than fourth, ahead of Haas drivers Kevin Magnussen and Romain Grosjean.

Daniel Ricciardo, who parked after Q1, was the notable absentee thanks to a raft of engine-component changes that forced him to the back of the grid.