QUALIFYING
If the final flying laps in Q3 for the Spanish Grand Prix go down as the last hurrah for Mercedes’ “party” qualifying engine mode – as Lewis Hamilton coined it ahead of the
2018 Formula 1 season – then they were an anti-climax.
When discussing the implications of the FIA’S expected move to clamp down on powerful qualifying engine modes from the Belgian GP, Williams driver George Russell – who experiences the potent step in power the Mercedes engine can produce for the grid-setting session – said he’d be “disappointed” to lose “such an exciting part of the weekend”.
Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas had used the extra power to roar clear in qualifying, with the world champion ahead by 0.059 seconds after their first Q3 laps. But on the final runs, nothing changed. Both Mercedes, as well as Max Verstappen and Lance Stroll, failed to find another step.
“I don’t think conditions really changed – at least it felt like they didn’t really improve for the second run,” Bottas said afterwards, with both Mercedes drivers at a loss to explain the situation. Bottas actually thought he was up on his final run before his dash display adjusted and confirmed his gap to Hamilton remained, and he had been quickest of all in the second sector before fading through the final turns.
“The first lap felt OK, but a little bit – in some areas – within the limit, so I knew that there were some areas that I could improve on,” Hamilton said after clinching his 92nd F1 pole and 150th front-row start. “And then on the next run the tyres just didn’t feel the same and the grip wasn’t the same for me. So it was just overall a really poor second lap.”
Verstappen held on to what he called his “subscription” on third place. But his lack of improvement left him perilously close to the returning Sergio Perez, who was just 0.190s off
Verstappen’s time on his final run at the end of Q3.
Arguably the star of qualifying was another world champion: Kimi Raikkonen. His 1m17.797s in Q1 was enough to lift an Alfa Romeo out of the opening segment for the first time this season – a trick Russell has recently made his own but didn’t this time, despite Williams head of vehicle performance Dave Robson saying the team “got most of what the car had to offer” as it took 18th and 19th.
Raikkonen, who eventually beat Esteban Ocon’s much faster Renault to 14th on the grid in Q2, said: “We could have achieved even more, but we didn’t have any more sets of soft tyres so we had to use the mediums.”
“WE COULD HAVE ACHIEVED EVEN MORE, BUT WE DIDN’T HAVE ANY MORE SETS OF SOFT TYRES”