The Sunday News
Lewis Hamilton beat team-mate Nico Rosberg in an all-Mercedes battle for pole position at the British GP.
Hamilton beat Rosberg by 0,113 seconds to huge cheers from the 105 000 crowd at Silverstone, to qualify top for the eighth time in nine races this year.
“It is a special day when you get pole on your home turf,” Hamilton said.
“There are so many people here and they really do motivate me. It has not been the smoothest of weekends but it was great to go flat-out at the end.”
It means Hamilton has now taken pole position at his home grand prix three times (2007, 2013, 2015), but has never won from top spot.
On Sunday (at 13:00 BST) he will be gunning for his third win at Silverstone in front of an estimated 140 000 people, having won in 2008 and last year.
Williams locked out the second row, with Felipe Massa heading Valtteri Bottas.
Ferrari could manage only fifth and sixth, as under-pressure Kimi Raikkonen beat Sebastian Vettel in qualifying for only the second time this season.
Raikkonen’s performance came at the right time – his position at Ferrari is under threat for next season as the team have warned him he needs to improve if he is to be retained for 2016.
The Ferraris will be expecting a battle with Williams for best of the rest as Mercedes appear to be in a league of their own.
Hamilton’s pole lap was 0,837secs quicker than Massa in third.
Red Bull’s Daniil Kvyat was promoted to seventh after team-mate Daniel Ricciardo had a fractionally faster time deleted for exceeding the track limits at Copse.
Toro Rosso’s Carlos Sainz was eighth ahead of the revamped Force India of Nico Hulkenberg.**
It was another difficult day for McLaren, with world champions Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button qualifying 17th and 18th, ahead only of the low-budget Manor team. The Spaniard’s 17th position was in doubt for a couple of hours as stewards investigated Alonso running one of team-mate Button’s wheels after a mix-up in the McLaren garage.
In the end, the team were let off with a reprimand.
Alonso, his positivity about the potential of McLaren-Honda still as relentless as his performance in a grand prix, said it was “the best qualifying of the year”.
He admitted that “sounds strange”, but said that the 1,5-second margin from Ferrari over a lap that is more than three miles long was the smallest margin of the season for McLaren.
The percentage margin to Mercedes was actually slightly larger than it has been at McLaren’s best two races this year but it is certainly among their best. — BBC Sport
