Valtteri Bottas yesterday pipped Lewis Hamilton to pole position for today’s milestone Chinese Grand Prix in a dominant Mercedes front-row lockout.
Sebastian Vettel was third-fastest for Mercedes’ archrivals Ferrari for the race in Shanghai, Formula 1’s 1,000th grand prix.
Bottas, who leads the world championship and is one point ahead of title-holder Hamilton after two races, scorched to a best time of 1 minute, 31.547 seconds.
That was just 0.023 seconds ahead of Hamilton, who struggled with his Mercedes in practice and has voiced concern about Ferrari’s superior straight-line speed.
“The car has been really good this weekend and Lewis also improved a lot in qualifying — it was super close,” said Finn Bottas, who is beginning to climb out of the shadow of his more famous teammate.
Vettel, the four-time world champion who has been in the spotlight after a series of unforced errors stretching back to last season, was 0.301 seconds off Bottas.
The German this time got the better of his decade-younger Ferrari teammate Charles Leclerc, who is fourth on the grid and has so far failed to match his performance last time out in Bahrain.
Fifth was Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and sixth his teammate Pierre Gasly.
Verstappen was infuriated after traffic prevented him from clocking a final, flying lap, and made his anger clear in an expletive-filled message over his radio.
Seventh and eighth were the Renault duo of Daniel Ricciardo — last year’s victor in China — and Nico Hulkenberg.
However, Bottas is the man in form, going fastest in the past two practice sessions.
“Valtteri’s been stellar all weekend... There’s more time left on the table, but I’ll try and get it tomorrow,” Hamilton said.
Bottas took a clear victory in the season-opening race in Melbourne and grabbed a bonus point for the fastest lap to take the edge in the early standings.
A notable casualty in the second qualifying round was former world champion Kimi Raikkonen, the Alfa Romeo veteran who is a crowd favorite in China.
Earlier, Toro Rosso’s Alexander Albon lost control and smashed at high speed toward the end of final practice, so did not take part in qualifying.
The 23-year-old rookie climbed gingerly out of his wrecked car, but only after a huge scare that drew gasps from the crowd.
The Thai-Briton, who is in his first season in F1, careened into a wall as he entered the straight with less than 10 minutes left of the third and final practice.
His car was badly mangled and there was a frantic call from engineers asking if he was okay.
He was later given the all-clear, but missed qualifying, because his car could not be fixed in time.
Albon said that he had been “a bit too greedy.”
“I was obviously pushing, trying to find the limits, but it should have been in qualifying, not FP3 [third practice],” he said.
Today’s race begins at 2:10pm.
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