TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Lewis Hamilton won his sixth pole position of the season here for Sunday’s Singapore Grand Prix. Team-mate Nico Rosberg was beaten into second place in yet another Mercedes lock-out, as reported by The Guardian.
It was Hamilton’s third pole here but he won it by 0.007sec in an unusually competitive qualifying session. He made a mistake going into turn one but still managed to run quickest under intense pressure from not only Rosberg but also Red Bull and Ferrari.
Daniel Ricciardo appeared to have stolen pole for Red Bull but the Silver Arrows were yet to come home. Rosberg duly went into provisional pole only to be pipped by Hamilton in the dying seconds.
Niki Lauda, Mercedes’ nonexecutive chairman, said: “The others are catching up. I’m very worried.”
Hamilton said: “It was quite an exciting qualifying session. I did some good laps and saw the Ferraris were very good. I locked up into turn one and lost time but I just kept going and it got better and better.”
The Mercedes drivers were followed by Ricciardo and Sebastian Vettel in the other Red Bull, and then Fernando Alonso for Ferrari.
The first stint was dominated by the Italian team and it was Kimi Raikkonen who put in the fastest lap of all on the super-soft tyres, beating Alonso – who had topped the third practice session earlier in the evening – into second place. It was the first time Raikkonen had won a qualifying run all season.
Hamilton was third, ahead of Jenson Button, Valtteri Bottas and Rosberg. The six to miss out were Adrian Sutil, Pastor Maldonado, Jules Bianchi, Kamui Kobayashi, Max Chilton and Marcus Ericsson.
In the second run, the six to drop out were Button – who missed out by just 0.017 – Jean-Eric Vergne, Nico Hülkenberg, Esteban Gutiérrez, Sergio Pérez and Romain Grosjean. Button said: “I would have found Q3 very difficult in any case because I was struggling with the front end.”
Grosjean sounded angry. “I cannot believe it, bloody engine, bloody engine,” the Lotus driver said on the team radio. His race engineer replied: “Understand Romain, I’m very sorry it’s the same issue as we had in P3.” Grosjean came back: “I don’t care, I don’t care, it’s too much.”
This time Rosberg finished fastest, by almost half a second, but only after going out for an extra run while Hamilton and the Ferrari drivers rested in their garages.
THE GUARDIAN
