British Grand Prix: Lewis Hamilton beats Kimi Antonelli to pole for Silverstone sprint race
The crowd of around 150,000 fans cheered loudly as Hamilton crossed the line and got ahead of Antonelli.
Said Hamilton: “Wow. OK. I like it. I love this place. I love this crowd. I can’t tell you what a dream this is and what a flow you can get around this place if you can get the setup in the right place.”
“We are ahead of Mercedes. These guys have a lot of power. We didn’t expect to be racing on the front row, so this is an incredible surprise. I’m very excited.”
Ferrari had a tough race in Austria last weekend, with Hamilton taking his first win with his new team in the previous race in Barcelona, but the seven-time champion said some minor improvements to the car had helped them get back to the top.
“We brought some small pieces here,” he said. “I’m really happy to take pole. It only took like 10 milliseconds and the team really deserves it.”
Antonelli said: “It was very close and it was embarrassing. It was a bit left in the table but it was a good lap. Congratulations to Lewis and we are now focusing on tomorrow. Ferrari have made an incredible step forward so it will be incredibly tough. Lewis is in great form. We love the challenge. We will fight for it.”
Verstappen said Hamilton and Antonelli “looked a bit quick” to compete in the sprint.
“It was very close, we could have easily been 3rd or 6th/7th. But we are on the good side. We are still not where we want to be. There are a few things we need to solve to find more lap times and we will try to do this after the sprint.”
Leclerc was 0.327 seconds behind Hamilton and said he was still trying to understand why he did not find himself as comfortable in the new car as his team-mate.
“Lewis is mostly using 100% of the car’s potential, I’m not,” Leclerc said. “I actually need to work on everything.
“I’m struggling to be consistent at 100%. I just don’t feel the car as well as I would like.”
“Overall we were extremely surprised. We expected a much bigger gap to the cars in front.”
Russell, who needed a good series of races to close the gap with Antonelli, was 0.346 seconds behind the Italian with a similar gap.
“The story of the year is always behind us. Usually I can make a move in the 3rd quarter, but that wasn’t the case today. We need to understand why,” Russell said.
“I was very surprised by Ferrari’s pace. They were behind on PU and energy management and today they look their best. We always knew they had a great chassis. Some things just don’t make sense. Ferrari had the upper hand all day.”
