Mercedes drivers Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas say they did not expect to qualify so far ahead of Ferrari for the Australian Grand Prix.

The pair locked out the front row of the grid. Hamilton’s pole position time was seven-tenths of a second faster than Mercedes’ closest rivals, Sebastian Vettel’s Ferrari.

“I’m a bit blown away by the performance we have today,” said Bottas, who will start from second on the grid. Mercedes had a similar margin over Ferrari yesterday but may assumed their rivals were disguising their true potential.

“Obviously yesterday was looking good but it’s always practice, said Bottas. “It’s just the first session this year that really counts in terms of lap time and I don’t think anyone in the team could have imagined we’d be in this position after the testing we had.

“But everyone’s been working so hard. that made this possible. But it’s only one session, tomorrow is the main day.”

Hamilton said the team’s progress since testing has come from understanding the car and making set-up changes rather than adding new parts.

[mpuzweeler01]”Coming from Barcelona we’ve made some really big steps forward in the last couple of days with set-up and we brought that here and it seems to have worked. But there was also a little bit of work done after the two weeks where we analysed everything and made some small corrections.

“I really was not expecting to see the performance difference that we have here. It had been so close throughout the whole weekend between us.”

Hamilton made a mistake on his first run in Q3 and Bottas was on course to take pole position until Hamilton improved on his final run.

“The second lap was definitely a lot better than the first which is not always the case,” said Hamilton. “It’s always quite difficult on the second lap to pull that amount of time out.

“But the first lap I made a mistake, which is unusual for me. But it was OK I just brushed it off and kept moving. We just kept working away, chipping away at our pace, our balance throughout the weekend.”

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2019 F1 season