Nico Rosberg will start the Spanish Grand Prix from pole position after comprehensively outperforming Lewis Hamilton through qualifying in Barcelona today. It's a great story for F1 – the guy who's lost out to his teammate in the first four races, and who was already being written off by some pundits, has bounced back. Will it be his chance to turn the tables and get his title challenge back on track, especially with his home race of Monaco – where he always does so well – coming up? Well, from the outside, that's one way to assess the outcome of today, but no one is getting too carried away at Mercedes – even Nico himself. Rosberg did a good job today, no doubt, but Barcelona is an oddball track, and sometimes there's more luck than judgment in getting everything just right and putting a time together. So us amateur sports psychologists, who would like to think that Nico came here after spending the last couple of weeks getting his head together for a concerted attack on Lewis, need to think again. “These guys out there are resilient, tough guys,” said team boss Toto Wolff tonight. “I know we like to write and talk them up and down, but that is not the reality. Of course Lewis had quite a run of winning four races, but at least internally from what we've seen Nico was still in good spirits. “Today he got everything together and managed to extract a good lap. Lewis got in a bit of a messy setup situation, or was unlucky on the track with the conditions, and here we go, a couple of tenths off. But I wouldn't interpret too much into whether somebody bounced back now, or whether the dynamic has changed. It's just another race...” As Wolff suggested, there were good reasons why things unfolded the way they did today. Getting everything right proved to be something of a black art, and Rosberg and his engineers simply got closer to the optimum than their rivals on the other side of the garage. “I think finding the right set-up this weekend was the important bit,” Wolff added. “The track changed massively within minutes. It's not completely clear to us why that was, because of gusts, or temperatures, but you could see that in hitting the track in qualifying we had a mediocre car balance on our first tire, the prime tire, and it took three or four laps to finally get the tyre working. Then we put the next set on and we had a massive time improvement.

“So I guess it was sorting yourself and your setup out, and trying to extract the most from the conditions. In that final run Nico was able to nail it on the first set with a very good lap, and Lewis suffered from the car balance. The second lap wasn't quick enough for any of the drivers. You could see the track conditions changed again within minutes. That was the tricky thing today.” Rosberg himself was not getting too carried away with suggestions that it was the start of a fight back, or something of that ilk. It was just a day when everything came together, as it has for him very often over the past two years of qualifying battles with his teammate. People have short memories... “It just feels good because it's a great day in the office,” said Nico. “It's not really about any past races or anything. It's just fantastic to be on pole here today, because on this track it's particularly important. It's very difficult to overtake here, probably nearly impossible – well let's not say impossible, but it's difficult to overtake – so it's good to have the advantage for tomorrow.” Nico admitted that it was far from easy to get everything right today, and inevitably, some compromises had to be made. “It really is strange. The best way to explain the track being all over the place is to explain that the balance of the same car is just different from one corner to the next, although the corner might be pretty similar, the balance is so different. It just changes through a lap, and also the track is changing between morning and afternoon all the time, so it's been quite a difficult weekend in that sense. Also to get the setup right, because you have to take the best possible average. “You're never going to get the setup right for all corners, which is unusual. Normally you can get it pretty much right for the lap, but here you just have to make some sort of compromise, so it's more or less OK for everything, and that we really nailed today. So that's good.”

He also gave some intriguing insight into how hard it is even for Mercedes to get it right. If you remember in Bahrain Mercedes made some big changes after Friday in the search for pace with which to ward off Ferrari in the race. It worked, but mods to brake cooling caused problems that hampered both cars at the end of the race, and very nearly cost Hamilton the win. “We got the brakes a little but wrong in Bahrain, two laps wrong, we nearly got to the end without problems, we pushed the limits too far, and here's it's a totally different story again, here we're trying to cool the tyres rather than put more temperature into them. I'm confident that we're looking good on that. “We've understood the brake problem, because it wasn't just one thing, it was a couple of things coming together, so we've understood all of them, and I think we have good solutions for that. And here on Friday we practised for the race, and the pace was good, so I'm confident for tomorrow.” Rosberg is a thoughtful and very open guy, and is always interesting when discussing his driving and so on. After qualifying in Bahrain he admitted he had tried to be too clever – in Q2 he went only as fast as he needed to to get through to Q3, knowing that particular set of tyres would be the ones he would start the race on. He kept those tires in good shape, but when he had to go flat out in Q3 he suffered because in that earlier run, he hadn't explored the limits, and thus hadn't got his eye in. Today he didn't repeat that error. “For sure, today I learned from my mistake in Bahrain, and really got myself into the rhythm in Q2, and from then on I was not catchable any more. For sure today that really helped me, that approach, so I learned my lesson I guess. It depends you know, from one race to the next, but today that was the way to do it.” Now he has to keep Hamilton behind on the first lap. If he does, Lewis will have his work cut out if he's going to end up on top of the podium...

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