George Russell declared himself stunned by the pace produced by Lewis Hamilton in qualifying for the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix. Mercedes continued their perfect streak of pole positions as Russell went fastest, but he only just stopped Hamilton, who got the better of Kimi Antonelli to put his Ferrari on the front row.
Russell admitted that he was not expecting the sort of pace the seven-time world champion was able to deliver. "It's going to be an interesting race tomorrow. Lewis did an amazing job to get up there; I think that was a real surprise," he said after the session. "We thought the fight was with us and McLaren, and then Lewis has been really quick all this session. I'm sure there's going to be a fight on our hands. Obviously, Kimi has been doing an amazing job. Tomorrow, it's not going to be easy from any standpoint, but I feel fit and ready."
It turned out Hamilton was just as surprised by the pace he found from his Ferrari car. He revealed that he had done something he had never thought to do before in his entire Formula 1 career to prepare for qualifying, having been disappointed by his results in free practice.
Hamilton said: "I couldn't believe when I came around and I was P1 in Q1. The gap was so big and all weekend I was thinking, 'Why am I half-a-second off?' I was a bit down everywhere. But the engineers did a great job with small adjustments on the setup. For the first time ever, I left the track between FP3 and qualifying. I thought, 'I've got to get out of here' and I went back to my motorhome. I was on the engineer call just on my phone, just to have a bit of a reset. And I came back and I was on it. It feels great to be up here with them. Honestly, this weekend has been so difficult."
"But in Q1, I was first so I knew I had good balance and I was really comfortable in that session. Q2 was a little bit harder with traffic and everything, and then these guys did a great lap. Congrats to George, but we're in a good position to be able to fight tomorrow. We have a race!"
"All weekend, we've been four-tenths off these guys. Even with the upgrades we've got, we thought that was maybe where we were. For us to be this close, less than a tenth between us, it's a real showing of the hard work that everyone at the factory has done to bring these upgrades to this track, so a big thank you to everyone back at Maranello. We've just got to keep pushing, keep developing and I'm hoping tomorrow we can squeeze some more out of this and, hopefully, keep up with these guys for once."
