After claiming a decisive pole position for Sunday’s Canadian Grand Prix Lewis Hamilton admitted afterwards that even he was surprised to have got up to speed as quickly as he did after a difficult Saturday morning practice session.
“This morning was terrible,” he said of a practice session in which he actually ended up last in the standings. “P3 is just a session to find your balance and really get on it and I didn’t get any of those laps really, but I managed to pull it out in qualifying.
“We didn’t go out [in Saturday morning practice] until quite late, we were only doing two runs and these tyres they’re hard for everyone and they take a couple of laps to warm up.
“I went out and it was very cold in the morning and I tried pushing from early on and it [the tyre] just locked, the front tyres didn’t have enough temperature and just locked the wheel and completely flat spotted it so I couldn’t run any more with that.
“Then I came back in, went out on another set of tyres and did exactly the same thing on the next so I didn’t get to record any laps…Afterwards I couldn’t make any comments on how the car’s feeling and what changes we need to make so we just kept the car the same.
“I even surprised myself really just how quickly I got back to it. I think it was just going out there and taking one step at a time…We did a longer first run in Q1 which enabled me to get back onto it, and it was relatively easy to be honest.”
Hamilton also admitted that he had expected Ferrari in qualifying – its leading car being that of Kimi Raikkonen in third place and six tenths away from Hamilton’s pole mark – to be closer than they were.
“I think we anticipated them to be a couple of tenths off. The gap is bigger than we anticipated but that’s a positive.”
