Lewis Hamilton Club

Hamilton leads Mercedes front row lock-out
Lewis Hamilton secured pole position for the French Grand Prix, edging team-mate Valtteri Bottas as Mercedes achieved its second front-row lock-out of the 2018 season.
After topping both practice session on Friday, Hamilton led both Q1 and Q2 in qualifying.
... In the final session, he recorded the fastest time on the opening runs. However, team-mate Bottas posted a session-best sector three times to snatch top spot by a tenth.
Hamilton overhauled Bottas’s advantage immediately. His final sector time eclipsed that of his team-mate to snatch a 75th career pole by 0.118 seconds.
Both Mercedes’ opted to use the supersoft tyre in Q2 along with the Red Bull pairing of Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo and will start the race on the compound.
Ferrari completed Q2 on the ultrasoft tyre. Sebastian Vettel will start from third on the compound. He ended up 0.371s adrift of Hamilton’s benchmark, failing to improve on his final lap after “pushing too hard.”
Behind Vettel, Verstappen, and Ricciardo will line-up in fourth and fifth. Verstappen was quicker than his team-mate in all three qualifying segments and finished nearly two tenths clear.
Kimi Raikkonen will start in sixth after a difficult Q3. After a mistake at Turn 11 on his first lap, the Ferrari driver was fueled for two laps on his second run.
He out-braked himself at Turn 3 on the first lap before a slow second attempt. He ended up over a second behind Hamilton’s time.
Renault’s Carlos Sainz Jr qualified in seventh, ahead of Sauber’s Charles Leclerc. The Ferrari junior propelled Sauber to its first Q3 appearance since 2015. His previous best qualifying performance was 13th.
Leclerc was 0.3s clear of Kevin Magnussen’s Haas. Romain Grosjean’s Q3 ended in the barriers on his first lap after he lost control of his Haas at Turn 3 and slid into the barriers. A red flag was deployed, which meant that team-mate Magnussen had to abort his first run.
Both McLaren’s dropped out of qualifying at the Q1 stage. Fernando Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne were vulnerable throughout the session, as both were in the bottom five with three minutes remaining.
Alonso briefly climbed out of the drop zone, only to be demoted down to an eventual 16th as rivals improved. Stoffel Vandoorne ended up in 18th.
Vandoorne only managed to beat the Williams pairing of Sergey Sirotkin and Lance Stroll who were the slowest two drivers.
Stroll, who will start 20th, ran wide at Turn 2 and was launched over the raised kerbs in the latter stages of Q1, ruining his final run.
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