On a crucial day, Lewis Hamilton slams the opposition just when he looked at his most vulnerable

On a testing day, Hamilton rose to the occasion to secure pole position

Lewis Hamilton was superb on a crucial day (Getty)

What’s the best thing that can happen when it’s a Very Big Weekend for your team, with more Board members attending than you’ll see even in Monaco?

Well, if you’re Lewis Hamilton, it’s to slam your opposition just when you look at your most vulnerable, and spearhead a Mercedes 1-2 as F1 goes into its European leg.

2018 has been bruising for the Silver Arrows. Hamilton should have won in Australia, but lost out to Sebastian Vettel because of the timing of a safety car intervention. Since then, Ferrari seem to have better understood how to get the best out of the latest range of Pirelli tyres.

When all the design calculations and tweaks have enhanced the basic concept of your new car for the start of the season, gaining ultimate performance out of the resultant package comes down to keeping the deliberately degradable tyres in their operating temperature window.

Last year that was tricky, but if the window then was a double-glazed suburban house’s, this season it’s a narrow as a glassless slit in a medieval castle wall.

“I don’t think even Mercedes know why they were struggling so much with that in China,” Vettel said here this afternoon after Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas pushed his Ferrari back to the second row of the grid.

“Then today it’s a different picture for them. It’s good if you know how to get the tyres working, not so good if you don’t.”

Hamilton himself has said many times this year how mystifying it can be to unlock that tyre performance, and added: “It’s a continuous learning process. These tyres have the smallest working window, and because of that they appear to be harder compounds than they were last year even though they aren’t.

“You wrap them in heating blankets, then put them on and give it all on your out lap to get them up to temperature, and still they have none when you go into your flying lap. It can feel like you are running on cold tyres.

“We had them working really well in Australia, and then we’ve been struggling ever since until today.”

The smooth, newly resurfaced track was an added cause for confusion, Hamilton remarking that it had lost much of its character as Vettel suggested that the organisers, who had done the job to make life easier for the MotoGP riders, could have made the investment elsewhere as far as the F1 racers were concerned. At least 20 journalists would have liked it to have been spent on better security after their hire cars suffered smashed windows in the media car park on Friday afternoon.

Hamilton is well placed to defend his Championship lead (Getty)

Hamilton had said earlier that leading the world championship points table felt empty, after winning by default in Baku when both team-mate Bottas and arch-rival Vettel struck trouble. And he wasn’t really in the picture in Q1, when he was only fifth fastest, six-tenths off Vettel’s best when they both ran the supersoft tyres, or fourth in Q2, three-tenths shy of the German when they both ran the softs. But then he turned on the best lap of their first runs in Q3, and bettered that on the second, to take the 74th pole position of his career.

On the first run he lapped in 1m 16.491s to Bottas’s 1m 16.909s (after a mistake) and Vettel’s 1m 17.255s. And though both the Finn and the German improved on their second runs, with 1m 16.213s and 1m 16.305s respectively, Hamilton dipped down to 1m 16.173s to seal the matter.

“It was very close,” he said of his 0.040s advantage over his team partner, “but I’m very happy. I really needed this pole, as I’ve not had one for while.” His last came in the opening round in Australia in March, and his lap was a whopping three seconds faster than his 2017 record.

“I was definitely happier with the car,” he continued. “It’s exciting this year that we are breaking records, because F1 should be about what we are doing with the technology that we have brought to the cars. Some people might think we were sandbagging, but it took everything to get this result, which is fantastic for the team, especially as Valtteri was driving exceptionally well. We have lots of work to do and it’s going to be a very tough race, but it’s a good way to start it.”

Bottas only just missed out (Getty)

Bottas, who would have deserved victories in both China and Baku, was philosophical. “It’s been so close all weekend, and good fun, so it’s a pity that I ruined my first run. I did a decent lap on my second, but missed out by only four hundredths of a second. But we’ll race hard and try to get the Mercedes the 1-2 we deserved in Baku.”

For once, Vettel and Ferrari were the ones scratching their heads.

The German dominated Q1 on supersofts with a lap of 1m 17.031s, improved that to 1m 16.802s when all of the leading runners used softs in Q2, but then struggled on his first supersoft run in Q3 before regaining some ground on softs on his second.

“I just didn’t have great feel with the tyres,” he admitted. “They are the same for everyone, but for some reason we all get different results from them. When you get within one and a half tenths you always think you could have done it. My first run in Q3 was not so good, as I locked up a bit going into Turn 1, but my second run was feeling good until the end when I looked at the timing tower and saw my name didn’t go to the top. We expected Mercedes to be very strong here, but we also expect a great race tomorrow.”

Red Bull have had an up and down weekend, with electrical problems for Max Verstappen this morning and a minor crash for Daniel Ricciardo yesterday. But they were within range of Kimi Raikkonen’s fourth place in the second Ferrari, and always go better in race trim as their Renault engines don’t have access to the higher power settings that Mercedes and Ferrari can use in qualifying. They should be in the mix too.

Further back, modifications to his McLaren-Renault enabled Fernando Alonso to make the top 10 for the first time this year, but the local hero can expect a hard fight with the Haas-Ferraris of Kevin Magnussen and Romain Grosjean, and fellow countryman Carlos Sainz’s Renault.