Lewis Hamilton pumped about close battle with Ferrari
Lewis Hamilton made it clear that he is relishing the battle with Ferrari in 2017 after edging Sebastian Vettel to his second pole of the year – and his sixth in a row.
Ferrari had looked favorites after FP3, but Hamilton pulled something out of the bag when it really mattered.
“It’s more exciting than ever for me, because we’re really fighting these guys, you know,” he said. “It’s amazing, and I think that’s what racing’s all about. It really pushes you to raise the bar every time you go out, which I love.”
Hamilton admitted that it hadn’t been easy to go into qualifying with relatively little preparation after Friday was lost because the medical helicopter could not be used.
“Today was a real challenge for all of us in the sense that we had to compile a lot of yesterday’s testing into this morning, and hope we’d hit the nail on the head with the balance of the car. But the Ferraris have looked so fast, through practice this morning and then through each qualifying session.
“We knew it was going to be close, and it was going to mean we would have to pull out all the stops and really have a very, very perfect lap, you know, a solid lap. I managed to just chip away at it from session to session. No major issues. But the last lap was my best lap, which is always the plan – sometimes it’s in another session.
“The lap started off not as good as perhaps the Q1 first lap but then the rest of the lap got better and better – I think it may have been tire temperatures or something, who knows. It felt strong and then obviously coming into the last corner knowing I was up a couple of tenths… it’s always nervous going into Turn 14 because you want to break late and gain some but you don’t want to throw away everything you’ve gained. And through the last corner and coming across the line, and then just waiting after that to see what everyone else had done.”
Hamilton reached another landmark today with his 65th career pole, putting him one step closer to Ayrton Senna’s total.
“Every pole has been – it might be hard for you to believe – but every pole position has been so unique in its own way. There’s always been a different journey to gain that pole, there are different things that have happened on that lap. It’s still today – and I’m sure it will never change – it’s still so real that I have that amount of poles and to think you can have a pole in Formula One.... because the dream was to get to Formula One.
“And now, it’s perhaps even more exciting, I’m nearing Ayrton, he had a lot of pole positions with less races. We know what he did back then was just phenomenal, the same with Michael but just grateful to be up there up amongst them. I definitely feel that what I love even more now is that I feel like more than at any other time, I feel like I’m really having to earn those pole positions being that it’s so close, so again, on top of that the feeling is even better.”
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