Lewis Hamilton backed up his confident pre-qualifying words that McLaren-Mercedes were a match for Ferrari at the Spa-Francorchamps circuit hosting today's Belgian Grand Prix by roaring to pole position. Despite seeing Ferrari set a strong pace in Friday's practice sessions, the world championship leader had maintained that he and his team were well placed to challenge.
And he held off championship rival Felipe Massa by three tenths of a second as he took the 11th pole position of his career with a lap of 1min 47.338secs. The Briton said he had been pleased with his form throughout the session and also with his decisions on which tyre compounds to use in the overcast - but dry - conditions. "Today has been a great day for me," he said. "The team made no mistakes and I made no mistakes. I had three great laps.
"My first Q3 lap had a bit of a lock-up at turn one, same at the second one but I kept it together, and the rest of the lap I was very happy with. "I decided to stay with the harder tyre for Q2 and surprisingly the Option, the softer tyre, is quite a bit better. Everyone else was on Option and I was on Prime, so I was comfortable with the pace I had considering I was on that tyre." Hamilton leads Massa by six points going into the race and will be confident of increasing that margin, although rain is forecast to fall during the event and could throw proceedings wide open.
"It will be a challenging day, but with the car and the package we will be hard to beat," added Hamilton. The other McLaren of Heikki Kovalainen was a solid third, while the world champion Kimi Raikkonen enjoyed his best qualifying display for three races as he drove his Ferrari to fourth on the grid. The top two teams proved to be a class apart from the rest of the field, with fifth-placed Nick Heidfeld's BMW-Sauber being almost a second slower than Hamilton's pole winning time.
The double world championFernando Alonso drove well to take sixth place in his Renault, ahead of the Red Bull of Mark Webber, while Robert Kubica's slim title hopes took another dent as the Pole could only qualify his BMW in eighth. He trails Hamilton by 15 points going into the race. The Toro-Rosso team maintained their resurgent form with Sebastian Bourdais and Sebastian Vettel qualifying in the top 10.
Bourdais caused a big surprise by topping the times in the first part of qualifying and he eventually finished ninth, one spot ahead of his teammate. The big surprise was the poor speed of Toyota. The team who are fourth in the constructors championship saw their drivers Jarno Trulli and Timo Glock only qualify 11th and 13th. @Email:gcaygill@thenational.ae