Lewis Hamilton seemed as surprised as everyone else after taking a sensational pole position for Saturday’s Sprint at the British Grand Prix to raise the hopes of his home crowd that maybe, just maybe, he might be victorious this weekend.
Has Ferrari really got the pace to fight for Sprint and Grand Prix victory?
Well, if you’d asked the Italian team that very question heading into this weekend, they would have told you they were expecting Silverstone to be a tricky one to master for them.
As Hamilton admitted after Sprint Qualifying: “We didn’t expect coming to Silverstone that we’d be competing for the front row, we really, really didn’t, so this is an amazing surprise. I’m ecstatic.”
But from the first laps in the one and only practice session, Ferrari – and in particular Hamilton – looked quick. Their strength in the low-speed turns this year paid dividends at Silverstone, as they enjoyed an advantage of 0.3s over Red Bull, 0.4s over Mercedes and more than half a second over McLaren.
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