SPIELBERG, Austria: Valtteri Bottas upstaged both title protagonists on Saturday by claiming his second pole position for Mercedes in a tense qualifying session for Sunday’s Austrian Grand Prix.
The Finn clocked a best lap of one minute and 4.251 seconds to outpace championship leader Sebastian Vettel of Ferrari by four hundredths of a second.
Briton Lewis Hamilton, who trails Vettel by 14 points in the title race, was third fastest in the second Mercedes, but will start the race from eighth on the grid due to a five-place penalty for an unscheduled gearbox change.
The session ended in some disarray when Frenchman Romain Grosjean stopped his Haas out on the track to bring out a series of yellow flags that prevented any final fast laps.
Finn Kimi Raikkonen, the 2007 world champion, will start from third in the second Ferrari ahead of Australian Daniel Ricciardo and his Red Bull team-mate Max Verstappen, backed by a crowd including 10,000 Dutch fans at the Red Bull Ring.
Grosjean was seventh ahead of Mexican Sergio Perez and his Force India team-mate Esteban Ocon, with Spaniard Carlos Sainz 10th for Toro Rosso.
Hamilton’s hopes of reducing Vettel’s 14-point lead suffered a setback late Friday when he was handed the five-place grid penalty.
The penalty is the regulation mandatory punishment for an unscheduled gearbox change, in this case before Hamilton’s unit had completed six races, his Mercedes team confirmed.
Hamilton’s penalty is the latest unfortunate setback to his mounting championship challenge and follows his bad luck in Baku where, following Vettel’s ‘road rage’ attack, his head-rest worked loose and cost him a near-certain victory. — AFP