Lewis Hamilton continued his 100% pole position record in 2015 by taking top spot during qualifying for the Bahrain Grand Prix.
The Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS driver stormed to his fourth pole position out of four events, and his first in Bahrain, with his lap of 1m32.571s enough to beat Sebastian Vettel by over four tenths of a second.
Vettel was able to split the two Mercedes drivers, with Nico Rosberg unable to get within half a second of his team-mate in final qualifying, while Kimi Raikkonen was fourth in the second of the two Ferrari’s.
Row three will see Valtteri Bottas and Felipe Massa line up side by side for the Williams Martini Racing team, while Daniel Ricciardo pulled an excellent couple of laps out of his Infiniti Red Bull Racing machine to qualify seventh.
Nico Hulkenberg was able to make it through to the final part of qualifying in his Sahara Force India, and led a trio of cars in the final three places of the top ten covered by just 0.034s, with Carlos Sainz Jr ninth for Scuderia Toro Rosso and Romain Grosjean tenth for the Lotus F1 Team.
Sergio Perez will start eleventh in the second Force India after seeing Sainz knock him out of the top ten shoot-out at the last moments of qualifying two, while Felipe Nasr and Marcus Ericsson also saw their efforts fall short, with the two Sauber F1 Team drivers ending Q2 in twelfth and thirteenth respectively.
Fernando Alonso managed to take McLaren-Honda into Q2 for the first time in 2015, with the Spaniard beating the Toro Rosso of Max Verstappen into fourteenth position.
Unfortunately for the second McLaren of Jenson Button, the Briton was forced to stop on track for the third time in four sessions in Bahrain this weekend, and was unable to set a time during qualifying and then will therefore start twentieth and last.
Pastor Maldonado of Lotus and Daniil Kvyat were the surprise drivers to be eliminated in the first part of qualifying, with Maldonado suffering with an engine problem, while Kvyat appeared to make a mistake on his final quick lap. They qualified ahead of the Manor F1 Team drivers Will Stevens and Roberto Merhi, who will start eighteenth and nineteenth respectively, with the Briton over a second faster than the Spaniard at the end of the day.
Bahrain Grand Prix Qualifying Times
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