Valtteri Bottas secured his first pole position of the season and the fifth of his Formula 1 career at the Red Bull Ring on Saturday, defeating Mercedes AMG Petronas Motorsport team-mate Lewis Hamilton by just 0.019 seconds.
The Finn’s lap of 1:03.130s was the fastest ever lap of the Red Bull Ring but he was made to work for the pole position, with an improvement on his second flying lap needed to deny his team-mate the top spot.
“It feels really good to get my first pole position of the season,” said Bottas. “I like this track a lot; last year I had a good weekend here and this year the weekend has started well again.
“It’s a tricky circuit; there are only seven real corners on this track, but you can get them wrong very easily and lose a lot of time. For me it helped a lot that my first lap in Q3 was really good, so I could build on that in the second run.
“I will look at the data in detail to see where there is further room for improvement.”
Turning his attention to race day, Bottas cannot see why Mercedes cannot also have a strong performance on Sunday, with the Finn eyeing up some good luck and hopefully his first win of the season.
“The car felt really well-balanced today, so I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t feel that way tomorrow,” said the Finn. “We have had very mixed races lately, so I hope that I can get a good start and fight for the win.
“We have shown that we are quick here and have a really strong package, so we need a nice, clean race to turn our qualifying result into points. It’s nice to have a good result, but this was only qualifying, and it’s the race that counts.”
