Sebastian Vettel was pleased for his Scuderia Ferrari team after he secured his first pole position of the season at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve on Saturday, beating championship leader Lewis Hamilton by just over two-tenths of a second.
Vettel says taking pole position will send positive messages to everyone at Ferrari, particularly those who are working flat out to improve the car after a lacklustre start to the year that has seen Mercedes AMG Motorsport take six victories out of six races, four of which have gone the way of Hamilton.
“That was a good day for us and I’m really pleased for the team,” said Vettel, who now has fifty-six career pole positions. “The last couple of months haven’t been easy for us so it’s nice to get a result like today and it sends the right message to all the guys.
“We are flat out and the most important thing is we keep pushing. There’s a lot of adrenaline going around in qualifying and when they came on the radio I was really delighted. It was quite tense in terms of concentration and obviously you try to put everything in that one lap or in those two attempts that you have.”
Vettel admitted that Ferrari came to the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve hopeful of a more competitive weekend in relation to Mercedes and starting from pole position gives them a good chance of ending the unbroken run of victories the German outfit have taken at the start of 2019.
The four-time World Champion will have the opportunity to use only the medium and hard compounds of Pirelli tyre during the race after making it through Q2 on the mediums, and he hopes this will enable him to fight for the win on Sunday and put himself back in contention for the championship.
“Coming here, we knew that we would have better chances and we were able to confirm that,” said the German. “Our pace is stronger here and we are basically sure to avoid the soft tyre in the race.
“We’ll take it from there. Anything can happen tomorrow and we’ll race to find out, as simple as that. We know our competitors are very quick, especially over the distance and we’ve seen this in all the races so far, but we’re starting ahead of them and hopefully we’ll stay there and fight as hard as we can.
“It is important that the chance was there today and we took it. But now we must confirm it tomorrow. So hopefully more singing!”
