Hamilton takes Canadian GP pole position

F1 Grand Prix, GP Canada, Circuit Gilles Villeneuve

Lewis Hamilton has taken pole position for the 2015 Canadian Grand Prix, his fourth pole on this circuit. His team mate at Mercedes, Nico Rosberg, secured second place with Kimi Raikkonen qualifying 3rd.

Fernando Alonso was the first to leave the pits and come out on track, only to stop at the end of the pitlane and prepare for a practice start. As he parked on the left, Lewis Hamilton passed alongside to be among the first to kick off a timed lap.

The World Champion was well on the pace on his first lap, but was later seen oversteering through the final chicane, and on a later attempt missing the final chicane entirely. Rosberg went faster a little bit later by just 0.0002s.

Before the Mercedes set their times, Maldonado proved fastest, although he later spun off at turn 2. He did keep his car going and continued after marshals helped him along. Romain Grosjean later set the fastest time in Q1, thanks to a run on super soft, just like his teammate did to eventually classify 4th.

In fact, Raikkonen and Bottas were the only two non-Mercedes drivers to progress through to Q2 on the softs.

In the dying seconds, having sat out half of the session after an early slowish run, Sebastian Vettel did an attempt to get through to Q2 on the super softs, but shockingly failed to do so, qualifying 16th despite having shown impressive race pace on Friday. Vettel however did have an MGU-H issue in FP3 which seemingly did not get sorted in time for qualifying. Behind him is Felipe Massa, equally surprisingly eliminated, as well as Merhi, Stevens and Button. The latter didn't even come out of the box during Q1, having incurred an ERS related failure in FP3 that could not be fixed in time for qualifying.

In Q2, everybody opted for the super soft immediately, with Felipe Nasr the lone Sauber to initially take the track. By the halfway mark, both Mercedes set their times, with Hamilton marginally ahead of Rosberg, but both almost a full second ahead of Raikkonen, who turned out to be the closest competition.

Nothing much changed later on, with Bottas initially demoting Raikkonen to 5th before the Finn took back 4th in the classification. Grosjean however kept third, a strong performance for Lotus, especially as Maldonado posted the 6th fastest time. Hulkenberg progress through to Q3 as well, along with Kvyat, Perez and Ricciardo

Eliminated are Sainz, Verstappen, Ericsson, Alonso and Nasr. Verstappen however is set to get a 5-place penalty for causing a collision during the Monaco GP and a 10-place penalty for using his fifth engine of the season, effectively demoting him to the back of the grid.

Q3 is initiated by by Nico Hulkenberg, followed by Kimi Raikkonen, of whom Sebastian Vettel hopes he can put 'Ferrari where it should be', after his own technical problem denied him a place further up the grid. The Finn was initially fastest on the first run, 2 tenths quicker than Maldonado and Bottas.

Hamilton and Rosberg on the other hand did slow first laps on the super softs before jumping to the top of the timesheet with Hamilton 3 tenths ahead of his team mate.

Grosjean came out a few minutes later than the others. He went all out on the first lap, posting the fourth best time thus far, behind Raikkonen but more than a tenth ahead of team mate Maldonado.

In the final minutes, Raikkonen was again the first one on track for his final attempt, improving on his earlier lap, but not enough to gain a position. Hamilton and Rosberg didn't improve and kept their 1-2 while Bottas managed to get ahead of both Lotus cars to qualify in 4th.