Lewis Hamilton said he only found his groove in the final qualifying session as he recovered from a slow start to beat Nico Rosberg to pole for the Monaco Grand Prix.
Hamilton topped both Thursday practice sessions but seemed to have dropped off the pace on Saturday, finishing behind Nico Rosberg in FP3 and then finishing behind his Mercedes team-mate in the first two qualifying sessions. During Q2 Hamilton took to the radio saying "we need to just calm down" after hitting traffic on a flying lap and it seemed he had by Q3, taking provisional pole with his banker lap and then stretching out his advantage to 0.342s at the end of the session.
When asked if his first pole at Monaco seemed like it was a long time coming, he replied: "It does! It's been a long, long time and I can't express to you just how happy I am. It wasn't the easiest session, I had a lot of things that were easy to throw you off the rhythm. I didn't really have any rhythm until the last two laps so I was really, really happy with it, coming across the line just hoping for once that you've got it."
Hamilton was asked to explain what his radio message had meant in Q2 and he put it down to the difficulties he was having finding a rhythm early on.
"Well, at this track it's so hard, it's difficult to express just how difficult this track is. We do it because we've been racing for years but getting your head around it and improving, it's important to get into a rhythm and to continue to improve. It's like climbing a ladder and every time you've got to be taking one step, if you slide down it's sometimes harder to get back up. In our session we had some problems with tyres, some problem with wing, and traffic, so it wasn't easy. It makes it even more special because normally if you're just back-to-back good laps, good laps, good laps, and you get it you can expect it, but we had some really bad laps, didn't get the quickest lap in Q1 or Q2 ... anyways, it was great, I'm really happy."
When asked what percentage of the job was now done having claimed pole at a circuit where overtaking opportunities are at a premium, Hamilton was clear about the task at hand.
"This is not even half the job done. There's so much to do tomorrow, there's a long, long way to go, many, many laps here, so it's going to be mentally and physically challenging. Again, just so happy today, nothing was able to get in my way today, thank goodness. I'm just sitting here thinking about all the previous years, things that got in the way or I wasn't good enough, or whatever it may be, so I'm looking forward to tomorrow. 2006 in GP2 was the last time I started on pole here so it's a very special day and a big thankyou to the team, the performance we have with the car has been outstanding and it's been perfect all weekend."