Lewis Hamilton was left wondering what might have been after a red flag forced him to settle for second on the grid for the Japanese Grand Prix.
Hamilton and team-mate Nico Rosberg had taken Mercedes back to the top of the timing screens on Saturday after their Singapore setback and exchanged times at the top in Q1 and Q2. At the start of the top-ten shootout Rosberg pipped Hamilton by 0.07s, with the world champion hampered by a mistake at the hairpin which saw him lock up and run deep.
He had another chance to beat his team-mate to pole but had to abort his final run when red flags were brought out for Kvyat's big crash on the approach to the hairpin.
"It doesn't really matter but the second lap was good looking good," Hamilton said. "On the first lap I lost a bit of time on Turn 11 and in the last corner. Nico's driving pretty well this weekend but I definitely felt pretty good on that last lap. I'm just glad Kvyat is okay.
With Mercedes reclaiming its position of dominance and finishing four tenths clear of the next car, Hamilton reserved special praise for his engineers.
"The guys worked incredibly hard to try and understand last week and it's great to be back up here. It's very strange obviously when you see the pace of some of the people behind but definitely the car feels quite normal this weekend which is great to see."
"I think the great thing about this sport is there's never the perfect car. It's always evolving, it's always improving, there's always areas you can improve on. My engineers did a fantastic job trying to get it set up in a nice place and it was an exciting qualifying with the [close] gap to Nico, a shame I didn't get to do that last lap."