After a restless Friday night, Lewis Hamilton admits he was not expecting to find enough time to claim pole for the Malaysian Grand Prix.
Hamilton and Mercedes endured a tricky Friday with an upgraded car, prompting the decision to switch the championship leader back to an old spec to compare to teammate Valtteri Bottas' car in FP3. Hamilton kept the old parts for qualifying and, after seeing title rival Sebastian Vettel hit engine trouble in Q1, turned in a blistering lap in Q3 to edge Kimi Raikkonen to the 70th pole position of his career -- one that left him over 0.6s up on his teammate's upgraded car.
The Englishman did not fully understand where he had found the pace.
"We had such a difficult day yesterday, it was difficult to know where we stood," Hamilton said. "I didn't sleep very well last night, probably like all my engineers as well, because we didn't know whether we were going to fix the issue or not.
"Today we arrived and the car was much better but still it looked like Ferrari was a little bit ahead, so some big calls to make ahead of qualifying. Those laps, particularly the first Q3 lap, was very well out together, a very nice lap, I didn't know where it came from to be honest so a little surprised in myself. So a surprise to be up here but I'm very grateful.
"It's always a special thing when you're able to extract a little bit more out of the car than it's probably willing to go. That's what I've always enjoyed since my dad would say my first go-kart was fifth-hand, or something, and he would say it was like a four-poster bed.... Not that my car was a four-poster today, but I was able to extract a little more out of it!"
Though he appeared comfortable with the changes his team made to his car ahead of FP3, Hamilton said the time constraint between that session and qualifying was the only reason he did not move back to the upgraded package Bottas had stayed with.
"We came with an upgrade that was supposed to be better but we were unsure yesterday because we were so far off. We went back to one car trying one, one car trying another. Before qualifying I was thinking of going back to the new package because our times were similar and Valtteri seemed happy on it so I didn't want to carry a penalty going into qualifying, you want every little millisecond you can get.
"But there wasn't enough time so we ended up staying with it and also it was a risk changing the car again before qualifying and maybe getting something wrong. That was mainly the reason we ended up staying with it. Fortunately I had done P3 with it so I was quite comfortable with it and it turned out to be a stepping stone in terms of making the set-up change. Ultimately it is down on performance but thankfully it didn't make a difference."