Lewis Hamilton has taken pole position for the US Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas for the first time in his career.
He set an impressive of time of 1:34.999 to take pole from his teammate Nico Rosberg by 0.216 seconds.
Hamilton had the advantage for pole after the first laps in Q3, as Rosberg had a big lock up, going wide, into Turn 1. Rosberg gave it his all on his second timed lap but there was nothing he could do to mute the charge Hamilton was on.
It was two-by-two through the top six as the Red Bull duo finished ahead of the Ferrari pair. Daniel Ricciardo was faster than Max Verstappen by two-tenths of a second.
Despite his potential gearbox issues earlier, Sebastian Vettel has not taken a gearbox change and the car now seems to be running fine. But he was out-qualified by his teammate Kimi Raikkonen as the Ferraris were over a second off the pace.
Nico Hulkenberg, Valtteri Bottas, Felipe Massa and Carlos Sainz Jr finished off the top ten. None of the four set more than one time in Q3.
It was an impressive recovery from Sainz who is running a car with a significant power deficit as it is last year’s Ferrari engine. After his broken FP3 session, that was disrupted by two rear punctures, it was a great performance from Sainz to start tomorrow’s race in the top 10. It just goes to show how much raw talent the Spaniard has.
Fernando Alonso and Sergio Perez were unlucky to not make it into the top ten. Both drivers had shown the potential pace in their respective cars to make it into the top ten in the practice sessions over the weekend. However, when it came to qualifying the Williams duo managed to produce some pace they had not shown earlier on and displaced the two cars.
It was a bad session for Jenson Button and Romain Grosjean who both found themselves out in Q1. The pace of the Haas has been struggling all weekend as Esteban Gutierrez proved only managed 14th fastest.
Button had been on his final flying lap to improve out of the bottom six but he hit a lot of traffic in the final sector. The Briton claimed he lost three-tenths as a result, most of that down to finding Jolyon Palmer on the racing line in the penultimate corner.
The Renault driver did move out of the way, driving off the track to get out of Button’s way, but the damage had already been done. Had Button have been three-tenths faster he would have made it through to Q2.
Despite the issues with Button, Palmer managed to get his Renault into Q2, outqualifying his teammate Kevin Magnussen by three-tenths. He qualified 15th, finishing ahead of Marcus Ericsson only in Q2.
At the back, Pascal Wehrlein out-qualified his teammate Esteban Ocon for the first time in three races. The German recovered from an off in FP3 to claim 20th ahead of Felipe Nasr with Ocon bringing up the grid.
