Bottas: Spain front-row lockout a ‘perfect’ result for Mercedes 

Valtteri Bottas was ultimately pleased to secure an all Mercedes front-row for the Spanish Grand Prix, despite missing out on pole position by just 0.040s. 

Teammate Lewis Hamilton turned in a superb pair of laps in the final segment of qualifying to claim his 74th career pole and his second of the 2018 campaign.

Bottas recovered from a mistake on his first run to snatch second place and his best qualifying result of the season with a late improvement in the closing moments of Q3. 

“It was so close today, like it has been all weekend. Good fun. I ruined my first run in Q3 so I only had one chance in the last run, so it was a decent lap. It is a shame it is only four hundreds of a second, but the race is tomorrow.

“I think the last run in Q3 was fine, there were no mistakes, so there was not much left. I managed to put the lap together an it was extremely close, like all weekend. Lewis had a very good qualifying and, for us, as Lewis said, it’s a perfect result for us and hopefully we can continue like this tomorrow.”

Q3 saw a mix of strategies as Mercedes’ drivers opted to complete their final run on Supersofts, while both Ferrari’s and Daniel Ricciardo switched onto the theoretically-slower yellow-walled Soft tyre. 

Ricciardo, Vettel and Raikkonen all found improvements on their runs, while Bottas and Hamilton also made marginal gains on the Supersofts. Bottas later explained Mercedes’ thinking behind it’s decision. 

“Going into today we saw that the gaps between the different tyres, with these new tyres and the new surface were very small. 

“We saw that in testing and we saw it both yesterday and today. We though the Super Soft was the better tyre for us and it worked, bit it was still marginal the gains we made."