Hamilton doing a “dry dance” with heavy rain set to hit F1 in Austria

Lewis Hamilton is eager for qualifying for the Styrian Grand Prix to take place as normal with heavy rain and thunderstorms threatening to curtail Saturday's running at the Red Bull Ring.

The reigning Formula 1 champion is looking to bounce back this weekend after a difficult season-opening Austrian Grand Prix, finishing only fourth while team-mate Valtteri Bottas stormed to the victory.

Should qualifying be unable to take place on Saturday, and the FIA are unable to schedule it for Sunday morning, it will use the results from FP2 to determine Sunday's grid.

If FP2 results are used to determine grid, Verstappen and Bottas would line up on the front row with Hamilton in sixth. 

When asked for his thoughts on a potential qualifying cancellation, Hamilton said: “Yeah if we have to start it would definitely suck if we didn’t get to qualify, starting further back then I was last week, would definitely make it challenging. I’ll try to do the dry dance if there’s a dry dance, make sure there’s no frigging rain for Sunday.”

Team-mate Bottas fared much better for pace and revealed Mercedes was making positive gains in improving its reliability after the concerns it had throughout Sunday's Austrian GP.

“Practice was really useful,'' Bottas said. “We had quite a few things to try, work and analyze after last weekend, so in FP1 we were mainly trying to see if we have been able to fix the reliability concerns we had in the race, last Sunday. The team is still looking into that but I think we made progress on that, so that’s good news.

“We also used one extra set of tyres today, as it’s almost certain it will be raining tomorrow. With that tyre set I pushed a bit harder, it wasn’t still not full qualifying, but it was good fun.''