Lewis Hamilton reveals to burning "midnight" oil to unlock Qatar pole pace

Qatar Grand Prix

Hamilton reveals to burning "midnight" oil to unlock Qatar pole pace

Hamilton will start on pole for the Qatar Grand Prix

Sam Hall

Saturday 20 November 2021 16:40

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Lewis Hamilton has revealed to staying behind at the Losail International Circuit until "midnight" searching for answers after struggling for pace on Friday.

Hamilton ended practice behind team-mate Valtteri Bottas but then closed the gap in final practice before asserting his dominance in qualifying to secure pole ahead of Max Verstappen by the largest margin in a dry session this season.

Either of Hamilton's Q3 efforts would have been enough to secure top spot on the grid, but it was his final lap of one minute 20.827secs that grabbed the headlines, with Verstappen almost half-a-second adrift.

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"Yesterday was a really difficult day for me actually," assessed Hamilton. "I wasn't feeling too well [stomach ache] so I really struggled throughout practice and I was just off yesterday.

"I really had to dig deep. I was here until midnight last night with the engineers, who also always work so late and are such hard workers, and [we] found a lot of areas I could improve.

"We made some changes for P3 and it seemed to work but, of course, you've got to try to carry that through into qualifying.

"I'm so grateful for the timings that they put us out on track. We didn't have any traffic and just that last lap was beautiful. It was a really sweet lap."

Turning his attention to strategy, Hamilton feels that with Pirelli providing the three hardest tyres in its range to this circuit it could provide options.

"Being that it's such a fast circuit, I don't think from the little bit of experience we have had through practice, it's not the easiest of circuits to follow but it's also not massively degrading on the tyres," he explained.

"I think the top three of us at least are on the medium tyre [for the start] and the hard tyre is the C1 so it looks like it could go quite a long way.

"It could be a one or a two-[stop race]. We will find out tomorrow."