The seven-time world champion delivered a season's best qualifying result in Montreal and secured P4 on the grid; George Russell took a gamble on his tyres and will start P8; watch the Canadian GP live on Sky Sports F1 from 5.30pm on Sunday, with lights out at 7pm
Sunday 19 June 2022 19:03, UK
Lewis Hamilton said qualifying fourth "never felt so good" but warned Mercedes still have work to do ahead of Sunday's Canadian Grand Prix.
The seven-time world champion, who said on team radio yesterday that his car felt "undriveable" and later described it as a "disaster", had a much more positive Saturday in Montreal as he came through a wet qualifying session with a season-best grid position.
After Mercedes took two very different set-up routes on Friday to gain data, Hamilton said his team did "a lot of work" overnight to approach final practice and qualifying in a better position.
Wet conditions added another dimension to the qualifying session, and with Hamilton's result and Alpine's veteran Fernando Alonso securing second place, experience counted around the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.
"Honestly, I feel amazing. I'm so, so happy. P4 has never felt so good," Hamilton told Sky Sports.
"Maybe [it did] when I was in my first year here in 2007 and I got my first P4 in qualifying... it felt great then. It kind of feels like that, particularly because it's been a really, really difficult year.
"To go through what we were faced with today, it was difficult for everyone out there and I'm really so happy to have us there and put us in a position," he continued.
Despite his season's best qualifying performance and out-qualifying his team-mate George Russell for the first time in four races, Hamilton knows that Mercedes' issues are far from behind them.
"With this car, you need everything and more to come together. I like to think that I have rhythm and at this track, particularly in a session like that, you need to have rhythm.
"I feel like this car works on a completely different beat! It doesn't work on the normal beat, that's been difficult to get used to.
"It's just really all the hard work from everyone [that helped]. The rain makes it's much different, if it was dry I don't know whether we'd be in that position. The rain always opens up opportunity. I love this track.
"It's been a struggle so far this weekend and there's still a lot of work to do tomorrow but I hope all the team are feeling positive. I believe in them so much. I hope at some stage we can stop this bouncing and move forwards."
In the final stages of Q3, George Russell took a gamble when he switched to the slick tyres. However, it was a risk that didn't pay off when he slid off track and clipped the wall with his rear wing.
"It's high risk and high reward," Russell said. "It was just turn one, had that been as dry as the other corners, we could have been in a really good place.
"We showed some really good pace today but as I said on the radio, I'm not here to settle for P4 or P5, we need to try things. At the end of the day, points are tomorrow and glad I'm glad we tried something different.
"We've had worse qualifying sessions in normal circumstances this year," he continued. "P4 and P3 would have been nice, I definitely had the pace to do that. But, as I said, the points are tomorrow.
"It was my call [to go for it]. There's openness and trust between us, I knew it was borderline. It was one of those that would either have ended up in P1 or where we ended up. It's not the end of the world and I'm glad I tried it."
