LEWIS Hamilton swept to his fifth Canadian Grand Prix pole position and piled more pressure on his championship-leading Mercedes teammate Nico Rosberg.
Daniel Ricciardo, who was famously denied victory at the last race in Monte Carlo after a botched pit stop, will start the race from fourth spot on the grid but his qualification was not without more drama.
Hamilton, the triple Formula One world champion, will seek to win in Montreal for the fifth time, knowing he will retake the title lead if Rosberg draws a blank.
HHis love affair with the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, where he took his first pole in 2007, continued as he seized the top slot with a time of one minute 12.812 seconds and beat Rosberg by 0.062.
Two weeks after lucking into his first win of the season in Monaco, Hamilton provided further evidence that his campaign is fully back on track after a start plagued by misfortune.
Rosberg’s second place brought him a 13th consecutive front row start, with Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel third fastest and 0.178 behind Hamilton.
Ricciardo said he was worrying about losing his wheels when he gave the ‘wall of champions’ a “pretty big kiss”.
The 26-year-old said he felt his Red Bull touching the wall as he exited the final chicane and recalled the similar incident that resulted in a crash and elimination for Spaniard Carlos Sainz.
Ricciardo clipped the wall with both his front and rear wheels, just as Sainz had in his Toro Rosso, but he survived without serious damage.
“It felt like a pretty big kiss actually!” said Ricciardo.
“As soon as I hit it, I thought about what happened to Carlos in my head.
“I thought ‘just please keep the wheels on until the line and then they can fall off it they want’. In the end, I don’t think I lost that much to it.
“I think I carried so much speed into the corner that I gained in what I lost out by hitting the wall. It probably didn’t change the overall position.
“I took a pretty big hit yesterday, as well (in practice), and the car held up. We’ll see. It felt a bit buckled.
“The car wobbled a bit as I crossed the line. I’m sure the FIA will let us change parts if we need to if they look a bit worse for wear.”
After his glum exit from Monte Carlo after finishing a frustrated second in last month’s Monaco Grand Prix, Ricciardo was smiling again.
“Yeh, I’m pretty happy. This weekend has been steady and I think we’ve built it up,” he said.
“We got it all together and we’re pretty happy with fourth. We’re only three tenths from pole...”
As to his prospects of winning, he smiled. And said: “We’ve got an outside chance.”
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