Lewis Hamilton gave the home crowd reason to roar as he took pole position for the sprint race at the British Grand Prix for Ferrari, beating the Mercedes of Kimi Antonelli into second, with Red Bull’s Max Verstappen in third.
The pole for the short format race to be held on Saturday morning at Silverstone must be considered somewhat against the odds, as Ferrari had been expected to be somewhat on the back foot to Mercedes, at the power dominated track.
Yet Hamilton and Ferrari defied expectations from the moment they took to the track on Friday. He had been fastest from Antonelli in first practice and went on to top the timesheets in each session of sprint qualifying, including the one that mattered when he had the finest of margins on Antonelli, who leads the world championship by 40 points from his teammate George Russell and is 46 ahead of Hamilton. Russell was fifth in sprint qualifying.
Indeed despite his superb form Hamilton appeared somewhat taken aback that he had managed to put one over on the Mercedes and Red Bull but with nine wins here, the British driver knows how make the most of every inch of the old airfield.
“I love this place, I love this crowd, and I can’t express to you how big a dream it is,” he said. “I’m really grateful to get that pole. I was quick through all the session but still, it was only 10 milliseconds, so it was very close to these guys.
“Still to this day when you’re building up to this race you think about every corner and the flow you can get into at this track if you get the setup right and if you’ve got the right team behind you.”
With the single lap-shoot under way in Q3, Oscar Piastri set the opening pace for McLaren, only to be pipped by his teammate Norris. Antonelli was rapid behind them, briefly taking the top spot. Yet Hamilton was immense through the middle sector and claimed pole from the Italian by 11 thousandths of a second, with a time of 1 minute 28.376 seconds. Verstappen claimed third but was a full three-tenths back. Charles Leclerc was fourth for Ferrari, with Norris and Piastri in sixth and seventh.
Earlier in the day Norris had welcomed the changing demographic across Formula One as the sport has expanded to attract a larger female audience than at any time in its history. This weekend’s British Grand Prix will attract record numbers and more of them than ever are women and girls, for which the defending world champion believes F1 should be celebrated.
Approximately 570,000 are expected across the race weekend at Silverstone, breaking the record held by previous highest attendance of 520,000 at the Australian GP in 1995 but most striking is the makeup of those numbers.
Female attendance now makes up 43% of sales at the British GP. The driver’s dedicated Landostand on the outside of Stowe corner, bedecked in his florescent yellow colour scheme, has been increased to a 20,000 capacity this year and last year 70% of ticket sales there were to female fans.
“The fact of just more women getting into the sport in the first place is a good thing,” he said. “So, it’s nice to know that I’ve played a part in it, in bringing a newer, younger generation and an audience to Formula One.
“Most that I’ve seen today were girls and women, which is a cool thing. It’s just good to know that Formula One has moved on from that point of view,” he added. “I don’t think it’s necessarily lost the amount of guys that love it, it’s just more of the girls and women that are getting into it, which is a bonus because there’s just more of an audience altogether.”
