Valtteri 𝓀Bottas says he was “blown away” by Mercedes’ qualifying performance as it l💮ocked out the front-row of the grid for the Formula 1 season-opening Australian Grand Prix.

Having dominated proceedings throughout practice, Mercedes’ apparent pace advantage continued in qualifying as Lewis Hamilton stormed to pole position ahead of Bottas, with the pair six tenths clear of Sebastian Vettel’s Ferrari. 

Mercedes arrived in Melbourne convinced it would be behind Ferrari in the pecking order following a strong showing from the Scuderia in pre-season testing, leading Hamilton to describe the gap to Ferrari as a “real shoc🌼k”. 

Bottas echoed his teammate’s commen♛ts, adding that Mercedes could not have imagined being in such a commanding position following wint♍er testing. 

“I’m a little bit blown away by the team perforꦗmance we had today,” Bottas sa♎id. 

“Yesterday it was looking good, but it was only 𝕴practice, today it was the first sessions of the year that really counted and I don’t think anyone in the team coul🧸d imagine we would be in this position after the testing we had. 

ꦏ“But ev༒eryone in the team has been working so hard, and that made this possible. This is only one session, tomorrow is the main day.”

The Finn had looked set to land his first pole꧙ position since the 2018 Russian Grand Prix after leading the way following the opening salvo of Q3 runs, but Hamilton found an improvement of over half a second on his final effort to snatc♓h pole by 0.112s. 

“Of course, I would prefer to be on pole but the race is tomorrow and starting fr🐼om the front row is good,” Bottas added.

“I was in the wall after qualifying last year! Historically it’s never been the best track for me, I feel I never managed to get a good qualifying ▨or race around here, for some reason. 

“But I managed to build up durin💖g this weekend, I really started from zero and tried to learn session by session. 

“It was pretty clean with my driving and𒈔 with the car, especially in the first lap in Q3 I was really enjoying driving the car and that’s when the lap times are good. 

“Of course, there were still a few thing🌌s to improve, as Lewis showed on his last laജp. It was close enough, so much better than one year ago.”