Vettel delighted to rediscover his pole-winning groove

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Not so many years ago, a Sebastian Vettel pole position was barely worth commenting on. But that was in the Red Bull days, and poles have been much thinner on the ground since his move to Ferrari.

Vettel has topped qualifying only once for the Scuderia, in Singapore in 2015. He went on to win that race, and will be hoping history repeats himself this weekend in Sochi.

But Vettel revealed that Saturday's qualifying for the Russian Grand Prix hadn't been entirely straightforward.

"I had a good start to the session to qualifying this afternoon and I was feeling reasonably comfortable," he recalled.

"Then in Q2 I lost the rhythm a little bit. My final run in Q2 - which I thought would give me enough of an idea for Q3 for the final segment - went wrong.

"I locked up and lost a bit of the rhythm.

"Then in Q3 the first run was not really tidy, so I left it to the end. Got a good lap in, improved in the last sector and made up some time compared to my lap before."

Vettel and Raikkonen lock out Sochi front row

His team mate Kimi Raikkonen was already on provisional pole. Mercedes drivers Valtteri Bottas and Lewis Hamilton were also on flying laps. Vettel admitted he had no idea whether he'd done enough to clinch the top spot.

"I knew it would be tight," he recalled. "I knew also I would be the first one to cross the line. By going quicker than what I saw on the screen before than Kimi, I knew that for now I was ahead.

"I then immediately opened the radio and asked 'What about the others? Tell me about the others!' My race engineer Carl told me 'They're closing the lap, they're closing the lap.' I said 'Yeah, let me know - how are their sectors, what are their split times?'

"The first over was Valtteri who didn't manage to improve. And then when I got the message that we'd got it then I was obviously over the moon."

Vettel credited the team and the "phenomenal" car they had given him for the day's success.

"It's really a pleasure to go around with low fuel and really push it to the limit. If you have a rhythm here it feels fantastic, so I'm glad I got it back.

"It's a team effort and a great results to have both cars on the front row. But it's only part of the job. The main job is obviously tomorrow.

"For now it's an important step. We managed to improve a little bit - maybe the circuit came our way as well - but it's a very good result and I'm sure everyone is very happy and very proud.

"We'll enjoy that, but in a couple of hours we'll start focussing on the race."

GALLERY: All the pictures from Saturday in Sochi

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.