Canada pole 'at the low end', admits Hamilton

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Lewis Hamilton will start on pole position for Sunday's Canadian Grand Prix after pipping his team mate Nico Rosberg to the top spot by just 0.062s - the closest margin in qualifying so far this season.

But Hamilton didn't feel that he had extracted the most out of his car in the session, and admitted that despite clinching his fifth pole of the year (and fifth in Canada) it was 'at the low end' of his qualifying performances.

"Honestly that wasn’t a great qualifying for me in terms of laps, they weren’t that great. My pole lap was definitely at the lower end of the pole laps that I’ve had.

"I’m pretty happy that I’m still on pole [but] I think there’s always room to improve."

Qualifying was certainly much tighter than Friday's practice had suggested, where Hamilton had topped both FP1 and FP2 by around three tenths of a second from the competition.

"To be honest it doesn’t matter how far ahead you are as long as you are ahead," he said. "Of course in practice it was a much bigger gap and today I just didn’t have the pace I had yesterday, but clearly it was enough.

"I think there was definitely more time in it, but it was great to see how close we all were. I think that is great for the fans to see and an amazing turn-out on the Saturday here as always and I am glad it stayed dry. It is going to be interesting tomorrow, but [pole] is the best place to start that is for sure."

Perhaps more surprising that the close shave with his team mate was how close Sebastian Vettel had come to matching them both in the Ferrari.

"Yes, Ferrari have picked up the pace with the upgrades they have brought on their car and this is a great track to test their ultimate speed," Hamilton agreed.

"We are excited to have the race with them. I think it will be exciting for the fans. I think there long runs looked strong and I don’t know if it was a lot stronger than ours. But we shall see tomorrow."

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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.