Hamilton revels in Mercedes’ performance

Lewis Hamilton says he is “massively grateful” for the work Mercedes has done to deliver such a competitive car after taking pole for the Australian Grand Prix.

With team-mate Nico Rosberg struggling to put together a lap in Q3, Hamilton took pole position by 0.6s from his team-mate. However, the more telling gap was the 1.4s back to Felipe Massa in third place and Hamilton is full of praise for the work Mercedes has done over the winter.

“It’s been a great start to the weekend,” Hamilton said. “It doesn’t feel like it’s been a long time since the last race, so it’s been a big rush and a huge effort from all the guys back at the factory to enable us to come here and have this performance and I feel incredibly blessed to have this car.

“Today, we found a good balance and it was just about trying to push in those laps. It’s so much fun when you get into qualifying and you have those single laps that you have to push. I’m just massively grateful for all the work that has gone in.”

Having been on pole in 2014 but failed to finish in Australia, Hamilton also says he isn’t putting too much importance on improving on that result.

“It’s not that its not important [to win the first race] as last year showed that, even if I didn’t have a good first race it’s not the end of the world. Of course, the plan tomorrow is to have a better start to the season, and today’s the first step in that direction.

“We had a difficult start to the season last year, so definitely, as a team, as a whole, we are hoping for a better start for both cars and to succeed tomorrow, so we're going to make sure we do that. There’s a lot of work to be done tonight to study for the race tomorrow – it’s a huge challenge still.”

Click here for Saturday's gallery from the Australian Grand Prix

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