Lewis Hamilton will start at the back of the grid in Sunday’s Chinese Grand Prix for the first time since Hungary in 2014 after a failure of his engine recovery system dumped him out of Q1.
Hamilton, who had won pole here on the previous three occasions, was already due to start the race in sixth place at best because of a five-grid penalty following a changed gearbox. He was unable to set a time as his bad luck, after two mishaps in the opening two races in Australia and Bahrain, continued.
His team-mate, Nico Rosberg, who has won the past five races, won his first pole of the season and his 23rd in all to move him ahead of Fernando Alonso on the all-time list.
And beside him on the grid will be Daniel Ricciardo, who put together a thrilling late lap to give Red Bull their best qualifying performance of the season. “I’m quite shocked,” said the Red Bull team principal, Christian Horner. “We can race from there.”
The Ferraris of Kimi Raikkonen, who at one stage looked set to win his first pole since 2008, and Sebastian Vettel will be next on the grid.
A very calm-looking Hamilton said: “These things are sent to try us and I am sure we will learn from it. It is just about trying to figure out the issue and making sure it doesn’t happen again.
“You can overtake here the tyres don’t last as well so it perhaps won’t be as simple as it was in that race [Hungary 2014]. The car is quick, hopefully they get the issue fixed and we can have a race.”
Manor’s Pascal Wehrlein has been outstanding this season but his qualifying lasted only three minutes and 22 seconds before he came off in the wet conditions. The session was red-flagged and Wehrlein – the only one of the three rookies not to have driven here before – was out of Q2.
The other drivers who failed to get out of Q1, apart from Hamilton, were the Renault pair of Kevin Magnussen and Jolyon Palmer, along with Rio Harryanto (Manor) and Esteban Gutiérrez (Haas),
The Q2 dropouts were McLaren’s Jenson Button and Alonso, Sauber’s Marcus Ericsson and Felipe Nasr, Felipe Massa (Williams) and Romain Grosjean (Haas), while Nico Hulkenberg also missed out on Q2 after losing his front-left wheel.
In a very wet FP3 in the morning, Vettel was fastest, followed by Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Pérez, though there was very little running from Mercedes and Red Bull.
