Hamilton: Didn't expect a gap of eight tenths to pole

Mercedes seemed to be in decent form as long as the track temperatures were high, but once the sun went down and the conditions cooled, the W13 lost its speed, and as a result Lewis Hamilton qualified fifth and George Russell was sixth.

Hamilton said after qualifying in Abu Dhabi: "We came here expecting this to be a difficult one for us but we didn't expect a gap of eight tenths to pole position."

To be precise Hamilton was 0.684s off pole position, almost seven tenths, so maybe the Briton can feel less bad about the speed of his W13.

"We were losing six tenths today on the straights to the top cars," Hamilton revealed. "I gave it everything, so it's a bit of a surprising result and just being so far behind Red Bull and Ferrari.

"Hopefully our race pace tomorrow will be better than our qualifying pace today. There's also some bouncing at this track, which adds to our lack of performance and issues with temperature splits on the brakes which we've experienced throughout the whole season," he explained.

"The whole team is working hard and they're doing an incredible job to fix these issues, especially also for next year. I'm looking to tomorrow and the final race of the season," the seven-time Formula 1 Champion concluded.

Despite a difficult qualifying, Russell is hoping for a better performance during Sunday's race; he said: "We hoped for better lap times during qualifying but should be in a stronger position during the race tomorrow as our long run pace looked competitive from what we've seen so far.

"The grid position seems fair when you look at our current car performance at a circuit like Abu Dhabi but following the results in Brazil, we were probably hoping for a little bit more," he admitted.

"So, we would have liked to be a little bit closer to the front but should be in a better place for the race. Tomorrow will be interesting, as there are lots of different strategy options. I expect Red Bull to be out of reach, but I hope we can chase Ferrari.

"Let's see what tomorrow brings - we will fight as hard as we can all the way to the finish line," the winner of the 2022 Sao Paulo Grand Prix concluded.