Toto Wolff: Gap at Front Down to Hamilton, Not Car

Hamilton scorched to a 73rd career pole position leaving his rivals guessing.

Mercedes executive director, Toto Wolff says the blistering pace Lewis Hamilton had during qualifying was down to the driver and not the car. Hamilton's 1:21.164 was 0.6s clear of next best Kimi Raikkonen, a huge gap that has left rivals puzzled as to how the Brit was able to put in such a quick time.

Wolff maintained that the gap was due to his superstar driver's talent despite the 'party mode' qualifying engine setting the Mercedes has in its arsenal.

"There is a party mode in the car but we switched the party mode on in Q3," he said.

"There was no difference from the first run in Q3 to the second run in Q3, he just said that he had a great lap, pulled it all together and carried more speed through the apexes."

"The gap was down to Lewis Hamilton and putting in a lap with the grip level he didn't seem to be able to extract before,"

"It was just that everything was in the sweet spot, I guess.

"If you take the majority of the timed laps in qualifying, the Ferraris, Red Bulls and Mercedes were always very close to each other -- within a tenth on some of the laps and then there is this one outlier at the end,"

"So from my always pessimistic perspective we need to find out whether Lewis just got it right and it was his driving and he found so much more or whether the reality is the narrow gaps we have seen in the session. I don't know."

Ferrari and Red Bull will have to make up the deficit in the race tomorrow where both teams are confident they can reel in the huge advantage Mercedes seemingly have on the competition.