Qualifying stats: Bottas completes hat-trick of Austria poles

The first qualifying session of the season is complete – and it produced some statistically significant outcomes, not least for the man who captured pole position in Austria...

• Bottas joins Niki Lauda, Rene Arnoux and Nelson Piquet as a three-time Austrian pole winner. The Finn doesn’t have more than one pole at any other circuit

READ MORE: 'I finally unlocked the performance in myself' says Bottas after Austria pole

• Mercedes 65th front-row lockout ties Ferrari’s all-time record – it’s their first since Silverstone last year and it comes on the anniversary of the Silver Arrows finishing one-two in their F1 debut in France in 1954

• Bottas beat team mate Lewis Hamilton to pole by 0.012s – the smallest pole margin in Austrian GP history

• Lando Norris secured a career-best fourth place on the grid. It’s just the second top-four start McLaren have achieved since the end of 2014. The other one also came in Austria, when Jenson Button was third in a wet/dry qualifying session in 2016

• For the third race in a row, Alex Albon will start in fifth place. This will be his sixth consecutive start from row three of the grid

• Sergio Perez set an identical lap time to Albon and starts in P6 – his best grid slot since Azerbaijan, 18 races ago

• Charles Leclerc qualified seventh with a slower time in his Ferrari than he managed to take pole in 2019

• Lance Stroll made a rare appearance in Q3. His only previous visits to Q3 in the last 54 Grands Prix all came at Monza in Italy (2017, 2018, 2019)

• For the first time since he joined Ferrari in 2015, Vettel failed to make it into Q2 on pace alone. All his other failures to advance were caused by mechanical issues. The German only failed to reach the top 10 shootout once last year, in Germany

READ MORE: 'I thought we had more in hand' - Vettel ‘surprised’ by Q2 exit as Ferrari struggle in Austria

• George Russell missed reaching Q2 by just 0.073s - in the first race of 2019 he was 1.3s off making it through, showing how far Williams have come. The didn’t make it out of Q1 at any time in 2019

• Sadly for Alfa Romeo, they picked up where they left off in 2019, with both cars going out in Q1 – as at last year’s curtain closer in Abu Dhabi