George Russell revealed a helping hand from Lewis Hamilton after securing pole position for the Canadian Grand Prix.
In qualifying on Saturday, Russell secured pole for only the second time in his Formula 1 career. The first came at the 2022 Hungarian Grand Prix, while he also started that year's Brazil race from the front grid slot - and went on to secure his only victory to date.
The Briton is dreaming of doubling that tally in Montreal - six of the last seven pole-sitters at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve have gone on to win. And Russell admits he is in that position partly because of what he learned from team-mate Hamilton.
The 26-year-old said: "To be honest, this weekend has been really challenging because of the conditions. You've had rain around all weekend and then [in FP3] Lewis was absolutely flying and he was well ahead of me and I had to look a lot into his data to try and understand what he was doing differently.
"To be honest, that helped me a huge amount. So ahead of this qualifying, I'm just so glad that we could pull it off, because I feel like we really deserve it for all of this hard work we've been putting in and the car has been feeling awesome this weekend. It is such a buzz. It's been a while since we've experienced this feeling."
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Russell secured pole in the most dramatic of ways. He set the exact same time as Max Verstappen - but was classified above the Red Bull racer because he put his lap time on the board first.
It is only the second time since F1 adopted the current timing system, which measures laps to three decimal places, that pole has been decided in that way. The other was at the 1997 European Grand Prix at Jerez when there was a remarkable three-way tie.
Max Verstappen congratulates George Russell after they both set the same time in qualifying (Getty Images)Michael Schumacher and Heinz-Harald Frentzen set the exact same time as Jacques Villeneuve, but it was the latter who secured pole because he was first across the line. But Russell was too happy with the latest sign of Mercedes' strong progress to care about his near-unprecedented feat.
He said: "We're sort of dialling in that sweet spot right now, and it feels like something we've been saying for a long time, in all honesty. But there is just really a sense of relief to see it translate into a pole position.
"[There is] so much hard work going on behind the scenes at Brackley, at Brixworth, it's been a little while to be able to sort of get back in the fight. We've almost felt like all of that hard work hasn't been paying off, but I think these last two race weekends have really shown that it is."
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