What a story from qualifying it was!
Ferrari had a strong showing in practise and Sebastian Vettel came to Malaysia with a lot of pressure on him for the championship fight (despite what he says to the contrary).
The Sepang circuit has been a happy hunting-ground for Vettel over the years as he's won here 4 times. With this being the last time that Malaysia would host the F1, he would probably have been feeling fairly confident of putting in another strong showing before the curtain comes down on this track.
But again, as we've seen over the last couple of races, things can be turned on their head within a fraction of a second. And turn on their head they did. In the final practise session, as the team was setting up for qualifying, Vettel developed an issue with his car power unit and crawled back to the pits where the team started working frantically to strip his car down and fix whatever the issue was. With 20 minutes of FP3 remaining, the pressure was really on the mechanics.
Vettel came out for Q1 and it looked like all was resolved but it soon became apparent that the fine work of the mechanics had not completely ironed out the kinks. He was soon on the radio reporting a turbo issue. The team instructed him to recharge but he replied that this just made the situation worse. So once again, he had to limp back to the pits for the car to be worked on. Another rush of activity in Vettel's garage with 11 minutes of Q1 left.
It initially looked like the mechanics had put in another Herculean effort as, with 2 minutes left on the clock, it appeared that Vettel was going to be waved back out onto track but it wasn't so. The issue was not fixed and Ferrari had to concede that their man would take no further part in qualifying - dealing yet another massive blow to Vettel's championship hopes.
With the main man out, Kimi Raikkonen rose to the occasion and took the fight to the Mercedes drivers. Valtteri Bottas topped Q2 with Raikkonen in P2, Max Verstappen P3, Lewis Hamilton P4, Daniel Ricciardo P5. The top 5 were separated by less than 0.5 seconds!
After initial times were set in Q3, it looked like the battle for pole position was now between Hamilton and Raikkonen. Showing his superior race craft again, Hamilton was over half a second faster than his teammate. Raikkonen was keeping within a couple of tenths of Hamilton, while the Red Bull drivers tussled between themselves for P3 and P4.
Hamilton got provisional pole but radio messages with his team suggested that he wasn't totally comfortable and had experienced some sort of power issue on his lap as he told the team to "Sort it out".
In the final minute of the session, it was a nervous wait in the Mercedes garage as Raikkonen had a chance to reply to the time set by Hamilton. Raikkonen was blitzing sectors 1 and 2 and it was all falling into place for Ferrari, but the final sector just didn't come together for Raikkonen and Hamilton held on by 0.045 seconds!
Hamilton bagged his 70th career pole position - 5 in Malaysia (tying Michael Schumacher for a share of the record here), and his 4th in a row at Sepang.
P3 went to Max Verstappen alongside his teammate in P4. Bottas will start in P5 - a massive 0.682 seconds slower than the time set by Hamilton.
With Vettel starting at the back, the team may opt to take his engine penalties now and get it out of the way - especially as Sepang allows for overtaking so he has plenty of opportunity to claw back positions and get into the points.
Max and Kimi have had their moments scrapping and squabbling over the duration of this season so there may yet be some fireworks between them tomorrow. Max will just be hoping to get to the end of the race without his engine packing up. Of course, with Hamilton's engine fire from last season as he was comfortably leading the race still very much a fresh memory in everyone's minds, tomorrow's result is by no means a foregone conclusion.
Being in the sub-tropics of Malaysia, a spontaneous downpour is not out of the question either so there may yet be a shake up to this race.