Valtteri Bottas edged out his teammate, Lewis Hamilton by a fraction of a second to secure the first ever pole position of his Formula One career. With Lewis finishing in a close second, it gives the Mercedes-AMG team yet another front row lock out, their first for 2017.

A first pole for Valtteri and it feels excellent. It's lovely to have a front-row lockout and it's a great reward to Valtteri for three excellent laps in qualifying today. We are all really happy," said James Allison, Technical Director at Mercedes.

After the blistering pace shown by Ferrari here all weekend it was thought that the Maranello based squad would be a lot closer to the Silver Arrows than what they were and their their third and fifth places even caught Mercedes by surprise....

"The gap to Ferrari is a little larger than in the first two races but rather than being surprised we're just grateful for that small bit of breathing space," Allison continued. "It will be different again tomorrow when everyone has their cars full of fuel - then we are sure to have our work cut out."

"We're expecting the weather to change a fair bit for tomorrow, both windier and cooler. But it will be normal fare for Bahrain - tough on the brakes, tough on the drivers. It'll be a long, hard toil, but hopefully we'll end up at the front. It's going to be super tight.

Sebastian Vettel could only muster up the third quickest time with the Aussie Red Bull of Daniel Ricciardo all set to start alongside the German on the second row of the grid.

The second Ferrari of Kimi Raikkonen will start from P5 after complaining once again about understeer problems with the car. The Finn will have the second Red Bull of Max Verstappen alongside him on row three.

Nico Hulkenberg put in a very strong lap for Renault to finish up in P7 ahead of the Williams piloted by Felipe Massa, the HaasF1 of Romain Grosjean and his Renault teammate, Jolyon Palmer rounding out the top ten, the first time he has made it into Q3 in his F1 career.

A little further down the grid we saw Fernando Alonso lose yet another Honda power unit and as such didn't post a time, leaving him to start from P15 while Carlos Sainz, who was on a good lap, was forced to pull over to the side of the track with a complete loss of power.

1. Valtteri Bottas, Mercedes, 1:28.769
2. Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes, + 0.023
3. Sebastian Vettel, Ferrari, + 0.478
4. Daniel Ricciardo, Red Bull, + 0.776
5. Kimi Raikkonen, Ferrari, + 0.798
6. Max Verstappen, Red Bull, + 0.918
7. Nico Hulkenberg, Renault, + 1.073
8. Felipe Massa, Williams, + 1.305
9. Romain Grosjean, + 1.994
10. Jolyon Palmer, Renault, + 2.305
11. Daniil Kvyat, Toro Rosso, 1:30.923
12. Lance Stroll, Williams, 1:31.168
13. Pascal Wehrlein, Sauber, 1:31.414
14. Esteban Ocon, Force India, 1:31.684
15. Fernando Alonso, McLaren, No time set
16. Carlos Sainz, Toro Rosso, 1:32.118
17. Stoffel Vandoorne, McLaren, 1:32.313
18. Sergio Perez, Force India, 1:32.318
19. Marcus Ericsson, Sauber, 1:32.543
20. Kevin Magnussen, Haas, 1:32.900