The seven-time world champion qualified third for Sunday’s race but will join his title rival and polesitter Max Verstappen on the front row 🌠after his Mercedes teammate Valtteri Bottas’ three-place grid penalty is applied.

Hamilton, who ended up missing out on pole by 0.226s, was seen🅺 overtaking a number of his rivꦓals in the last sector at Spielberg just before he started his final push lap in Q3.

Having failed to improve on his last run, which included a wide moment at the final sequence of corners, Hamilton admitted his queue-jumping tactic was ℱ“definitely” a mistake “in hindsight”.

“I knew that everyone was going so slow and I was worried [about] not having the tyres up to temperature but I went on all the dirt🍸y lines so I was just picking up all the dirt on the 🐓tyres,” Hamilton said.

"And then a poor exit out of the lꦿast corner, so already by Turn 1 I was a tenth down then already by Turn 3 I was two-tenths down.

“No hope i🎉n tha🦹t respect and then naturally tried to overdrive to gather that time lost back but it didn’t work.”

Hamilton explained his and Mercedes’ decision to carry out an unusual 🔯Q3 strategy that saw him complete three flying lap attempts on the soft tyre instead of the typical two runs.

“I was told that I had three tyres and I could useꦇ them all so I was like yeah, I’ll throw everything at it, give it three shots in the hope to close the two-tenths to Max,” he said.

“But as I said, th💫e last one was not great when there’s all these people out there and you’re not able to get the temperature into the tyres. But we did everything we could.”