Bottas heads into the race 29 points behind Hamilton and needs to beat him to get his challenge back on track.

Behind them, Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc was third while team-mate Sebastian Vettel could manage only seventh.

Mercedes were untouchable at the front, as they have looked all weekend on this demanding track in the Provencal hills.

Bottas looked to have an edge on Hamilton through practice, but when it mattered the Briton made it count, as he so often does.

It was Hamilton’s third pole of the season, matching Bottas’ tally.

In the final qualifying session, Hamilton was 0.157secs quicker than Bottas on the first runs.

Bottas had a scrappy lap on his second attempt and failed to improve, while Hamilton took a few extra fractions off his time, despite a small error in the penultimate corner.

Leclerc had his best qualifying since the Bahrain Grand Prix back in March and beat Vettel for only the second time this season, finally ending a run of bad luck and errors.

He looked quicker than Vettel all Saturday and delivered a strong performance in qualifying to be best of the rest behind Mercedes, albeit 0.646secs adrift.

Vettel, though, had a messy qualifying. He had an untidy first lap, with a big snap at the rear at the first corner before running wide at Turn Six on to the Mistral straight. His gearbox then missed the upshift to fourth out of the Mistral chicane, and he aborted the lap.

That meant he had it all to do on his second run, but he was unable to deliver and ended up 0.834secs behind Leclerc.

But the stars of qualifying were arguably the McLarens, with Lando Norris and Carlos Sainz closely matched and only just failing to pip Max Verstappen for fourth.

Red Bull were struggling – Verstappen was over a second off the pace – but even so McLaren were not expected to be so close.

“I’m happy with P5,” said Norris, who started his F1 career this season. “It’s my best qualifying.”

But he did express some surprise about their pace. “We don’t have any big upgrades. For whatever reason, it seems to be working very well. Hopefully we can identify (why) and bring it to the next races.”

Sainz added: “It is good news. We are bringing upgrades every race and the car is responding, it feels alive. Let’s try to keep it for tomorrow.”