Daniel Ricciardo will start ahead of world champion teammate Sebastian Vettel for the third time in five races this season in Sunday’s Spanish Formula One Grand Prix.

The young Australian qualified third fastest on Saturday, behind only the all-conquering Mercedes team which has Lewis Hamilton on pole and Nico Rosberg alongside him.

Three-time world champion Vettel could only qualify 10th after suffering a drive failure early in the final session and he was later penalised five places after his team announced they had to change his car’s gearbox.

Hamilton, the 2008 world champion, clocked a majestic late lap of one minute and 25.232 seconds to outpace by 0.168 seconds and claim the 35th pole of his career.

Only Vettel with 45 poles, Ayrton Senna on 65 and Michael Schumacher on 68 have claimed more.

On a Barcelona track where eight of the past 10 races have been won from pole and 21 of 23 from the front row, Hamilton’s success made him favourite to extend his winning streak to four and take over as championship leader from Rosberg.

Despite his good qualifying showing Ricciardo was disappointed.

“I think we did OK today, but it’s not quite good enough. We’re a second off – I expected a closer gap than that,” he said.

“We’ve made improvements this weekend, but so have Mercedes.

We’re a clear third today and that’s not bad, but we want to be closer to the top two.”

While Vettel sits one place ahead of team newcomer Ricciardo in fifth spot on the driver standings, Ricciardo has qualified ahead of Vettel in Australia, China and now Spain.

He has also finished races ahead of the German three times, in Australia, Bahrain and China, though he was later disqualified in the Australian Grand Prix.

Valtteri Bottas qualified fourth for a resurgent Williams team ahead of Romain Grosjean of Lotus and Kimi Raikkonen in the leading Ferrari.

Fernando Alonso was seventh in the second Ferrari, Jenson Button was eighth for McLaren and Felipe Massa ninth in the second Williams.