Lewis Hamilton said he was "in shock" after securing pole position for Saturday's sprint race at the Chinese Grand Prix on just his second race weekend with Ferrari.
The seven-time world champion beat his old rival Max Verstappen to the fastest time by 0.018 seconds as Lando Norris, who was faster than Hamilton through the first two sectors of the lap, made a mistake by running wide at Turn 14 and finished sixth.
The result marked a significant turnaround following Hamilton's tenth-place finish at a wet season-opening Australian Grand Prix, and he appeared to be genuinely surprised by the performance of his car.
"I didn't expect that result," he said. "But so, so happy and so proud. I think obviously the last race was a disaster for us. And clearly we knew that there was more performance in the car, we just weren't able to extract it.
"So to come here to a track that I love, Shanghai, beautiful place, and the weather has been amazing and the car really came alive from Lap 1.
"I didn't know when we would get this position and, after last weekend it was a difficult start to the week. [I wanted] to come here with aggression, I wanted to go into the weekend and really get the car into a great place. I started out straight away with better feeling in the car and I was just can't believe we're at the front," he said.
"We made some great changes, the team did a fantastic job through the break to get the car ready. I'm a bit in shock. I can't believe we got a pole in the sprint.
"It's obviously not the main race, so we've got work to do for tomorrow. But this puts us in good stead for the race."
Hamilton entered the weekend saying he already had some setup changes in mind to extract more performance from his Ferrari, but he was still at a loss to explain the improvement after stepping out of the car.
"I have no idea. I have to go back and have a look. My first sector was really, really strong. I think that's where I made most of my improvement on that lap.
"But just little, little increments through the whole place. There's still time to find, for sure, which I'll try and apply to the next qualifying session we go out in. It's amazing to see the number one as you stop and to be in the red car. It's pretty incredible."
Hamilton said Saturday's 19-lap sprint race will be his first experience driving the Ferrari in dry race conditions after issues with the car in preseason testing prevented him completing a race simulation.
"I mean I didn't get to do a race run in Bahrain, obviously we did the race last weekend in the wet," Hamilton said. "So tomorrow will be kind of my first long-ish run or race run, and Sunday will be my first proper race run in the dry with this car.
"I'm hoping we can hold onto it, but I think the McLaren is very, very, very fast, as is Max. But we're in a good position. We'll stay positive and keep our heads high, and keep pushing forwards."
Ferrari teammate Charles Leclerc will line-up fourth on the grid on Saturday, he said: "I've struggled on my side of the garage, from the beginning I felt like I was a step back compared to Lewis and Lewis was just faster today.
"[I] struggled a lot in Turns 1, 2, 3, which was more or less the same struggles I had last year so that's a bit of a shame, but apart from that everything was quite tight. It's a shame we start P4 but Lewis is on pole and hopefully we can have a good race together tomorrow."