Lewis Hamilton put his Mercedes on pole position for the French Grand Prix as the crisis at his old team McLaren took another miserable twist.

Hamilton stormed to the 75th pole of his career on Formula One’s first visit to France in a decade with a dominant display at the Paul Ricard Circuit.

The British driver saw off his team-mate Valtteri Bottas by more than one tenth of a second, while Sebastian Vettel, whom he trails by a single championship point, finished third, four tenths back.

But Fernando Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne qualified only 16th and 18th of the 20 runners on another humiliating day for the failing McLaren team.

Eric Boullier, McLaren’s racing director, insists he will not resign, but the decision could soon be taken out of his hands following another abject display from the team he has presided over since 2014.

Boullier, 44, was pulled from McLaren’s media schedule on Saturday evening.

Zak Brown, McLaren’s American chief executive, said Boullier was in an engineers’ briefing, but then refused to confirm whether the Frenchman would still be in place for the remainder of the season.

“I am not going to get into any personnel changes,” Brown said.  “We have a team of 700 or 800 people, and Eric is a valued member of the team.

“But clearly we have to identify why we have missed this year’s development of the car.”

McLaren’s already troubled season descended into chaos earlier this week when a member of staff described the atmosphere at their Woking headquarters as “toxic”, branded the team’s hierarchy as “clueless”, and revealed staff are rewarded with small chocolate bars for their gruelling work.

McLaren’s managing director Jonathan Neale sought to reassure his divided 800 staff by sending an email in response to what he viewed as an attack on the British team.

In it, it is understood he blamed the disgruntled employee for acting divisively, and urged the factory to pull together. The team, however, appears to be falling apart.

Alonso and Vandoorne were dumped out of qualifying at the first hurdle and ended up an eye-watering three seconds slower than Hamilton.

They were two seconds adrift of the Red Bull cars, who use the same Renault engine and who Brown vowed to challenge this term.

This was McLaren’s worst display of the season. They are not improving, but sliding further down the grid.

Indeed only Williams, another of Britain’s former giants, ensured the McLaren cars will not occupy the final row.

Alonso, 36, is out of contract at the end of the season, and, aside from the £20million he will bank for occupying the McLaren cockpit, it is difficult to see why he would want to continue under the team’s current malaise.

“(It is) normality,” Alonso said. “On the personal side I’m trying to do everything possible.”

Hamilton has won 43 of his 64 victories, and three of his four world championships, since he left McLaren for Mercedes.

On Saturday, armed with a new engine, he made no mistake in seeing off the challenge from his team-mate Bottas as Mercedes secured an ominous front-row lockout.

“It was a really simple session to be honest,” said Hamilton. “It could always be better, but I am really happy to have the pole.

“You can see how close it is between all of the teams so it’s really great to have this result, and a one-two for Mercedes.”