Max Verstappen’s mantra of ‘all we can do is our best, the rest isn’t in our control’ is helping him to unerringly hit the target in his Red Bull, despite it being a more contrary car to set up than the McLaren of his 2025 Formula 1 title rivals.
After starting the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix weekend well behind in FP1 yesterday and steadily clawing the deficit down in the evening, a change to a smaller wing for Saturday and rebalancing the car around that just left Verstappen to do his customary near-perfect laps at the perfect time.
Both his Q3 laps would have stood as pole, the quicker second one not benefitting from the tow team-mate Yuki Tsunoda provided on the previous run. Even without the tow, it left him 0.2 seconds clear of the McLarens, Lando Norris marginally ahead of Oscar Piastri.
"We could see from FP3, given how we project the times into qualifying, that Red Bull was going to be very, very competitive," said McLaren team principal Andrea Stella in reference to assumed engine modes. "It would seem that they are just faster than us today."
With the track grip potentially ramping up very quickly in the dusk of Q1 as the temperatures came down, neither Verstappen nor the McLaren drivers were willing to risk not using up two sets of softs. Which left all three of them with just two sets to last them through Q2 and Q3.
Red Bull got around this complication by having Verstappen do just one run in Q2 – on a set of used tyres. This was arguably the lap of qualifying, given the pressure to go fast enough not to need to go back out. It was 0.1s and 0.2s faster respectively than the used tyre times of Norris and Piastri and stood as second in that session to the new-tyred Mercedes of George Russell.
The McLaren drivers went back out for second runs on new tyres – which were not completed as they were safe. But it meant Verstappen had the luxury of two new-tyre Q3 runs but the McLaren drivers would have to do one of their runs on the part-used sets.
The extra confidence Verstappen took from that probably isn’t 0.2s-worth but he was in swashbuckling super-confident form. Despite running a smaller rear wing than either McLaren – which meant he reached around 5km/h more at the end of the back straight and 3km/h on the pit straight – Verstappen was notably later on the brakes into the tight Turn 6-7 chicane and the tight Turn 12 and maintaining better momentum through and out of them. The McLaren ultimately did not have the Red Bull’s balance in the slow corners, suffering a little more understeer.
It was notable also that the sector 3 (the repeated slow-medium corner sector) advantage McLaren had shown throughout practice had disappeared.
"There’s not much left, that’s pretty much as fast as it will go," said Piastri after going third a few hundredths slower than Norris.
"I’m a little disappointed," said Norris after being denied the starting position which could have allowed him to dictate events and put the title out of reach. "We just weren’t quite quick enough today. Given the higher fuel loads we were on this morning, we didn’t find as much time as we should have."
The cooler track and grippier surface seemed to have landed the McLaren with that shallow understeer trait. The track improvement, together with a few small tweaks around the FP3 wing level, brought the Red Bull into its sweet spot. At least over one lap.
Whether that picture will translate in the race is of course the big question, the answer to which could decide the title. Yes, Norris needs only to finish third and, given the significant gap to his fourth-quickest friend Russell, he should in theory not need to worry too much. But a three-way Abu Dhabi title decider may not pan out according to the numbers.
Quite aside from whatever championship tactics Verstappen and Red Bull may employ and what happens in the heat of the wheel-to-wheel moment, there’s a further potential complication of whether it’s a one- or a two-stop race. It looks very finely balanced between them at the moment.
A yet-further complication arises if it is a two-stop: McLaren has retained two new sets of hard, more graining-resistant, tyres. Verstappen has retained two sets of mediums. There’s not been enough comparative running to know which will be the better tyre over a race stint. It’s all made extra intense by the three title contenders qualifying in the first three places.
A long way behind the title fight in terms of the event’s focus, Russell manhandled the Mercedes spectacularly to fourth on the grid and could be yet another complicating factor. He was only 0.1s faster than Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari - who said the car was so bad that he almost abandoned his Q2 lap "about five times". In the sister car Lewis Hamilton went out in Q1 for the fourth consecutive time and was perhaps more despondent than ever.
Fernando Alonso and his Sauber-driving protégé Gabriel Bortoleto were separated by two thousandths in sixth and seventh. The former might reflect that his Ferrari engineer from his nightmare three-way 2010 title decider – Andrea Stella – is now facing a similar set of circumstances.
