Defending Formula 1 champion Max Verstappen took pole position for the 2025 season finale in Abu Dhabi, but championship leader Lando Norris crucially saw off McLaren team-mate Oscar Piastri.
Norris will win his maiden title on Sunday if the top three order stays as it ism or even if he drops behind Piastri to third.
Unlike the McLarens, had Verstappen managed to carry an extra set of softs into Q3 - and also made use of a tow from team-mate Yuki Tsunoda on the run to Turn 9.
That all came together for an initial 1m22.295s, placing him three tenths in the clear over the McLarens' scrubbed-tyre laps.
That lap, it turned out, would have been good enough for pole already - but Verstappen followed it up with a 1m22.207s on his second attempt to make things more emphatic.
Piastri was ahead of Norris after the initial laps, but was outpaced by 0.029s in the end, both of them two tenths off Verstappen.
Only Mercedes driver George Russell posed any kind of real threat to the three title contenders in the end, and Russell never got a clean Q3 lap together.
He caught a lurid slide through the Turn 14 left-hander on his first flyer, just avoiding the barrier, then had a moment out of the final corner on his last attempt.
But that lap was still enough to take him fourth, ahead of Charles Leclerc - who had been "surprised" to even make Q3, clearly finding the SF25 a real handful.
Fernando Alonso placed sixth for Aston Martin - having outqualified team-mate Lance Stroll in every grand prix qualifying this season, though Stroll did beat him in one sprint qualifying back in China at the start of the season.
Gabriel Bortoleto in the Sauber was 0.002s back from his mentor Alonso, with Esteban Ocon another hundredths back in eighth in the Haas and Isack Hadjar last of those to set a legal time in Q3.
Tsunoda ended up 10th in Q3. Having advanced by 0.008s in the first segment and by 0.007s in the second, he sacrificed his first run for the Verstappen tow, then breached track limits on his second, on a lap that anyway ended up narrowly slower than Hadjar's.
Just 0.367s covered the field in Q2, in which Haas driver Ollie Bearman and Williams driver Carlos Sainz - 0.001s apart - were both less than a hundredths short of advancing.
Liam Lawson (Racing Bulls), Kimi Antonelli (Mercedes) and Lance Stroll (Aston Martin) rounded out the Q2 order, Antonelli complaining loudly on the radio of "no rear" on his W16.
Lewis Hamilton suffered a third successive Q1 exit to cap off qualifying in his brutal first season at Ferrari.
A failure to improve his laptime on his final attempt - courtesy of a minor error at the tricky sharp Turn 12 right-hander - left him just short of advancing to Q2 at Tsunoda's expense, and he radioed in to his race engineer Ricciardo Adami: "Every time, I'm so sorry."
Like Hamilton with Leclerc, Alex Albon was a quarter of a second off Williams team-mate Sainz in Q1 and was likewise eliminated in 17th, ahead of Nico Hulkenberg (Sauber) and the two Alpines.
Both Pierre Gasly and Franco Colapinto struggled with track limits at Turn 1 through Q1, but their final laps were clean - and ended up four tenths apart, Gasly ahead of Colapinto.
