If the infamous internal ‘consequences’ McLaren has imposed upon Lando Norris for his Singapore contact with his team-mate is the timing of his final qualifying runs relative to Oscar Piastri, it just might have cost McLaren the sprint pole to Max Verstappen’s Red Bull here.
Red Bull – just as in Singapore – waited until the very last moment to send Verstappen out on track in an attempt at maximising the track grip. He was the last car out. The penultimate car out was Piastri. Norris took to the track a full 40s+ earlier than Verstappen and 20s earlier than Piastri.
With the track cooling and the line rubbering up, there was potentially significant laptime difference between Norris’ slot and Verstappen’s. Norris lost pole by 0.071s. Might the track grip difference have feasibly been as much as that? Absolutely, it may have been. Not a certainty, but definitely a possibility.
So it was unfortunate that all this should coincide with Piastri struggling for pace. Despite his more favourable running slot, he could qualify only third, a chunky 0.3s adrift of Norris, having been a similar amount shy in SQ2 and over half-a-second behind in SQ1.
On the medium tyres of the first two sessions, Verstappen was just over 0.1s behind Norris. So on the switch to softs for SQ3, it was definitely game on for Red Bull. Hence the high-risk strategy of putting him out on track last. Verstappen then delivered the beautiful lap, as he’s done so many times before.
The balancing trick at this place is always how much to take from the tyres through the high-speed sweeps of the first sector so as to do a competitive final sector. Verstappen managed to best Norris in both the first and final sector, the sum of that advantage overturning Norris’ advantage in the middle sector.
Verstappen is only 0.02s ahead of Norris in that first sector. This is despite being almost 0.15s behind as they exit the first turn which the Red Bull really doesn’t like. Verstappen then makes up time through the super high-speed sequence of Turns 3-4-5 to be just 0.05s behind. He’s a full 9km/h faster by the exit of the seventh gear Turn 5. He then gets the power down better through the slower Turns 6 and 7.
There’s just three hundredths difference – in Norris’ favour – by the end of sector 2. In the slow turns which begin the final sector Norris increases his advantage but Verstappen steadily claws it back through the long loop of T16-17-18 to be almost equal as they approach the final turn. Verstappen then gets way better traction out of that turn – and that’s what clinches pole in his favour.
Half-a-second behind the Verstappen vs Mclaren contest, Nico Hulkenberg starred by putting the Sauber fourth on the grid, edging out George Russell’s Mercedes. Hulkenberg is habitually terrific around this track and the Sauber, he reckoned, was “right in the sweet spot.”
Russell and the two Williams’ were way earlier onto the track than the others – and seem to have suffered as a result. Although the quarter-second by which Russell lagged behind Hulkenberg is more than can feasibly be accounted for by track evolution, the 0.001s by which Carlos Sainz lost out to the later running Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin for sixth is most certainly not.
All however were significantly faster than Ferrari, for which Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc only just scraped into SQ3 before qualifying eighth and 10th there respectively, sandwiching the earlier-running Williams of Alex Albon. The Ferrari, at 0.85s off pole, was the seventh quickest of the 10 teams.
The combination of bumps and high end-of-straight speeds here is not conducive to being able to run the Ferrari as low as it needs for competitive downforce.
The McLaren’s excellent control of rear tyre temperatures is expected to be particularly valuable around this high-deg track on a weekend forecast to be super-hot throughout. But will just 19 laps for the sprint race be enough to prevent Verstappen from keeping intact his perfect COTA sprint record?
