Well, we’ve been here before on a Friday this season: McLaren flying while Max Verstappen struggles with an ill-behaved Red Bull he can do nothing with. This feels rather like Friday at Sao Paulo. So we also know not to write off Verstappen’s prospects for the weekend just because of that.
What we can say with a fair degree of confidence is that if nothing is found to be physically wrong with the car beyond the floor which was damaged in his first SQ3 push-lap, it will be undergoing a thorough set-up reworking for grand prix qualifying tomorrow.
That will leave him scrabbling for whatever points he can rescue from the preceding sprint race for which he has qualified half-a-second off the pace and behind not only two McLarens, a Mercedes and an Aston Martin, but also a few hundredths off team-mate Yuki Tsunoda.
After only one session of practice in which he was complaining of bouncing, the problem was, if anything, exacerbated in the qualifying sessions and seemed worse on the soft C3 tyres used in SQ3 than the medium C2s of SQ1 and 2.
“From the first lap I had really bad bouncing and really aggressive understeer which would switch into oversteer on the fast stuff. I tried many things with the tools but it wasn’t working," Verstappen said. "With this balance the sprint won’t be a lot of fun, just try to survive, then make some changes going into qualifying.”
On his first SQ3 attack lap, the car bounced itself clean off the circuit. And he spent the remainder of the session just recomposing himself and keeping track position in order to complete a safe lap before the flag fell.
The simulator crew back at base will have already been preparing for more midnight oil. It’s become a familiar dance at Red Bull over the last couple of years. There is almost certainly a set-up window in there somewhere, which will switch the car on, and the clues may be on Tsunoda’s car.
This all has potential championship implications of course, so points leader Lando Norris could really have done with maximising Verstappen’s damage but has qualified only third, 0.13s off pole-sitting team-mate Oscar Piastri.
The medium-fast flowing corners are very much Piastri territory and the McLaren was straight into its sweet spot. “It’s nice to be back,” he said.
He was lap-for-lap as quick as Norris through practice and the first two qualifying sessions and would have been in the pole fight regardless, but his task was made easier by Norris making a small mistake on his first lap (the one which ended up counting for his grid position) and through being passed by Alex Albon as he slowed on his prep lap for the final attack.
It put him in the dirty air of the Williams through the final sector, causing him to run off the road at Turn 16.
The Mercedes always likes the C3 tyre (which was the soft here and the hard in Vegas, where Kimi Antonelli completed that superb zero-stop race stint) and here George Russell was in his element and only three hundredths adrift of Piastri.
He’s not on McLaren pace on the medium – which is the tyre favoured for the two-stop main race – but is right there on the soft. Kimi Antonelli wasn’t quite as tuned in and was 0.3s off and four places behind.
Fernando Alonso maximised an Aston which likes the speed range of this track and the fact that it features no slow corners. Four-tenths adrift of pole was good enough for P4.
Fifth-fastest Tsunoda delivered the sort of performance he could have done with delivering earlier in the season. “I’ve just had a clean weekend so far, with no issues in the practice,” he said.
It was notable that as the track grip came up and Tsunoda’s understeer increased, he asked for three more holes of front wing – and suddenly he had a front end.
There was also another woeful performance from Lewis Hamilton in failing to get his higher-winged Ferrari out of Q1 for the second week in succession.
Charles Leclerc, with a smaller wing, at least made it into Q3, where he placed ninth. The Ferrari badly lacks traction out of Turn 6.
“I think that we had the potential to be in the top five today,” was the best he could say of it.
“The car ahead of me [Alonso] slowed down before Turn 15 on my final lap, so I couldn’t build enough of a gap and started the lap too close to him.”
