Well, the wind had changed from yesterday, in both its direction and intensity – and that had virtually every driver out there utterly perplexed at how bad their cars felt.
But the front row didn’t change – as Lando Norris again set pole from Kimi Antonelli. One-two in sprint qualifying, the sprint race and now in GP qualifying. They at least provided a baseline level of consistency on a day of wildly fluctuating fortunes. A day when Max Verstappen went out in Q1, Ollie Bearman threatened the frontrunners in his Haas (but ultimately fell short) and no-one seemed to know why they were quick or slow.
With Verstappen exiting in Q1 and Oscar Piastri not really standing the car on its nose the way Norris was able to do, Lando was able to take things calmly in Q3. Even after he ruined his first lap there before it had barely started – with a lock-up into the Senna Esses. That wild gusting tailwind was the culprit. “I braked earlier and more gently on that first run than on my second and I still locked up.” That lap was ruined but he pressed on with it regardless, just attempting to get a better feel for the car in preparation for his final run.
But there wasn’t really any feeling to get for anyone in these conditions. Isack Hadjar – fifth fastest in his Racing Bulls – probably explained it best: “Just unbelievable. In the first run in Q1 it felt so bad and I thought what the hell is going on. Just nothing at the rear. So I changed my tools, changed the [front wing] flap angle. But still, it was really on the nose. So you go into Turn 1 and you’re really not sure because if you under-commit into there, you get the worst ever understeer at the apex. I got through there OK and in sector 2 it was quite competitive, but with the car on the nose, I was fighting it all the way. On the nose was faster.”
So, what was under-commitment, and what was over? There wasn’t a right answer because it depended on what that tailwind was doing into T1 at the beginning of the lap. So Norris was a little cautious with his entry speed to begin his final lap and, just as Hadjar said, it gave him understeer. But at least he was now underway cleanly. The McLaren and Norris’ feel for it did the rest.
“It wasn’t the best pole lap I’ve ever done,” he said, noting that he was shallow and cautious into Turn 10, for example, just to ensure no locking up. But he was getting that vital rotation into the car. It was nowhere near as much ‘on the nose’ as Hadjar’s car, but it was getting the direction change good and early nonetheless and Norris’ calm composure ensured he deployed that.
“It’s not like in Mexico,” he said, in reference to his level of superiority there. “Kimi is really quick here and gave me a hard time in the sprint. Plus it’s cool tomorrow, which might help them further.”
Antonelli was indeed formidable around here, better tuned into the unusual demands of the day than Mercedes team mate George Russell, who ended up P6, around a quarter-second slower (“No rear grip, I’ve just got nothing with this tyre.”).
Antonelli trailed Norris by 0.174s, but even without his lock-up into Juncao, he wasn’t going to steal pole. He hit that sweet spot of calm commitment very much as Norris did – and the Mercedes’s traction in that middle sector was again outstanding. It just didn’t rotate into the turns quite as efficiently as the McLaren.
Mercedes had left its car pretty much unchanged after Antonelli had kept the pressure on Norris right through to the end of the sprint and Russell had finished a solid third. McLaren, by contrast, made “more changes than usual, let’s say,” said Norris. Those changes did increase the advantage a little, so they were evidently the right ones.
Or at least they were for Norris. Piastri, over 0.36s adrift of Norris and starting fourth, was fastest in the first Q3 runs, which was a solid recovery from crashing out of third in the sprint. But there was nothing more to come when he came to squeeze the lemon on the final runs. Although Andrea Stella, pointing to him being quicker than Norris when both were on used tyres in Q2, suggested that Piastri was just unluckier with how the winds caught him in each of his Q3 runs, it did look like he had more understeer than Norris again. He just wasn’t getting that early rotation that Norris is mastering increasingly consistently. In a car limited by understeer and a track that wasn’t getting quicker, there just wasn’t anything there to squeeze.
As a result, Piastri was pipped to third by the overachieving Charles Leclerc. Ferrari had reduced the rear wing on both cars since the sprint, making it livelier but more demanding. Leclerc was at his acrobatic best. Lewis Hamilton found that his rear tyres were overheating wildly and failed to make it out of Q2. “The car was only a tenth-and-a-half faster than in the sprint,” observed Leclerc. “But that can be the difference between going out in Q1 and being in Q3 around here. It was a step forward, but not a big one.”
Yesterday, you may recall how we talked about how the naturally wide operating window of the McLaren was a real luxury around a track where you need more rear ride height than usual and how the lack of that flexibility had put Red Bull into something of a knotted puzzle.
Well, maybe there just was no answer to that puzzle. Maybe the car’s combination of aero traits made it unsuitable for a bumpy place like this. Because, after reverting to the old floor, raising the ride heights and softening off the car, it was even worse. So bad that Verstappen was completely at a loss with what to do with it. That P16 was just where he was at.
Things really do seem to be shaping up for Norris. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This is Interlagos, after all.
