It’s only sprint qualifying, but Friday night’s session at the Qatar Grand Prix could have had some big repercussions for the 2025 Formula 1 world championship fight.
Here’s our pick of the flops and stars.
Loser - Max Verstappen (6th)
Sixth on the sprint grid isn’t title bid over (and it’s effectively fifth as Yuki Tsunoda - presumably - won’t be getting in his team-mate’s way) for Max Verstappen, but we’re at the point in this championship fight when the driver/s in the long-shot position has to be closing the gap at every opportunity. And that now looks unlikely in the sprint at least.
There’s a lot of this weekend still to go and a turnaround before the big points are awarded in the main race. But “bouncing like an idiot” to sixth on the grid is a less than ideal start to a weekend where this heroic surge into championship contention could easily end. - Matt Beer
Winner - Oscar Piastri (1st)
It feels like Oscar Piastri has turned a corner after a barren run of form that ruined his drivers’ championship lead and left him 24 points adrift of Lando Norris entering this weekend.
Here, at a track he has been very good at in the past, he was actually beaten in SQ1 and SQ2, but with a little bit of fortune owing to Norris being caught in traffic behind Alex Albon, when it came down to the crucial and final lap he did enough.
A ruthless analyst would point out that Piastri almost threw it all away with a massive moment at Turn 4 that needed a rallying-style opposite-lock correction, which he claims cost him at least two tenths, and that could have cost him pole without Norris's issues.
But given the torrid run he’s endured, a more optimistic and kind person might choose to focus on the positives, that he did put a good enough lap together and Norris didn't deliver. It's up to you to interpret.
Would he have beaten Norris without his team-mate’s mistake? We’ll never know. He just needs to focus on doing the same thing in terms of results for every session remaining this year. - Jack Benyon
Loser - Lewis Hamilton (18th)
The worst thing about Lewis Hamilton’s SQ1 exit is that it’s not even particularly surprising given how poorly his Las Vegas weekend went and how much Ferrari struggled in first practice in Qatar.
Hamilton’s post-sprint qualifying interview spoke volumes.
Question - Lewis, how tricky was the car?
Hamilton: Same as always.
Higher downforce wing [versus FP1] not better?Hamilton: No, clearly not.
Tomorrow, testing session for you?
Hamilton: The weather’s nice.
Hamilton told his team after the session that there wasn’t any more pace in the car. But the four tenths his team-mate Charles Leclerc found in Q1 set him up to advance to ninth on the grid… - Josh Suttill
Winner - Fernando Alonso (4th)
With the proviso that this isn’t grand prix qualifying, fourth for the Qatar sprint will be Fernando Alonso’s best starting position of the season.
He was third in the only practice session, second in SQ1, and only struggled in SQ2 when he hit a train of traffic while trying to put together his final lap.
He recovered in SQ3 and only a typical late lap from George Russell in SQ3 put him out of the top three. But still it’s a stunning start to be ahead of both Red Bulls and considering his Aston Martin team-mate Lance Stroll was out in Q1. - JB
Loser - Lando Norris (3rd)
This all felt a bit too much like a qualifying session from the pre-title turnaround version of Lando Norris.
Now that McLaren team-mate Piastri is back on his pace, the Norris errors have crept back in, even if his track position was far from ideal.
Maybe with the buffer Norris has, that doesn’t matter so much. Two lost points tomorrow still leaves him with a 22-point advantage in the championship.
But it ramps the pressure up far more than when he consistently had two or three tenths in his pocket on Piastri.
And that only increases the likelihood of a more significant blow on Sunday. - JS
Winner - Yuki Tsunoda (5th)
Slightly skewed circumstances from Verstappen’s likely car damaging early trip off the road, and probably too late to change his 2026 fate, but maybe just for a few minutes let’s put that aside. Tsunoda has outqualified Verstappen at last. He’s starting in the top five of an F1 race for Red Bull.
It’s too little, too late, and if he stays ahead of Verstappen in the race that’ll actually be a disaster for the team. But it’s happened. What a shame it’s not half a season earlier. - MB
Loser - Alpine (19th + 20th)
After a much-needed double dose of points in Brazil and a Q3 appearance in Las Vegas that could have yielded points for Pierre Gasly if he wasn’t a victim of the Lance Stroll/Gabriel Bortoleto collision, Alpine has fallen firmly back to earth in Qatar.
Gasly and Franco Colapinto were the two slowest drivers in qualifying, and remarkably, given Alpine’s struggles, that’s actually the first time it’s happened all season.
Neither were close to making it through to Q2 with Colapinto particularly struggling, two tenths slower than Gasly and half a second adrift of safety.
Alpine hasn’t actually finished as the last two cars on the road in many races, either (and never in a sprint race), but that may be a fate that awaits it in the sprint race. - JS
Loser - Lance Stroll (16th)
Given his team-mate Alonso scored Aston Martin’s best qualifying result of 2025 (this doesn’t count like grand prix qualifying of course, but anyway) in fourth, to go out in SQ1 is really poor for Stroll.
Especially when Aston Martin is one point behind seventh-placed Haas in the constructors’, and Racing Bulls is still within reach 18 ahead. Especially with Liam Lawson also out in SQ1.
Stroll appeared to bail out of his final proper SQ1 run and that was it, he was out. Hardly a surprise, but this one feels especially bad given Alonso’s result.
The fact that all he could come up with for the deficit was "just didn't put the laps together" and having "a little bit of traffic" gives me very little sympathy. - JB
Winner - Gabriel Bortoleto (13th)
Gabriel Bortoleto's 13th place in this qualifying appears completely unremarkable at first glance, and is highly unlikely to lead to any points for himself or Sauber.
But in truth he kind of needed this one. Earlier this year, between Austria in June and Azerbaijan in September, he had gone 7-0 in grand prix qualifyings (and 1-0 in sprint qualifyings) against Sauber team-mate Nico Hulkenberg, so looked to have made a decisive single-lap break.
Yet in the sessions from then to now it had suddenly gone 0-6 in Hulkenberg's favour, and that's not even counting the Brazil qualifying that Bortoleto missed due to shunting in the sprint.
An 0.064s gap for seventh-row supremacy isn't much, but it stems the tide - and offers a platform to get Bortoleto's season back onto the right track. - Valentin Khorounzhiy
Loser - Liam Lawson (17th)
A poor qualifying performance like this couldn’t be any worse timed for Lawson, when you consider his main competitor for the last Red Bull-controlled seat on the 2026 grid had his best qualifying of the season.
Lawson says he started “quite far off” the ideal window in practice and just couldn’t close up enough ground before sprint qualifying.
It means the sprint race is “more going to be a learning curve for Sunday”, rather than a race where any kind of significant result is possible. - JS
