QUALIFYING
Saturday had plenty of Formula 1 driver hits: complaints on a late track change, shocking crashes, scintillating speed. Q1, which Max Verstappen topped, was heavily disrupted by a collision between Lance Stroll and Nicholas Latifi. Stroll copped the blame for moving over as the Williams passed at Turn 5.
Q2 passed without issue, other than the setting sun. Having fitted darker visors for the Q3 showdown, the contenders produced quite the show. Leclerc led after the opening runs on a 1m18.239s, but only just got his first effort in before the session was halted again following Fernando Alonso’s Turn 11 crash. The Spaniard had just topped the middle sector, where the DRS zone running through the new sweeping section of track that replaced the old chicane had been removed ahead of FP3. This benefited the teams without a porpoising problem, forcing those that had relied on DRS activation settling the bouncing to either raise rear rideheight or live with it. Alpine is thought to have gained significantly, along with Mclaren. Alonso immediately blamed the crash on a hydraulics problem stopping his downshifts and braking.
The red flag stopped Carlos Sainz Jr completing a first run that might have matched Leclerc’s. After another near-15-minute delay, Sergio Perez, who had topped Q2, completed a run of two extra Q3 efforts, each with two tyre preparation laps. The challenge was getting the C5 soft rubber warm and staying at the right temperature on the smoother new asphalt.
The extra fuel weight didn’t pay off for Perez, as his second run only scraped
Leclerc’s first by 0.001 seconds and his third was slower. In the other Red Bull, Verstappen “struggled a lot with the balance of the car”, which robbed his confidence – a hesitant final two corners (where Ferrari’s higher downforce package paid off all weekend) proved costly. He was second, 0.286s behind Leclerc, and objected to the missing DRS zone, Red Bull’s system understood to be particularly efficient for drag dumping.
Track temperatures fell by four degrees between Q1 and Q3 thanks to the long delays. This seemed to undo Red Bull more than Ferrari, with Leclerc also taking “quite a bit of risk” in the now much faster Turn 6 right, as he blitzed to a 1m17.868s and pole. Sainz was ninth after his car did not fire up as expected and he was left without enough time to do the two warm-up laps his team-mate managed and so was “sliding everywhere”.
Mclaren’s Lando Norris produced a stunning late lap to take fourth and best-of-the-rest status, ahead of Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes.
“THE RED FLAG STOPPED SAINZ COMPLETING A RUN THAT MIGHT HAVE MATCHED LECLERC”