QUALIFYING

For the first time in over year, there was a genuine scrap between the Red Bulls for pole position at Suzuka.

Key to this was Sergio Perez feeling “a lot more comfortable, a lot happier and the confidence slowly coming back” now that he and Red Bull have abandoned trying

“to chase it too much with the set-up” when taking on

Max Verstappen, as he did across 2023.

Heading into qualifying, Verstappen had enjoyed a commanding 0.269-second advantage over his team-mate in FP3, which followed the drizzly FP2 washout on Friday.

In Q1, Verstappen opened up a massive 0.437s ahead of Perez – a gap big enough for Fernando Alonso (eventually a fine fifth behind Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz in Q3) to slot into. But come Q2, there was just 0.012s between the two RB20S.

Then, on the first runs in the final segment, Verstappen took to the track first. He shot to a provisional pole time of 1m28.240s, with Perez’s opening effort 0.365s down. He’d pushed too hard at Turn 2 – the track’s first braking point – and paid the price with a lack of grip out of the Casio Triangle chicane much later, where most of the gap emerged.

Lando Norris was this time able to slip his Mclaren between the Red Bulls, 0.249s down on Verstappen. But in the Esses on his second Q3 flier he “just tried and pushed that little bit more” and “just lost the front tyres a bit”. Norris therefore fell 0.096s short of his personal best and would slip to third.

That’s because Perez was about to achieve something he’d failed to do at every event since the 2023 Miami

GP: qualify on the front row. Because of a red flag, there hadn’t even been an intra-red Bull battle that day. Neither had there been one when Verstappen was addled by the driveshaft issue that preceded Perez’s previous pole in Jeddah last year. Thanks to Perez’s underwhelming efforts against the clock so often last year and in the opening 2024 events too, this was the first time since the 2023 Bahrain GP that both Red Bull drivers were eyeing pole position.

And how close Perez came. He improved by taking Turn 2 slightly slower on the way in but faster overall, whereas Verstappen pushed “maybe a bit too hard in sector one”, and this time it was he who ran out of soft tyre life at the end.

Nevertheless, Verstappen improved to a 1m28.197s. Perez, meanwhile, reversed what had been a 0.2s deficit to his team-mate at the hairpin to nothing at the chicane. Had he got it just slightly better, tyres also again screaming enough, a close 0.066s defeat might have been averted.

“Had he got it just slightly better, tyres screaming enough, a close defeat might have been averted”