Max Verstappen praised the balance of his Red Bull after taking pole position for today’s sprint race, but was left puzzled by the gap to his rivals.
The Formula 1 championship leader qualified half a second ahead of Sergio Perez in a Red Bull one-two for the sprint race later today.
After a wet Formula 3 race earlier in the day, the track was mostly dry for F1’s second qualifying session. Verstappen said it left little room for error to have his car in the right window.
“The track was drying up, so lap after lap you are improving,” said Verstappen, who has won the last four races in a row. “You have to be on the track at the right time.
“Of course today you don’t have a lot of laps in every segment of qualifying but I think we did well. The car was in a good window, good balance so I am very happy of course to be first.”
Lando Norris joined the Red Bull drivers in the top three while Charles Leclerc, who is alongside Verstappen on the front row for tomorrow’s grand prix, was eighth, 0.805s off the pace.
The pole winner admitted “I don’t know why” there was such a gap to his rivals. “It’s a bit different today, the track is not fully dry” he said.
After qualifying yesterday, Verstappen was frustrated by the number of lap times deleted due to track limits. Several of his were among the 47 deleted in total, and Perez failed to progress beyond Q2 after all his representative times in that session were ruled illegitimate.
Although fewer lap times were deleted for that reason in today’s shorter session, Verstappen still expects drivers to experience difficulty in managing it for the rest of the weekend.
“It’s quite difficult,” he added. “Of course in qualifying you really try to go to the limits and naturally it’s a bit more difficult in qualifying.
“But I think even in the race, it will be for all the drivers quite hard to manage around here.”
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