Throughout the hour there were signs Mercedes had been hiding their pace. But Max Verstappen set a searing laptime and took pole by almost 4 tenths of a second over second placed Lewis Hamilton, who did what he could but could not get on top of his rival.
Valtteri Bottas starts in third ahead of Charles Leclerc who pulled off a good lap and showed signs of an improved Ferrari in fourth place. Pierre Gasly once again showed the pace of the AlphaTauri and qualified in fifth ahead of the two McLarens of Daniel Ricciardo and Lando Norris. Carlos Sainz qualified in eighth ahead of Fernando Alonso who outperformed the car to get to Q3, and Lance Stroll rounds out the top 10.
A gamble to put Sergio Perez out on the medium tyre for his second run didn’t pay out and he starts in eleventh place. Antonio Giovinazzi will start twelfth ahead of Yuki Tsunoda in thirteenth, who will be disappointed to miss out on Q3 after showing promise throughout the weekend. Kimi Raikkonen starts fourteenth with George Russell picking up where he left off in 2020 as a qualifying master and making Q2.
Nikita Mazepin had a spin at the end of Q1, which caused problems for a lot of drivers due to the yellow flags. The biggest victims were Esteban Ocon in sixteenth and Sebastian Vettel in eighteenth, who both fell in the first part of qualifying. Nicholas Latifi starts seventeenth with the two Haas’s of Mick Schumacher and Nikita Mazepin locking out the back row.
Here is the provisional starting grid for tomorrow’s race.
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