It’s hard to know who was more on fire on Saturday in Suzuka — Max Verstappen or the circuit itself.
After the weekend’s fifth red flag to suspend running owing to a fire on the trackside grass, Verstappen stunned the sport with a purler of a lap to pinch pole from the quick but imperfect McLaren drivers after the chequered flag in qualifying.
It took every ounce of him to squeeze pace from his recalcitrant RB21. His overjoyed reaction over team radio after having his pole confirmed gave away just how unexpected even he thought it was.
“The last lap was just flat out,” he said. “Around here being on the limit or just a little bit over in places is incredibly rewarding.”
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But he’ll have his work cut out to hold top spot on Sunday.
While passing is tough around Suzuka, he’ll have to contend with two McLaren’s starting around him. Lando Norris will challenge him from the front row, while Oscar Piastri, starting third, is perfectly positioned to try to pick up the limited slipstream on the short turn down to the first turn.
Could rain on the radar help him? A downpour is forecast overnight and into Sunday, perhaps subsiding in time for the race. That could be good news for Verstappen, who used similar conditions to challenge for victory in Melbourne.
It would also be good news for this fire-prone circuit, pre-emptively dousing the apparently tinder-dry grass before it has a chance to interrupt running for a sixth time in the race.
‘MAGICAL’ MAX STUNS WITH POLE
“If you want to drive the car, give it a go. I think you’ll poop your pants.”
Verstappen was revelling in his unexpected pole position in the post-qualifying press conference, but his record-breaking lap around Suzuka wasn’t enough for him to drop his criticisms of his difficult car.
Complaints about his RB21 — that it was flexing too much, that it was understeering too much, that it was too inconsistent — had dominated the build-up to the Dutchman’s pole position.
In the end it took a “flat out” lap to pinch pole position, but the reigning champion made clear that this was not a sign Red Bull Racing was through woods.
“Some places I was not sure if I was actually going to keep it [on track] or not, but it was really nice and also great for the team as well,” he said.
“But I don’t say, ‘Oh, I’m first now, everything is perfect’. We still have clear issues that we need to solve.
“This is a very tough track for the car in general. It’s really high speed, so any little balance limitation that you have can sometimes be multiplied in some places around the lap.
“This whole weekend we have been really experimenting a lot to try and find that drivable balance, and at least it allowed me to push a bit more.
“We know that we have some issues that we want to solve, but it’s clearly not easy to solve them at the moment.”
It’s a context that makes pole position only more impressive.
We’ve talked a lot this week about the struggles of Verstappen’s teammates but perhaps not enough about just how well Verstappen himself is driving to get the most from this troublesome car.
To go faster than anyone else around Suzuka — to go faster than anyone else ever around Suzuka — is a neat underline beneath his brilliance in the face of challenging circumstances.
Just ask one of the greats.
“He’s an outstanding driver,” said an impressed Fernando Alonso. “He’s proving it every weekend. Hats off for him.
“I think the lap he did today is only down to him. I think the car is clearly not at the level to fight for pole or even the top five, but he manages to do that magical laps and magical weekends.
“At the moment he’s the best. He’s the reference for all of us, and we need to keep improving to reach that level.”
It’s something the presumed title contenders at McLaren would do well to think about.
McLAREN FUMBLES COST POLE
Max overperformed to seal pole position. But McLaren also left the door open to the Dutchman in a less competitive car to barge through and pinch the place.
Both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri left time on the table in a battle for pole decided by the finest of margins, with just 0.044 separating the top three.
Norris made a mistake through Dunlop on his first lap that cascaded into an almost half-second difference to provisional pole-getter Piastri ahead of their second runs.
It left him on the back foot and needing to take a conservative approach for his final lap.
“I tried pushing a good amount more in Q3 run 1 and it didn’t work out, clearly, so I just had to peg it back a lot,” he said. “I was happy with the balance and happy with the car at the end.
“The margin is so small. If you think, ‘Was 0.01 seconds in it?’ you’d probably say yes.”
Piastri’s Q3 performance went in the opposite direction. His first lap was strong, but he let his second lap down with a poor first sector that was 0.111 seconds down on his best. He set purple times in the final two sectors, but it wasn’t enough to overcome that bad start.
“When the gap’s 0.04 seconds from first to third, you think about it quite a bit,” he said. “I’ve been pretty comfortable through qualifying. I think the first lap of Q3 was a good one. The second one was just a little bit off the mark in a couple of places.
“Those little margins, when it’s so tight, make all the difference.”
These are tiny mistakes by both drivers, but on Saturday they were decisive when McLaren had the car for pole.
It’s not the first time this season the team has hurt its own qualifying chances.
In Australia both drivers made mistakes on their first runs that put them up against it for their second attempts, though they did manage to lock out the front row.
In China the team tried an unusual run strategy for the sprint pole shootout that allowed both Lewis Hamilton and Verstappen to cruise through onto the front row, with the Ferrari driver’s sprint pole ultimately proving decisive.
Now a grand prix pole position has been lost through small errors.
This isn’t a criticism of either driver; rather it’s an indication of how close to perfect Verstappen is currently operating.
In the face of that sort of relentlessness, McLaren can’t afford to let even the smallest amount of complacency creep in over its class-leading car. It would discount Verstappen at its own peril.
LAWSON GETS ONE BACK OVER TSUNODA
It was always going to happen, wasn’t it?
Liam Lawson is back in the benign Racing Bulls car in which he did so well in his various stand-in performances over the last two seasons.
Yuki Tsunoda has stepped up into the Red Bull Racing machine that chewed up and spat out two drivers in the last three races.
Lo and behold, Lawson qualified ahead of Tsunoda for the first grand prix of their post-swap careers.
It’s an easy situation to read too much into — and doing so would mask what had been a strong opening-round showing for Tsunoda up until Q2.
He’d been close to Verstappen throughout practice and even in Q1. It was only after the red flag for a grass fire halfway through Q2 that the wheels started falling off.
“I think the warm-up didn’t go as I wanted,” he said. “I’m still learning the warm-up.
“I thought it was okay. I knew it was maybe a little bit compromised, but the penalty was pretty big.
“A shame that I wasn’t able to extract the performance from the car. I think I was looking good from Q1 and everything. It just felt like overall worse and worse throughout.
“At least the confidence in the car feels good now. I just wasn’t able to put it all together today. Very sad.”
Arguably Red Bull Racing could’ve made things easier for Tsunoda by giving him more time to prepare himself after that red flag rather than leaving him with one all-or-nothing run given it’s his first weekend with the car.
But by that same token it showed the faith the team has already developed in Tsunoda given how well he’d been doing up to that point.
And after all, his 0.498-second gap to Verstappen in Q2 is the closest the second car’s got to the Dutchman in any session this year prior to this weekend, not to mention its first Q2 appearance.
That of course means Lawson also enjoyed the best qualifying result of his season to date despite being handily beaten by teammate Isack Hadjar, whose one-lap pace continues to impress after another top-10 appearance.
That’s doubly so given the unusual problem he had to deal with just to make it out of Q1 — belts that were “a bit tight around the groin, so to speak,” he said afterwards, which was clearly very painful judging by his emotional radio messages.
Lawson wouldn’t be drawn on lining up with Tsunoda on Sunday, saying only that he was still finding his rhythm in the car.
“I felt really good in the car,” he said. “It’s a shame it got away from us in Q2. The potential of the car has been very, very good this weekend.”
With a possible mixed-weather race on the cards on Sunday, both drivers could be thrown straight into the deep end.
DOOHAN SUFFERS FOR LOST TRACK TIME
Jack Doohan finally completed a practice session on Saturday, getting around 45 minutes of running between red flags in FP3 to acclimatise to the Suzuka Circuit.
It was far from ideal preparation for qualifying at a track that demands respect and requires confidence.
Losing FP1 to a mandatory rookie driver swap and FP2 to a crash meant he had plenty of the former but not much of the latter on his way to 19th on the grid.
“It’s something that P1, P2, P3, into Q, you take step after step after step,” he explained. “With jumping in first thing this morning, my steps had to be much, much bigger rather than starting on a solid base.
“The [qualifying] session was tricky, to say the last. Only three [fast] laps this morning meant I wasn’t able to continue taking the steps I would like, plus [I’m] just not in a perfect place with the car, which is no fault to myself, the team or anyone; it’s just very tricky to tune a balance around a very tricky circuit like we have here in Suzuka in just three laps.”
It meant Doohan was motivated to take some risks on his final Q1 lap that didn’t pay off, leaving him on the back row.
“I made a small mistake at the end of my last run exiting turn 14 [Spoon], something that potentially could have got me into Q2,” he said. “But if I hadn’t done that and had just hoped, then I’d still be here [out in Q1].
“It was unfortunately something that I had to do. I would have preferred to have brought that up a bit more steadily or tried to take those small steps over the course of free practice, but given our circumstances, I gave it a shot, it almost worked out, but I had to lift out of it unfortunately.”
But Doohan was thankful just to be in the mix after his enormous crash, and he paid credit to the team for preparing his car in time for final practice
“A massive, massive thankyou to the team, all the boys and girls, to get a new car,” he said. “The boys basically did an all-nighter to get me back on track. I’m so grateful to them, and we’ll just keep pushing on. The weekend is by far not over.”