“To be honest, it felt terrible,” Max Verstappen said afterwards. “I don’t know, maybe that last session it was just very difficult to get the tires working. In SQ2 it didn’t feel great, it was a terrible lap. I had no control.”
“SQ3 felt a bit the same to me. I didn’t improve much on the soft tire. But somehow we’re first. Of course I would be happy to accept that. But it didn’t really feel nice to drive for some reason, I wasn’t happy. It felt very good in training. I felt comfortable and confident, but not so in qualifying. When they said we had P1, I thought it was a joke. It didn’t feel great, but we’re going to see why that was. The race pace should stabilize somewhat, then it will probably be better.”
It was notable that the scores were tightly packed together during the sprint qualification. Verstappen was asked if this was due to the limited track time leading up to the sprint qualifying, with only one practice session that was interrupted by a red flag.
‘Don’t know. It might depend a bit on the layout of the circuit. After training I was confident that we could fight for pole. But it didn’t look like that during qualifying. But we still finished first. I don’t know what happened to the other cars on the last lap.”