Carlos Sainz Jnr revealed Williams told him there were only two drivers who could prevent him taking pole position after his first lap in Q3 yesterday.
He was one of only three drivers who completed a lap before the session was red-flagged for the first time. Sainz set the quickest time at that stage, and a second red flag left his seven remaining rivals just one chance to beat him.
Conditions deteriorated slightly during the stoppages. With Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari and Oscar Piastri’s McLaren out of the session, Williams told Sainz there were only two drivers left who could beat him ahead of his final run.
“I knew my lap was good, but probably not good enough for pole,” said Sainz. “We knew that if a McLaren or a Red Bull put a lap together, that’s three to five tenths on average.
“Also if the track conditions were good enough — which was the big unknown — I knew my lap was not going to be good enough.
“I think our simulation said at the time maybe only Max and Lando could beat us. So I was thinking about a P3.”
Norris, who was first of the remaining drivers to set a time at the end of Q3, nearly crashed at turn 15 on his lap and failed to beat Sainz’s time.
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Sainz made a strong start to his final lap, gaining over half a second in the first sector alone. However he lost almost a second in the next sector, understeering and struggling for traction in turn six. “Raining here,” he told his team on the radio.
His race engineer Gaetan Jego told him Norris had not beaten his time as he accelerated towards the finishing line. But shortly after he finished his lap Jego confirmed Verstappen had taken pole position off him.
“In the end, it was only Max,” said Sainz. “It had to be Max.”
He admitted he thought he might be able to improve his time when he began his final lap, before encountering the slipping middle sector.
“I thought, as soon as I started my lap at the end, I was actually coming very quick,” he said. “I was like three or four tenths up on my lap.
“In one way, I was thinking, great, because this might even confirm or achieve pole. But then I was thinking the leaders are going to be even quicker and that’s exactly what happened.
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Many drivers were caught out by the conditions in qualifying, which saw a total of six red flags due to crashes. Sainz said the strong gusts of wind were an even greater challenge than the rain.
“The tricky thing about today was, first of all, it’s very difficult to get into a rhythm because you’re not doing laps, not finishing laps, not spending time on track,” he explained.
“Every time you have a 10-minute break in the garage, it’s always difficult to know where the track is when you go back out again, where the tyres are going to be, where the wind is going to be. So every time we’re going out again, it’s a bit of an adventure, and I think that’s why there were so many crashes.
“If you also think that F1 cars nowadays are a lot trickier to drive in the wind than in the wet, for example, it’s completely unpredictable. You need to think that a car in mid-corner depends purely on its downforce, and 30 or 40 kilometres per hour of wind changes the downforce dramatically. And that’s what we’re getting — every lap, a different level of downforce in the corner.
“It always catches people out. It caught a lot of people out today – probably the wind – and it just shows. I don’t think people at home understand how tough the conditions were today and how easy it was to crash. I mean, to have the 20 best drivers in the world and seven or eight of them crashing tells you how tricky the session was today.”
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