There's many a slip twixt cup and lip – and the ifs, buts and maybes nag even more insistently when the gap between pole position and P2 is measured in the thousandths of a second.
"I think there was potential to be on pole today, but Max just did a better job," said Charles Leclerc after falling 0.054s short of Max Verstappen in final qualifying for the Singapore Grand Prix. Ferrari team-mate Lewis Hamilton, who had topped the first two segments of qualifying, was a further 0.069s in arrears after making a setup change which he felt transformed his SF-26 for the worse.
