Either side of the Interlagos wildness, the other final sprint events of the 2024 Formula 1 season bear significant similarities that pile focus on Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and the Ferrari drivers. The key difference between Austin and Qatar, however, is that so far both McLaren and Mercedes have dominated the victory hunt.
The prospect of a four-team win scrap over what is expected to be the first normal grand prix at the Losail circuit since its inaugural 2021 event – Pirelli still hasn’t seen anything like the minuscule sidewall lacerations that so changed race day here last year – is tantalising.
Verstappen had been set to head a GP grid for the first time since June’s Austria round, but his one-place penalty for impeding George Russell on their final preparation laps at the end of Q3 means he will now start second. This could have an additional knock-on impact for his race, given something Russell had been complaining about after starting second in the sprint.
REPORT: Verstappen loses Qatar GP pole after one-place grid penalty
But before all that, Verstappen had been delighted that Red Bull had pulled off “a miracle” in adapting his car balance compared to sprint qualifying and the weekend’s first race.
“It was all pretty close, but it felt just a lot more connected for me,” Verstappen said of his improved handling in the post-qualifying press conference. “And, yeah, that was definitely necessary. Then you can attack the corners a bit more.”
As well as making what Red Bull team boss Christian Horner called “aggressive” set-up adjustments - that centred on ride height changes, the sprint providing valuable insight in this, as was the case at Austin - Verstappen also significantly altered his qualifying prep lap plans for the second session against the clock.
Instead of going for a flying lap after two warm-up tours, from Q2 onwards yesterday, Verstappen was pushing after one prep lap, then backing off for two cooldown tours before going again for his pukka effort. The Dutchman used this arrangement to set his best times in heading both Q2 and Q3, having not done so and looked fairly ordinary in Q1, 0.3s back from Russell’s best at that stage.
The “challenge of the weekend” for the tyres, per Pirelli motorsport boss Mario Isola, is to get both axles into the narrow temperature window – with no big stops into slow corners to heat the rear tyres when powering away from such turns. It seems Verstappen’s adjustments combined perfectly to hit the sweetspot, with the wind also blowing much harder on Saturday – a factor that has been known to transform the RB20 previously.
Even before he was penalised, Verstappen, although clearly happier with his car handling compared to the oversteer nightmare he’d endured in the sprint, was still wary that he may not have the best race pace to deploy in the main event. This is given he was also fairly satisfied with the RB20 over one lap on the softs that won’t be used in the race for the leaders during sprint qualifying.
“[My GP race pace potential is] still a bit of a question mark,” said Verstappen. “I did feel that [on Friday] we were not too far off in qualifying and then I felt like we were quite far off in the sprint…”
Overall, the sprint both provided clues on GP pace prediction and concealed them too
McLaren went from leading Friday’s pure performance running to trailing both Red Bull and Mercedes – although Russell’s engine mapping confusion at the death in SQ3 skews the picture as he might’ve topped that session without it.
On why his drivers had slipped back results-wise, McLaren team boss Andrea Stella suggested they’d had to push harder with even stiffer qualifying opposition the second time around and that this meant they struggled to hit the tyre sweetspot quite as well.
With Verstappen’s penalty, Russell now moves to his second pole in a week, with the Mercedes boosted again by its team knowing it could “get the car low and stiff on a smooth track”- according to the Briton.
Watching trackside from FP1, right from the off the W15s were clearly running extremely low to the ground – sparking heavily and sending a clouds of detritus flying from every kerb in the high-speed blasts of the final sector here.
Norris reckoned he was "losing a good amount in the straights comparing to the others" and explained that was "really downforce" level choice. By running a touch more wing angle, the McLarens should get a tyre management boost for the GP, in that they will slide slightly less when pressing on through the high-speed corners in clean air or not.
Overall, the sprint both provided clues on GP pace prediction and concealed them too. In terms of how that extra downforce might make the McLarens easy targets down the long main straight here, Russell, who couldn’t get by Oscar Piastri when Norris worked hard to create the DRS train at the front of the field before giving his team-mate the sprint win, was stuck even with a near 4mph top speed advantage aboard the W15.
But, with Verstappen’s awful handling meaning his sprint race pace is unrepresentative for GP prediction consideration, the pace potential of both McLaren and Mercedes was also masked. In this case by Norris’s DRS tactics.
He clearly could’ve pushed on ahead of Piastri had he not “spent more time watching the mirrors than watching ahead”, per Stella. Russell too, would’ve been able to show stronger laptime averages had he not been stuck behind the slower McLaren.
For what it’s worth, of these Norris’s average to the final lap came in at 1m25.260s, while Russell’s was 1m25.255s – essentially nothing in it. But there was a driver clearly quicker than both – albeit with the caveats of how the McLaren DRS train impacted Norris and Russell overall.
In shades of Ferrari’s Austin sprint form, this comes from the 1m24.621s average Charles Leclerc produced over the final six laps of the race for Ferrari. This came after he’d passed his soon-to-be new team-mate Lewis Hamilton in a thrilling wheel-to-wheel scrap across sector one just past the sprint’s halfway point.
Leclerc, who was clearly treating his mediums gently early in the race having been bottled behind his current team-mate Carlos Sainz exiting the first corner, finished 3.7s back from the Spaniard. Sainz’s sprint pace as the lead Ferrari was also masked by being stuck in the lead DRS train behind Russell.
But Stella was also moved to point out that Ferrari was “very fast in the sprint, so I think dealing with Ferrari will be just because they are fast and they are starting right behind” Norris and Piastri in fifth and seventh for the GP. Leclerc heads Sainz this time.
In terms of race strategy, Pirelli reckons a one-stopper of medium-hard is the quickest, but the drivers will have to be careful to manage their front lefts and a band of that tyre that will get near to 100% wear over the 20-23 laps needed to get the hards to the finish after this, due to the demands of this very high-speed layout. McLaren’s downforce level could be key to helping the orange team cope with this.
Alone of the top teams, Ferrari has no fall back of the medium-hard-hard two-stopper Pirelli reckons will be the second quickest strategy because it ran one its two sets of the white-walled rubber on its cars in FP1. But that also means it has critical data none of its front running rivals possess, along with Williams back in the pack.
"I hope the guys can clean the track a bit because it was pretty clear in the sprint that everyone on that right side made bad starts and that's obviously a little bit unfair" George Russell
Also set to be a major moment of the race – that’s even more than usual – will be the start.
With overtaking tough at the first corner because it isn’t actually that big a stop – hence the axle balancing issue for qualifying – getting set well early in the order will be critical for one particular reason.
And this is now the biggest danger to Verstappen (and Piastri and Sainz), as, after starting second in the sprint, Russell reckoned a lack of grip away from the racing line is “probably about one and a half cars length difference from the inside all the way to Turn 1” for the cars on the right-hand side of the grid.
“We normally judge it based on distance in four seconds, and we think it's probably about four metres different left to right,” he added. “It's quite a big difference here. I hope the guys can clean the track a bit because it was pretty clear in the sprint that everyone on that right side made bad starts and that's obviously a little bit unfair to have those circumstances.”
When Autosport asked Isola about Russell’s comments, he explained: “Because of the wind, because of the sand that is going on track, the racing line is much cleaner compared to the other line.
“The level of grip is effected by the sand that is flying on track. The FIA is cleaning the track carefully before the start of each F1 session – especially before the start of the race tomorrow.
“But if the wind is blowing, by the time that you clean the track, you have the sand back. It’s really difficult to guarantee that you have a clean track. Support events are helping in this respect. I believe the forecast is in line with [qualifying for the race in terms of wind strength]. That means we will have the sand…”
