pole

Red Bull’s Max Verstappen took his second pole position in a week by beating the Ferraris of Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton in qualifying at the Singapore Grand Prix.

Verstappen’s first lap in final qualifying was enough to take pole, his time fending off a second lap from Leclerc that was 0.054 seconds off pole.

Hamilton was closest to Verstappen after the first runs but was unable to improve on his second run.

In fact, most of the front runners struggled to improve on their second runs, as Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli took fourth on the grid, from McLaren’s Lando Norris.

Antonelli’s team-mate George Russell was sixth fastest but will drop to the back of the grid with a penalty for using too many engine parts.

McLaren’s Oscar Piastri was the only driver in the top four teams other than Leclerc to improve on his second run but could do no better than qualify seventh.

Alpine’s Pierre Gasly and the Racing Bulls of Liam Lawson and Arvid Lindblad completed the top 10.

More to follow

Verstappen’s pole lap appeared to be further confirmation of Red Bull’s resurgence after his dominant win in Malaysia but he faces an investigation for overtaking under yellow flags shown before the first session was stopped for the Perez incident.

The four-time champion said he had not believed pole was possible before qualifying.

“We have some difficulties with the car in ride, as we know,” he said, “but at least when we went to the soft tyres (in the final session), it made the car a bit more stable in places where before you were a bit unsure.

“I did not expect this but you take it, I’m happy for sure. Qualifying tomorrow is still the main goal and for us the start is always a critical point but at least a positive end to our day.”

Russell’s performance compared with that of Antonelli raises further doubts about the efficacy of the Mercedes upgrade introduced in Malaysia.

It was their biggest car update since the Canadian Grand Prix in May but team boss Toto Wolff said at Sepang that it had appeared to take them backwards rather than forwards.

Mercedes split the car spec here in Singapore in an attempt to better understand its performance but Antonelli ended the session 0.573secs behind Russell.

The Briton said: “As a team there is still nothing telling us it isn’t working but it’s all driven by the stopwatch and, yeah, the stopwatch hasn’t been great for the upgrade yet. Maybe tomorrow’s a different day.”

Antonelli, who leads the championship by 84 points going into the weekend, said: “Already FP1 I was struggling and there is still a lot to understand about this package. Really the car is very difficult, very unpredictable, very difficult to put a lap together. It’s a shame. I was coming with high hopes but so far it has been very difficult.

“It’s going to be a difficult weekend unless we can pull something out tomorrow. Other than that it is going very tricky. I don’t really see where we can find 0.7secs but you never know.”

Wolff said before sprint qualifying: “The new car seems to be a little more tricky to drive. Not saying it’s necessarily slower, because there will be goodness in it, but maybe we haven’t just found a way of putting it all together and tuning it. The older car is a bit more stable, grippy, but that is really just one data point.”

Leclerc was 0.243secs off pole, and ruing what he said was Ferrari “losing a little bit of our raw performance” in the past three or four races.

However, he added: “Still I feel there is potential in the car and maybe tomorrow we can be there or thereabouts in fighting for pole.”

Hamilton said: “We did a slightly different run plan to the others. It was my choice, but I think we got that wrong. But ultimately, the car was very oversteery on that lap. If the rears [tyres] are not ready or they are overheating, it’s difficult to say. But it was very snappy and oversteery in the lap overall.”

Leclerc was somewhat taken aback by Mercedes’ superiority, saying that the position was what he expected but the gap most definitely was not.

At the bottom of the top 10, there was finally some good news for Williams, for whom Carlos Sainz achieved the team’s first top 10 qualifying performance of the year.

Williams have introduced a new chassis this weekend which has brought them down to the weight limit for the first time this season, after being as much as 25kg over at the start of the year.

Along with some additional developments, it appears to have produced a big step forwards, although the caveat is that Baku is a track that suits the characteristics of the Williams car and does not expose its weaknesses.

Team-mate Alex Albon did not manage to secure a tow in the second part of qualifying, and was “anyway struggling with straight-line speed all session”, and was 13th, just under 0.4secs behind the Spaniard.

Antonelli’s error came on his second lap of the first session.

He turned into the first corner too early, and the left front wheel clouted the inside wall, breaking the suspension.

He initially tried to get the car back to the pits but was told by engineer Peter Bonnington to park up.

“Let me try,” Antonelli pleaded, before Bonnington told him that either the track rod or upright was broken and there was no way Mercedes could fix that in the time they had to turn the car around before the next session.

Antonelli had been on the back foot all Friday trying to catch up time lost to a hydraulic problem that had stopped his car on track halfway through first practice, and was not repaired until halfway into the second.

It was Antonelli’s first major mistake of the season since he crashed heavily in final practice at the first race of the season in Australia.

The world champion said: “I’m shocked. I’m a little bit surprised to be here. It was probably one of the best laps I’ve done ever in my career.

“One of those laps when everything came together. I had a good idea of what I wanted to do, it was whether it came together but my brain let me do it almost perfect. It’s one of those laps when you look at the time and go: ‘Oh, that was pretty good.”

The session had started with predictions of a crash-fest, after drivers had been warning about the high-risk nature of the new Madring street circuit, with tricky entries to corners and walls coming back at the drivers on the exits.

Two red flags during final practice had led some teams to have private sweepstakes as to how many stoppages there would be in qualifying, but the session ran cleanly, with no incidents.

Pole looked to be a battle between Antonelli and the Ferraris, with Verstappen perhaps in the mix.

In the end, the Ferraris faded, as they so often have this year when it really matters, and Norris rose to the front with a breathtaking performance.

“The adrenaline was high on the last lap,” he said. “You have to relax and let it all flow.

“It’s easy to get tense around here. There’s a lot of walls that come at you pretty quickly. I have been feeling pretty good, I just wasn’t relaxed.

“I was pretty much perfect apart from the last corner, where I thought I was in the wall. Everything I wanted to achieve I achieved and it’s one of those moments when I was in that flow state.”

Hamilton, who had crashed at the final corner in practice and missed the final half of the session, did improve on his last lap, but only by 0.06secs and it was not enough to prevent him falling backwards.

He edged Leclerc by just 0.006secs as Ferrari rued yet another tantalising chance slipping through their fingers.

Hamilton said: “I felt pretty awesome in Q3 run one, and then just didn’t have any more grip or power in the last one.”