The Saturday in F1 Singapore GP was an up and down battle which saw some big exits and ended with the title contenders in the front.
It was not so straight forward for anyone on Saturday of F1 Singapore GP at Marina Bay Circuit as every driver had to fight off with grip issues to claim their track positions. It caught out Red Bull’s Sergio Perez, who was knocked out in Q2.
The Mexican was not so pleased especially after a good Azerbaijan weekend. His teammate Max Verstappen ended up on the front row after changes made to the car which worked for him. He was still not 100% but managed to put the car on the front row.
He will have his F1 title contender Lando Norris starting alongside him in the McLaren. The Brit has had a solid weekend so far and continued his fine form in qualifying too. It will now be a challenge at the start where he is tentative usually.
His teammate Oscar Piastri is slightly behind after blaming himself for not getting a lap in. That allowed the Mercedes pair of Lewis Hamilton and George Russell to get ahead in the order after not looking likely to even get into Q3 at one point of the weekend.
Hamilton found the sweet spot in Q3 to be third as Russell backed it up in fourth. The Ferrari F1 pair of Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz were caught out by lack of tyre temperature. The Spaniard had a strange crash in Q3 which ended his session.
The Monegasque was left disappointed after his lap was cancelled for track limits, but even before that, he didn’t feel optimum with the tyres. On Aston Martin side, Fernando Alonso once again dragged the car in the Top 10, as Lance Stroll struggled to find pace.
Norris: “Not particularly good. Just because it’s difficult. It’s hard to do everything around here in one lap. So I was a bit down in the first sector, probably a couple of tenths. And then I felt like I had to try and push a bit harder in the middle sector to make up for it and that kind of thing. But I mean, it still felt good. We’ve been good all weekend. Just struggled to progress much from practice into quali. Like we just found a good setup there and stuck and didn’t really progress at all really. I went only a touch quicker than what I did in FP3. So expected a bit more and probably found a little bit more difficult than I would have liked in both Q1, Q2 and Q3. But the car’s been amazing all weekend.
“So felt good and felt comfortable just to go out and put the lap in. I mean, quite a bit. We’ve been very good all weekend. People have caught up clearly, like we’ve gone into quali there and clearly Max improved and he improved a lot from yesterday into today. Mercedes as well, they were very quick in Q2, so they were there on my tail, a bit close for my liking, comparing to what I had in kind of FP3 and things. Confident that the car’s good in both quali and race. We showed that already on Friday. So confident if I can just get ahead, then I get my head down and can go away.”
Verstappen: “I think the whole of qualifying actually went quite well. We managed to improve the car, run after run, already with FP3, and I’m happy to be on the front row, if you look at where we came from yesterday. Q3 was tough. You know, your lap gets, of course, cancelled with the double yellow. Then everyone only has one run to do the lap, so you don’t want to overdo it. So you want to stay within the limit. I take second. I’m happy with that. I want to say also a big thank you to the team for continuing to push throughout the weekend, you know, to make the car better for me. So, yeah, very happy to be on the front row.”
Hamilton: “I’m not saying it’s a surprise, but I mean, through the weekend so far, we were looking, well, I was looking particularly very poor. I mean, this morning and all of yesterday, we were 1.2 seconds off this, guys. So we arrived with a car that was massively understeery, and we just couldn’t dial any in, no matter what we did. Nothing changed. And… made changes overnight, came here today, pretty much the same thing, and I was definitely shocked to see that we were still 1.2 seconds behind Lando again. And then we just kept our heads down, kept not giving up, and we made some more changes and got into this session, and it was like night and day. Such a big difference. Car was all of a sudden alive, and I was able to go where I wanted to go.
“It was looking really strong throughout qualifying and I think obviously with the crash in Q3 it made it difficult for all of us to put that final lap together. I think my lap was also nothing special. Very difficult to get the tyres perfect and not overslide them. I had a lot of snaps. So I think with a better job, maybe we could have been front row with this guy, but I don’t know whether or not we could have beaten him today. But still really, really happy. It’s very hard to say because it was such a nightmare the past day and a half. I think our long run pace was so-so. Nowhere near these guys, or at least the McLarens.
“But we have now put the car in a much different window. So we have to also anticipate a different balance tomorrow compared to the past every other session. Yeah, I think here is really about managing tyres temps. So that’s going to have to be key tomorrow. So doing absolutely everything we can to keep the temperatures out of the rears, basically. I hope in our attempt to do that, we’re somehow able to hold on to at least one of these guys. But yeah, we’ll find out tomorrow. I feel confident, though, that we might be able to do that.”
Perez: “I don’t know, Q1 was looking really nice and smooth, I actually had a mistake on my lap into Turn 1 where I lost around two-three tenths. But I just went slower in Q2, I felt I was sliding a lot more, couldn’t get the tyre up to temperature. It was just very, very tricky, very tricky afternoon. To me in Q2 I had issues with the brakes and the tyres, I think the brakes were running too hot and I was lacking quite a lot of bite from them. And the tyres were absolutely nowhere in Q2, the two laps I did I just had no grip at all, was super tricky. We changed quite a bit the car, I think we probably went in the wrong direction, it’s not so clear at the moment. But we certainly were in a nicer window yesterday, we just lost a lot of competitiveness. I think it’s going to be a very difficult race. Hopefully we can do some magic with the strategy and come through, that will be the key for us.”
Leclerc: “Q1-Q2 was going well. I was kind of hopeful again after FP3, that went wrong. But then I got out of the box in quali three and the front tyres were way cooler. So, I don’t know. We do so much preparation all the weekend to get to this one lap in quali where we know it’s as important as Monaco. And we get out of the box and we are way too cold on the front tyres and that puts all of our weekend into a very bad place, so not much to say on that. We do so much preparation all the weekend to get to this one lap in quali where we know it’s as important as Monaco. And we get out of the box and we are way too cold on the front tyres and that puts all of our weekend into a very bad place, so not much to say on that. I don’t know.
“I have asked to the team in the in lap. I think the investigations are still ongoing. We don’t know the exact issue yet. But the fact is, we started the lap with two cold front tyres, locked up into Turn 1 and that was it. I never really had the front grip I wanted. In FP3 I was not happy with the car, but also, it’s very warm weather here, so I was expecting it to be not exactly where we wanted it to be. But we were expecting to have a strong quali, which in Q1 and Q2 did confirm that we were in the pace to do a good thing. We throwed everything in the bin with the Q3 tyre temperature issues. So we’ve got to investigate that.”
Sainz: “It was a bit of a strange accident, I had to let a lot of cars through opening my lap, and my tyres were a lot colder than I thought they would be. I misjudged the grip on the bump of Turn 17, it completely snapped on me so it is a driver mistake. I underestimated the grip I would get in the launch of the lap, and was under pressure with another car coming. I knew that in the launch of the lap, I was already going to be slower because of approaching the last corner so slow, so it meant I tried to do something that there was not enough grip for. The car looks quite damaged, but once I get into a rhythm in the race, it should be okay, it is black magic with the tyres over one lap to get everything working. I mean, you saw the mistake I did. It’s not common and not typical, and it shows that there must be something, honestly, with very, very fine line between them to grip and not to grip. And this weekend has been that way.
“So tomorrow, as soon as I get into a rhythm, we will be there. Hopefully we can move forward. Extra DRS I’m still optimistic, but I need a good night’s sleep to feel optimistic also, because today was a big blow for me, and I didn’t enjoy it all. The tyres are the same in theory, but I don’t know what’s going on at some tracks, that is extremely picky. Five, 10 degrees under the right level, and there’s zero grip. Five, 10 degrees above, there’s also zero grip. So you just need to find the right area. It has been a big struggle for me this weekend, it is very strange how it can change from one year to another. To get the tyres in the window over one lap with our car is tricky, I’ve had a couple of decent laps over the weekend, but in general, it’s been very consistent. I had issues with the brakes, which didn’t help my build-up, and here it is all about gaining confidence, executing with perfect laps, and I haven’t had that this weekend.”
Alonso: “I am very happy with seventh position and the performance tonight in Qualifying. We’ve struggled with the weaknesses of the car here and we’ve put in a lot of hard work to try and improve things. Heading into Qualifying we were a bit pessimistic as our pace didn’t look too promising in FP3. We managed to put the laps together though and thanks to a few cars not completing their laps in Q3 we ended up a bit higher than what our true pace is. We’ll take it but we know that the points are scored tomorrow, so we need to complete the job and score some good points.”
The damage to Perez along with the Ferrari pair allowed for some of the F1 runners high up in the order. Like Haas’ Nico Hulkenberg found himself in sixth in a solid return after a slow start to the weekend, with teammate Kevin Magnussen not far behind in 13th.
The German was accompanied by Alonso and also Visa Cash App RB’s Yuki Tsunoda, who was happy to continue the forward momentum in the weekend, where teammate Daniel Ricciardo felt the heat and was knocked out in Q1 itself.
The Australian was not so happy after the session and tried to keep smiling with pain inside. He even joked about the famous crashgate moment in his desperation. A similar situation was with the Williams pair of Alexander Albon and Franco Colapinto.
Both were close to each other and missed Top 10 only by just. They were undone by tyre preparation as well. While Alpine’s Esteban Ocon upped his game, Pierre Gasly was out in Q2 along with Kick Sauber’s Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu.
Hulkenberg: “I’m very happy, that was a solid qualifying from the team. They were clean laps and I had a good feeling and confidence in the car, which is crucial around here and on street circuits in general, and something I was missing a bit last week. I’m happy, we didn’t leave much out there and we maximised the session. I think we were the fifth fastest team out there today. We have a big job ahead tomorrow and we need to close it out; we need to stay focused and bring it home.”
Albon: “The car was definitely quicker than P11 today, so of course I’m disappointed. We’ve got a balance issue in the car this weekend and we’ve been trying to improve it, but we’ve not found anything to fix it, so when it’s not there, we’re quick but unfortunately when it is, we’re struggling and that’s what happened in Qualifying. We’re also dealing with rear overheating of the tyres quite early in the lap, making it difficult to predict, so it’s not ideal. Whilst it was tricky out there today, I’ll still be fighting in the battle for points tomorrow, so let’s see how we go.”
Ricciardo: “We didn’t really change much. Obviously we were in a good place yesterday, so we were pretty upbeat about it. [We] weren’t chasing our tail. And honestly, the medium this morning was good. I felt like we started off on the same foot as yesterday, but then I put the soft on, and I was nowhere. So we did a bit of fine-tuning for quali, and we thought we would be OK, but I just didn’t feel comfortable on the soft. It was miserable because we were somewhere yesterday, genuinely. There wasn’t any big mistake or anything, but I knew when I crossed the line, that wasn’t quick. I could just tell. It just didn’t feel that nice. This morning you could say, oh, that soft didn’t work. But we had three of them today, and we were just not competitive on any of them. We were a bit puzzled.
“I would say, if FP3 was qualifying, then I would have said something more like, ‘That soft was s**t because it didn’t bite, it didn’t lock in.’ But the fact that I struggled on all three softs I used, maybe there’s something else. We’ll try and figure it out, but Q1 sucks, especially when you don’t expect to be there. Obviously some races, we’ve expected to be here, but after yesterday, we didn’t think this would even be possible with a shit lap. I think there was still some optimism in Hungary and after Q3, you feel a bit better. I try to be optimistic, but today was a very pessimistic day. Hopefully, [we get] a well-timed safety car. Bring Piquet back, and let’s make it happen (jokes).”
Ocon: “I was happier with the car in Qualifying, it felt better this evening and we took a step forward in terms of pace from Free Practice 3, particularly in Q1. The pace seemed to drop off a little in Q2 and we were not able to extract much more to be closer to Q3. A mixed result in the end. I’m glad we could improve a little bit, but we are still far away from where we want to be. We’ll debrief to understand what happened between Q1 and Q2 and will aim to bring the fight tomorrow to progress up the field.”
Bottas: “As the results show, it’s been a tough qualifying session. We tried to extract every bit of performance we could this weekend so far but, ultimately, it just wasn’t enough. This track really exposed some of our weaknesses, particularly in single-lap pace. We’re hoping for a stronger showing tomorrow, but regardless, we’ll aim to optimise everything and push for the best possible result. We’ll keep fighting hard before the mini break, when we can regroup and focus on improving for the future.”
Here’s how F1 Azerbaijan GP qualifying panned out
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