Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc combined forces to give Sergio Perez a massive present heading into Sunday’s Miami Grand Prix.
Perez, six points behind Red Bull team-mate Verstappen after his top-drawer victory in Azerbaijan a week ago, finds himself on pole position.
Verstappen is down in ninth and Leclerc seventh after both made critical errors in final qualifying on a day when a new track surface, hot weather and windy conditions made life exceptionally tricky for the drivers.
Verstappen, who has looked in a league of his own all weekend, made his error on his first run in final qualifying. He ran wide at Turn Seven and had to abort his lap, leaving him one shot at pole.
But doing that left him vulnerable to someone else crashing and causing a red flag on the second runs – and Leclerc did precisely that. His Ferrari spun into the barriers at the same corner and the session was stopped. There was insufficient time to restart the session, so that was that.
Verstappen knows as well as anyone how quick the Red Bull is, so he is confident that he can climb back up to finish on the podium without too much difficulty.
But the Dutchman has already had one experience this year of not being able to catch Perez when starting down the field – in Jeddah in March – so he knows he has his work cut out on Sunday if he is to prevent Perez from taking a win that would give him the world championship lead for the first time in his career.
“Podium for sure,” Verstappen said. “But I want to win, so this is not great. It’s not impossible but it’s not going to be easy.”
Throughout F1, the expectation is that Perez will not be able to sustain the challenge to Verstappen he has mounted over the first four races of the season, and that the Dutchman will eventually cruise to a third title.
But that’s a view based on prior experience and it’s certainly not how Perez sees it.
It is two wins each between the two Red Bull drivers, and Perez believes he should already be ahead on points – he is behind, in his view, only because of a difficult qualifying day in Australia two races ago, when various issues combined to leave him last on the grid, from which he could recover only to fifth by the flag.
The Mexican had been having a difficult weekend in Miami until qualifying, struggling with the car and regularly 0.5 seconds or so slower than Verstappen.
But he looked better once qualifying started, and the way events played out he has a golden opportunity which he believes he can take.
“I know I have a good race pace under me and I am confident that tomorrow I can deliver,” Perez said.
Leclerc ‘cannot hide disappointment’
If Verstappen was angry with himself for making the initial mistake that left him vulnerable, it was nothing to how Leclerc felt, after his second crash in the same place in as many days.
“Two days, two mistakes, same corner – this is not acceptable,” he said.
Leclerc is one of the most talented drivers on the grid – many in the sport regard him as perhaps the out-and-out fastest there is over one lap – but there is an equally strong feeling that he makes too many mistakes to be considered quite on the same level as the likes of Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso as an all-round, complete driver.
On Saturday, Leclerc’s comments while he beat himself up in public about his error gave an enlightening insight into both sides of his sporting character.
“I know I am really good in qualifying,” he said. “Most of the time I manage to extract the absolute maximum out of the car but it is the same mistake as yesterday, just over-pushing.
“You can always find excuses in those situations: ‘The wind was really strong, it was really tricky, the set-up of the car was really tricky also.’
“But I put myself in this condition. I wanted the set-up and I knew it would be tricky, but I thought I would be able to extract the maximum out of the car in Q3, which is normally one of my strong points.
“I know also that I’m taking more risk than others probably in Q3 and that’s why most of the time I’m doing good Q3s. It’s paying off most of the time. But this weekend I did too much and I cannot hide my disappointment.”
Had he started on the front row, or leading the second, as he could reasonably have expected to be had he nailed his lap, Leclerc might have been reasonably confident of holding on for a podium, as he did after qualifying on pole in Baku last Sunday.
But Perez is joined on the front row by Alonso’s Aston Martin, which Leclerc only just managed to hold at bay in Azerbaijan.
Alonso, who is having a superb season as he heads towards his 42nd birthday in the summer, is never more exceptional than when something of consequence is on the table in a race.
Give the veteran two-time champion a head start when you are a Ferrari driver in a car which struggles for race pace and you know you have a problem from which you probably won’t be able to recover.
“The Aston looks strong with their race pace,” Leclerc said, “so I don’t know exactly where we are going to be. But a podium will be a really good finish considering our race pace.”
Mercedes car ‘a nasty piece of work’
The dramas that befell Verstappen and Leclerc drew the attention away from Mercedes, on whom it might otherwise have fallen more heavily after a dispiriting qualifying session.
On Friday, Lewis Hamilton had been downcast, saying it felt like he was driving the same car as last year.
It was ironic, then, that on Saturday Mercedes had a qualifying session that mirrored almost exactly the one they had in Miami last year, with one car in the top six and the other knocked out in the second session and failing to make the top 10.
The only real difference was that the driver roles were reversed. This time, it was George Russell who qualified sixth and Hamilton who was down the grid, the victim of being sent out too late for his final run in Q2, which forced a rushed out lap, which led to him entering his final lap with tyres not up to temperature.
To complete the comparisons with last year, Russell even said that the dreaded bouncing that plagued Mercedes in 2022 had returned.
Team boss Toto Wolff did not mince his words.
“It’s worse than I ever thought it would be,” Wolff said. “Twelve months on since we were last in Miami and the car is just marginally better.
“The car is not fast enough and we haven’t got any comprehension why that is. It is just not acceptable.
“I take no enjoyment from finishing sixth if the car is so bad. It’s the lack of comprehension of what it is that makes this car such a nasty piece of work.”
For Mercedes, there is light at the end of the tunnel, or so they hope.
The next race, at Imola in Italy in two weeks’ time, sees the debut of their much-vaunted upgrade, which has been on the cards since Wolff admitted after the first qualifying of the season that they had gone the wrong way with their car development in sticking with last year’s failed concept and would have to rethink.
A new front suspension and aerodynamic package is coming, which the team hope will start what Hamilton has called “a new path”.
Wolff said: “What we are trying to do with the upgrade is to create a new baseline for us to take question marks, variables out of the equation and say: ‘This is not a problem now we have gone to a different spec.’
“And that is for example front suspension. We are also looking at bodywork solutions that are, let’s say, more conventional and that will create a different airflow.
“For me, it is almost like a reset to what would have been a good start 12 months ago and then to try to add performance to the car. At the moment it is a lack of understanding.
“The car should be moving forward immediately. We know what we are going to deliver in terms of aerodynamic performance and hopefully also better behaviour of the car. This is definitely expected.”
