Championship leader Max Verstappen will start tomorrow’s F1 Sprint in Miami from pole position after getting the job done in SQ3 on Friday afternoon in Florida.
The Dutchman looked to be on the back foot during SQ2 as he could only manage P4 on the mediums with Norris comfortably topping the times in his updated McLaren — the three-time World Champion was over 0.4s slower. Verstappen was also missing a quarter of a second compared to the Brit in SQ1.
However, he got the job done on the softs in SQ3. Although his 1:27.641 was not even as fast as Norris’ time on the mediums in SQ2, he beat Charles Leclerc to pole by a tenth as McLaren had huge difficulties on the soft tyre.
Speaking about his session, the 26-year-old admitted he was surprised to be on pole considering how difficult he felt it was to get the tyres working.
However, he made the biggest step from SQ2 to SQ3 regarding lap time when they switched to softs from mediums, and that even included a big snap of oversteer on the exit of the turn 15 chicane.
Such was the disbelief, he even said ‘LOL’ over team radio after getting told he got P1.
“To be honest with you, it felt pretty terrible.
“I don’t know, maybe the last session was just incredibly difficult to get the tyres to work, because already in SQ2 I didn’t feel great. SQ3 I think it felt quite similar for me.
“I didn’t really improve a lot on the soft, but somehow we are first. I will happily take it, but it didn’t really feel enjoyable out there to drive for whatever reason.”
Verstappen had been quickest in FP1 in spite of big problems at turn 17 as he struggled on a consistent basis to stop the car there.
He also completed a solid race run and was happy with the car at that stage, but it all changed come Sprint qualifying.
“In practice, it felt really, really nice. I was very comfortable and confident, in qualifying not so much.
“I thought after practice, I was quite confident that we could really fight for pole then in qualifying it didn’t really look like that for me.
“But somehow we still ended up in first. I don’t know what happened to the other cars in the last lap.”
