Carlos Sainz will start from Pole Position for the first time in the 2024 F1 season after a strong Mexico City GP qualifying performance.
Q3 became dramatic when Verstappen’s first attempt was deleted for exceeding track limits. Ferrari briefly held the top two spots, with Sainz ahead of Charles Leclerc by 0.360 seconds. However, during the final laps at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, Verstappen and Lando Norris both outpaced Leclerc’s best effort, pushing the Ferrari driver down to fourth place.
The Spaniard described his final runs in Q3 as “pretty much identical, almost perfect”, taking pole by 0.225s.
“You know, a lot of times around Mexico, you always have the feeling like you cannot put a lap together and it’s extremely difficult with how much sliding there is. But today, honestly, my two laps of Q3 were pretty much identical, almost perfect. And very happy because that’s not normally the case around Mexico with how tricky it is.”
Sainz assured the most important thing of grabbing a victory in Mexico City would be the extra points for Ferrari in the constructors’ championship, trailing McLaren by 48 at present.
“For sure, it’s our number one priority, to bring both cars home, but especially if you win the race, those extra seven, eight points that you get when you win are important for the team in the Constructors. So, I’ll be just looking forward to keep that P1 into Turn 1, and from there, hopefully our race pace should be good enough to win it.”
The Spaniard was questioned on the line he took at the end of his flying lap attempts, going to the inside and close to the pit wall to shorten the run to the line, a lesson he took from Lando Norris during their time together as teammates at McLaren.
“It’s just a Lando thing that he normally likes to do. I think it’s from iRacing or something. He likes doing short distance to the line.
“And I said, ‘well, I lose nothing by, maybe if it’s faster, maybe cutting a bit the distance. Maybe it gives me a thousand or two thousandths of a second that I’m going to make sure this time I don’t leave them out there’.
“And yeah, I remember from our McLaren days he used to do it a lot and I was a bit puzzled.”
Throughout 2024, Ferrari has been a better race car than qualifying car. The 30-year-old explained how he put a real focus in on getting the tyres working in qualifying after his crash in Singapore, enabling him to deliver strong Saturdays at COTA and Mexico.
“Tyre preparation has been a hot topic in Ferrari the last few races because we feel like in the race we’re always very strong, but we seem to lack something come qualifying.
“This year’s car is very good on tyres, but I think that sometimes it means that in quali you cannot maybe extract the maximum out of the tyres in the first timed lap on the Soft tyres.
“And yeah, I put a bit of focus on that during the break, the three-week break. came into Austin and Mexico with a couple of things that seemed to pay off.”
Sainz showed confidence in the strengths of the SF-24 that could grant him the victory in Sunday’s Mexico Grand Prix, even though he is aware of the nature of the start as the very long run down to turn 1 mans picking up a big slipstream for the cars on the second and third rows.
“Yeah, relatively confident because I know my race pace should be good tomorrow.
“Probably the biggest difficult thing will be the run down into Turn 1 and starting on pole with a slipstream, no? But I think you can still defend, you can still make it stick into Turn 1 starting on pole and that will be my target tomorrow.
“I have two guys behind fighting for quite important things tomorrow and the run down into Turn 1 should be interesting. I have obviously less to lose in that sense and I’ll make sure that I try and keep P1.”
