Resurgent four-time world champion Max Verstappen is the man to beat while Australian Oscar Piastri will start from seventh when the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia is run at 6pm AEDT on Sunday.
Verstappen continued his dominant form for Red Bull by claiming his first pole of the season on Saturday. The 29-year-old Dutchman, currently sixth in the world championship standings, clocked a best lap time of 1 minute 35.130 seconds in the final minute of a close session run in high temperatures at the Sepang International Circuit.
He outpaced seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton of Ferrari by 0.298 seconds. Isack Hadjar was third for Red Bull, but drops five places on the starting grid due to a penalty imposed for fitting new engine components beyond the permitted quota.
Next came standings leader Kimi Antonelli of Mercedes, Charles Leclerc in the second Ferrari and world champion Lando Norris of McLaren.
Piastri was seventh in the second McLaren, ahead of George Russell of Mercedes, Alpine’s Pierre Gasly and Gabriel Bortoleto of Audi.
It will be the first time Verstappen has started at the front of the grid since the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix last season.
“It’s fantastic,” he said. “We’ve been trying for many Grands Prix to get a pole position and so to finally get it is pretty incredible.
“I’m happy with today and will try to win tomorrow.”
Hamilton’s pace in a late flying lap enabled him to secure his best startingspot since winning in Catalonia in June.
“The car felt great. We’ve made lots of changes,” the 41-year-old said. “And then also execution was really on point. If we can keep this up, hopefully we can get better results moving forwards.”
Verstappen wants win before season’s end | 00:52
The Bahrain Grand Prix is being raced in Malaysia due to disruption in the Gulf linked to the US-led war with Iran.
Mercedes brought a big upgrade to the event this weekend anticipating it would boost performance by as much as 0.3s per lap. Instead the team bombed to by far its worst qualifying result of the season, with a whopping half-second margin to Verstappen.
“Very difficult to understand,” a baffled Toto Wolff told Sky Sports. “We have been a little bit caught out on Friday with some car behaviour that we didn’t see all year, but then you can say it’s very hot and the tarmac is very different to all the tracks.
“It looked really good in the morning (in FP3). We seemed to have, at least with Kimi, made a step in understanding. Then qualifying was a little bit back to what we saw before, just no performance.”
McLaren ended up anonymous at the end of qualifying, as the fourth-quickest team of the session for just the fifth time this season.
Norris and Piastri were closely matched but more than 0.6s off the pace in sixth and seventh respectively, having never looked in contention for the front row.
Excluding Baku last week, where Russell put nearly a second on everyone, this is McLaren’s worst qualifying result since its Hungary upgrade put it on a run of three poles in four races, and it’s well below its season average overall.
“We’re just slow,” Norris said. “The car’s not good enough here.
“I think we struggled a bit more than we thought this weekend. My lap was good … but the performance of the car is a long way off.”
Piastri wasn’t much more optimistic after failing to improve with his final Q3 lap.
“I thought it was a pretty good session in general,” he said. “We’re just not fast enough here.
“(The race) is going to be tough. I think our long-run pace did look pretty good yesterday, but the others around didn’t look bad.
“We’ll have to wait and see what we can do, but I think it’s going to be a challenging afternoon.”
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