Carlos Sainz will start the Mexico City Grand Prix from pole position ahead of Max Verstappen and Lando Norris after frontrunners Oscar Piastri and home favorite Sergio Perez were dumped out of qualifying in Q1.
Sainz bided his time through the qualifying hour until Q3, when he pumped in two flying laps good enough to have taken pole position for his first P1 start since last year’s Singapore Grand Prix.
“Very happy — and great couple of laps,” he said. “A lot of times around Mexico you always have the feeling that you cannot put the lap together and it’s extremely difficult with how much sliding there is, but my two laps in Q3 were pretty much identical, almost perfect.
“I just put two really solid laps in Q3, good enough for pole — very happy, because that’s not normally the case around Mexico with how tricky it is.”
With two Ferrari drivers in the top 10 but only one apiece for McLaren and Red Bull Racing, the Italian team has a golden chance to move to second in the teams standings and close in on the lead.
“Since Austin we’ve done what seems like especially on my side a step up, especially in qualifying,” Sainz said. “It seems like we’re going in the right direction. I just look forward to keeping that P1 into Turn 1, and from there hopefully our race pace should be good enough to win it.”
Verstappen recovered strongly from having his first lap time deleted to qualifying on the front row.
The Dutchman had rocketed to provisional top spot with his first lap but had his time immediately deleted for cutting Turns 2 and 3.
It didn’t deter him from pushing, however, with the Dutchman improving by almost 0.2 seconds with his second attempt to qualifying second, 0.225s behind Sainz.
“I was already under a lot of pressure to have a good qualifying, then the lap time got taken away, so it added a little more pressure,” Verstappen said. “I’m very happy to be on the front row. I honestly didn’t expect that to be possible.”
Norris had topped both Q1 and Q2 after McLaren comfortably topped FP3 earlier in the day, but the Briton hit his ceiling in the battle for pole.
After improving by 0.2 seconds between the first and second segments, he found only 0.041s in the shootout, leaving him third and 0.314s off the pace, which he described as McLaren’s maximum.
“I’m pretty happy with third, honestly,” he said. “I felt like I got to the limit of the car quite quickly, which made us look good, but I struggled to get a lot more out of it in the final two laps.”
Charles Leclerc had been Sainz’s closest challenger after the first laps, albeit he was more than 0.3s adrift, but a mistake through the esses cost him a chance to lock out the front row for Ferrari, dropping him to fourth and just 0.005s behind Norris.
George Russell and Lewis Hamilton qualified fifth and sixth for Mercedes,
Kevin Magnussen was an impressive seventh for Haas ahead of Alpine’s Pierre Gasly and Alex Albon’s Williams, while a mistake on his final lap left Nico Hulkenberg a distant 10th.
Yuki Tsunoda qualified 11th after crashing out of the session with less than 15s on the clock in Q2. The Japanese driver took too much speed into the right-handed Turn 12 leading into the stadium section and slid off the road and into the barriers. The RB driver had been just 0.081s short of a spot in Q1 and had set a personal-best time in sector two when he crashed.
The smash also hampered teammate Liam Lawson, who qualified 12th and just 0.033s further back and had just set a personal-best time in the first sector.
Aston Martin teammates Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll qualified 13th and 14th, while Valtteri Bottas, in just his seventh appearance outside Q1 for the season, will line up alongside Franco Colapinto in 16th.
Surprise knockouts Oscar Piastri and Sergio Perez will start on the penultimate row of the grid after dual qualifying shockers.
Piastri, who topped FP3 hours earlier, struggled to string together a clean lap. His first was scuppered by a lock-up at Turn 4, which sent him wide of the apex. His second was deleted for exceeding track limits at Turn 12. That deleted time wouldn’t have been enough to make Q2, but the Australian figured it cost him around a second.
Piastri lined up for a second attempt on the same used tires, but he failed to improve on his own personal bests in the first two sectors and only marginally improved in the third, dropping to 17th by the end of the session in his first Q1 elimination for the year.
Sergio Perez showed less potential, his 18th-place knockout and fifth Q1 knockout down to a lack of faith in the car.
“I cannot brake for low speed,” he radioed early in the session, reporting a lack of grip that didn’t improve even as track conditions improved rapidly.
It left him 1.106s off poll and 0.808s behind teammate Verstappen.
Esteban Ocon and Zhou Guanyu will start from the back row of the grid in 19th and 20th.
