As former team mates who entered Formula 1 in the same team as each other back in 2015, Carlos Sainz Jnr and Max Verstappen’s careers have diverged in two very different paths since their first year-and-a-half together.
Verstappen, now a double world champion, fulfilled the great promise always expected of him within the Red Bull ecosystem. Meanwhile Sainz’s route to the front of the field took him from Faenza to Enstone, from Enstone to Woking and then finally from Woking to Maranello where he would join the fight alongside Verstappen once more, only now dressed in red.
After the paddock was informed the news before qualifying that the founder of the Red Bull energy drink and media empire, Dietrich Mateschitz, had died following a lengthy illness, there was serendipity in how the two currently most prominent products of the Red Bull junior driver programme, Sainz and Verstappen, would be the ones to line up on the front row of the grid.
For the first time, Sainz will start on pole position with Verstappen alongside him. After so many rounds following the summer break where Sainz had come so close to pole only to miss out by fractions of a second, the Ferrari driver was relieved to have finally secured the top spot.
“I kept my head down and kept trusting that one day [it] was going to come,” Sainz said.
“There’s been qualifying this year where I was half a tenth off pole and I had done a fairly big mistake in the last sector or in the second sector that had cost me, so also having a decently clean lap for the wind conditions that were out there contributed.”
Sainz’s third pole of the season is only the second time he has been the fastest driver in qualifying. But just as in Silverstone, where he was helped by a mistake from Charles Leclerc which compromised Verstappen’s final lap, Sainz benefitted from another mistake from his team mate on Saturday. Leclerc was half a tenth quicker heading into the final corner, Andretti, but by the time they reached the timing line to complete the lap, it was Sainz who was half a tenth to the good.
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“When you speak about such a small margin, you can always do better,” Leclerc reflected. “But every driver can do better in Q3 when you see the lap afterwards. Carlos did a better job today and he deserves to be on pole.”
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