After three practice sessions for the Mexican Grand Prix where he had struggled for grip, abandoned multiple flying laps due to errors while wrestling with his Red Bull and relayed more than one exasperated radio message to his race engineer, was any qualifying outcome more inevitable for Max Verstappen than securing pole position?
The world champion’s sixth pole of the year may have come at the end of a particularly scrappy trio of practice sessions, but it was still little surprise to see him on top of the times at the end of the qualifying hour. Now, he is in the best position possible to take a 14th victory and, with it, set a new F1 record for most wins in a season.
After grumbling about the grip he was able to draw from track surface at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez over Friday and Saturday, fighting with his car over the kerbs around the circuit’s 17 corners, Verstappen and his Red Bull team managed once again to coax his car to its best at the most critical point in the weekend.
“I think every session it got a little bit better,” said the pole winner. “I think in Q3, we finally could push a little bit more with the car and [do] two decent laps.”
Despite being the most successful driver in Mexico since the race returned to the calendar in 2015, this is the first time Verstappen has secured pole at the venue. He would have started there three years ago but was penalised for ignoring a yellow flag.
He said it had been “very hard to nail a lap” during the session. “It’s very low grip and there are a few kerbs that you have to perfectly hit to actually gain time. So it’s definitely not the easiest qualifying, always. But it seemed like in Q3, we had it under control.”
The records will forever show that Verstappen took pole by a margin of three tenths over Mercedes’ George Russell, but the margin should have been much tighter. Russell’s final lap time was fractionally quicker – a matter of thousandths – until he started braking for the entrance to the stadium at turn 12. But he overshot his braking point and ran wide, ultimately costing him a chance at pole – something he did not hide his frustration over.
“Obviously I locked up just trying too hard in sector three to make up,” Russell explained. “I am disappointed because I feel like the team deserved the pole position today. The car’s been performing great but ultimately the points are scored…
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