The common denominator in such cases is inevitably rain, plus a team and driver that gets everything just right on the day when the usual frontrunners don’t quite achieve their normal level of perfection.
Good fortune has to play a part, but it would be wrong to suggest that luck was the biggest factor in Magnussen’s achievement. His team made all the right calls, and the Dane himself had to do the job on track in tricky circumstances.
This being a sprint weekend, there was one practice session before everyone plunged into qualifying, and that lack of preparation time probably served as something of a leveller. Magnussen was an unspectacular 16th in FP1, but his teammate Mick Schumacher was eighth, suggesting that there was some potential in the car.
Magnussen finished the difficult Q1 session in a very respectable seventh place after everyone switched to slicks on the drying track, and he then repeated that result in Q2 to ensure a place in the final part of qualifying. That wasn’t an outrageous surprise given that he qualified fifth in similar conditions in Canada back in June.
Schumacher showed just how easy it was to be on the wrong side of fortune, doing some decent laps early on in the damp conditions he was perhaps overcautious and simply didn’t get a quick enough lap in when it mattered at the end of Q1, and he was knocked out in 20th.
Top 10 was already a decent result for Magnussen, but with the rain threatening to return as Q3 approached, Haas made the crucial call that was to help earn him pole.
The team wanted him to be at the head of the queue at the pitlane exit, in order to give him the best possible chance of getting a lap in on a dry track before the rain arrived.
Having finished bottom in the 2021 world championship, Haas is the last team in the pitlane, and with neighbours Alfa Romeo, Williams, Aston Martin and AlphaTauri not participating in Q3, there was plenty of warning when cars started to emerge from their garages just before the green light.
That allowed Magnussen to nip out of his garage and park at the end of the pitlane ahead of the two Ferraris and Max Verstappen’s Red Bull.
The fact that one of the Maranello cars was on intermediates showed how easy it was to get the most basic call wrong in the circumstances.
“We knew rain was coming,” said team boss Gunther Steiner when asked by Motorsport.com about getting out first. “Do you take the risk to go out on dry, or is it better on intermediates?
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