Lando Norris’s pole position for Formula 1’s Spanish Grand Prix, on a weekend when Red Bull had been expected to dominate, has triggered renewed hope of a super-close season.
With the aerodynamic demands of the Barcelona circuit appearing to be the perfect stomping ground for the Red Bull RB20 to stamp its authority on the rest of the field once again, that Max Verstappen did not take pole has surprised a few.
Even Verstappen himself admitted that this was a weekend where he had expected to be comfortably back on top following some recent more challenging times.
“Ok, but not good enough, clearly,” he said after being beaten to the top spot. “These kinds of tracks, I was hoping, of course, to be ahead. But the other teams are catching up.
“We’ve seen this already in the last few races, so it’s definitely a lot harder. We need to do everything perfect to be first. We just need to bring more performance to the car.”
But while Red Bull losing out to McLaren in qualifying has triggered some optimism that things are now super close at the front of the field, it would be wrong to jump to conclusions based on single-lap performance.
Instead, the final judgement about the state of play at the front of F1 can really only be properly made after the Spanish GP has played out, as it is on Sundays and not Saturdays that Red Bull has traditionally excelled anyway.
In fact, it is McLaren’s long-run pace in hot conditions and management of tyre degradation that has proven to be an Achilles Heel before – which means how Sunday’s 66 laps play out will tell us much more about the change of trends in F1.
Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing, pole man Lando Norris, McLaren F1 Team, talk after Qualifying
Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images
McLaren has certainly made a lot of progress in improving tyre life, but there have been times – like the first stint at Imola – where Norris was nowhere near able to match the level of consistency that Verstappen could manage.
Barcelona’s challenging nature, the likely use of softer compounds and high temperature will thus provide a pretty good litmus test of where things really stack up.
McLaren CEO Zak Brown said on Saturday that he felt the squad’s previous concerns about warmer places derailing its chance was a thing of the past.
“We used to really dislike heat,” he told Sky. “We’ve never totally solved any problem, but we made a huge improvement in that area.
“So, weather conditions don’t…
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