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Almost doesn’t count for Verstappen at the Mexico Grand Prix [+video]

It was almost meant to be a new record, Max Verstappen would have been the youngest driver to ever get pole position in Formula 1 here in Mexico only to be denied that honour when Vettel beat his time by just 0.086s at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez circuit. Lewis Hamilton came in third and teammate Valtteri Bottas was in fourth place.

Kimi Raikkonen in the other Ferrari and Esteban Ocon in the Force India followed suit in the 3rd row. Local hero, Sergio Perez managed to stay within the top 10 for the race which starts at 3am local time here in Malaysia.

“Obviously I am really happy”, Seb said. “I had a perfect lap in the end, even if the track here is difficult and very slippery. It is easy to make mistakes going over the limit here. But I thought to myself that if I could get T1 right, then I’d have a better chance. The last sector was also tricky because you know how easily you can go wide and lose a lot of time, but I managed to push and stay clean. So, I am really happy, especially because other cars were close and it’s nice to hold everybody off.”

“Yesterday the car was not where we wanted to be, but today everything was ok, and I think tomorrow we’ll be quick enough. Let’s see what happens at the start and after that we should have a good race. I know it’s a long way to Turn 1, but overall I am confident because our starts are good. Last weekend it was tough for the whole team because it went through of a lot of work and a lot of changes. This weekend has been better, I think we deserved to get the result today and hope to have a great race tomorrow!”

“Our qualifying wasn’t good enough; we thought we could fight for the pole. We definitely struggled a bit compared to at least one of the Ferraris and one of the Red Bulls, for some reason they found quite a bit of lap time for Q3. The incident with Max ruined my first lap in Q3; I just couldn’t get back to the normal line for braking. However, I’m still optimistic for the race. We had good long runs yesterday and we’ll have a strong car tomorrow. As a team, we’re starting from the second row, and it’s such a long run into Turn 1 here. Hopefully we can have a good start and use the slipstream to our advantage. It should be an interesting race,” said Valtteri Bottas.

 

Here are the full qualifying results.

POS NO DRIVER CAR Q1 Q2 Q3 LAPS
1 5 Sebastian Vettel FERRARI 1:17.665 1:16.870 1:16.488 20
2 33 Max Verstappen RED BULL RACING TAG HEUER 1:17.630 1:16.524 1:16.574 19
3 44 Lewis Hamilton MERCEDES 1:17.518 1:17.035 1:16.934 21
4 77 Valtteri Bottas MERCEDES 1:17.578 1:17.161 1:16.958 17
5 7 Kimi Räikkönen FERRARI 1:18.148 1:17.534 1:17.238 20
6 31 Esteban Ocon FORCE INDIA MERCEDES 1:18.336 1:17.827 1:17.437 19
7 3 Daniel Ricciardo RED BULL RACING TAG HEUER 1:18.208 1:17.631 1:17.447 15
8 27 Nico Hulkenberg RENAULT 1:18.322 1:17.792 1:17.466 17
9 55 Carlos Sainz RENAULT 1:18.405 1:17.753 1:17.794 17
10 11 Sergio Perez FORCE INDIA MERCEDES 1:18.020 1:17.868 1:17.807 19
11 19 Felipe Massa WILLIAMS MERCEDES 1:18.570 1:18.099 10
12 18 Lance Stroll WILLIAMS MERCEDES 1:18.902 1:19.159 11
13 28 Brendon Hartley TORO ROSSO 1:18.683 DNF 12
14 14 Fernando Alonso MCLAREN HONDA 1:17.710 DNS 9
15 2 Stoffel Vandoorne MCLAREN HONDA 1:18.578 DNS 13
16 9 Marcus Ericsson SAUBER FERRARI 1:19.176 9
17 94 Pascal Wehrlein SAUBER FERRARI 1:19.333 9
18 20 Kevin Magnussen HAAS FERRARI 1:19.443 10
19 8 Romain Grosjean HAAS FERRARI 1:19.473 11