Lando Norris and McLaren had got it all set up beautifully. Knowing they were unlikely to retain their outrageous Saudi Arabian Grand Prix FP3 advantage when the track had been running at 47°C and that the others would close up in the cool of the Saturday evening, they remained confident.
Norris was visibly driving on the top of a wave of it, one which had been so missing in Bahrain a week ago. Comfortably faster than team-mate Oscar Piastri from the beginning of the weekend, it was just flowing beautifully here between the walls, not an inch of daylight between tyre sidewall and the unyielding concrete, the car doing anything he asked of it. What was hard work and adrenaline for the others seemed for him to be child’s play. It was almost trance-like. Perhaps too much so.
In FP3 they even anticipated how it was going to be in Q1, fuelling the car up for multiple laps on the same set of tyres.
So as everyone else, even Piastri, did the conventional thing in Q1 and ran a single flying lap, Norris was fuelled for two flyers with a cooldown in between. Sure enough, he knocked a couple of tenths off his first lap. So even with the tyres past their best he was 0.214s clear of anyone on those first runs. That gave him the luxury of sitting the rest of the session out.
Verstappen went out again and on a set of used tyres went even faster, showing that the track grip was ramping up as the temperatures came down and that the further they came down the more the Red Bull was going to be a threat.
Onto Q2, Norris again headed the times after the first runs (narrowly, from Verstappen) and again stayed in the garage for the remainder of the session. Verstappen again went out for a second run on a set of used but this time could make no improvement. Piastri was 0.15s adrift on the first Q2 runs, just not quite with Norris's confidence, especially through the first couple of corners.
So it was all there for Norris into Q3. He just had to continue riding that wave, then see what the Red Bull might do - and perhaps George Russell’s Mercedes too - as the track continued to cool and the deficit of those cars to his narrowed further.
Piastri was first out for the first Q3 runs and had just got his lap in as Norris crashed heavily at Turn 5. Maybe the confidence had tipped into overconfidence, as he understeered a little wide into Turn 4, not quite kissing the apex wall as he had been doing and tried to power his way through, as if he could do no wrong.
That's when reality bit with a snap of oversteer as the fronts finally gripped, bouncing him off the opposite kerb and from there hard into the wall. Without a time on the board.
In championship terms it was a disastrous error. But if there was a pressure element to it, it came surely from Verstappen rather than his presumed title rival Piastri; on this day, Norris had looked to have his team-mate handled.
In hindsight, maybe sitting out those second runs in Q1 and Q2 hadn't been a good idea. Maybe it had enabled Verstappen to get a better feel for the evolving track and to fine-hone the margins he needed to find. But Norris' decision came from confidence, having been the pacesetter throughout. That confidence was visible from the knife edge he'd been apparently so comfortable sitting on.
The delay as they cleared the mess allowed the track temperature to fall further. So the news just kept getting better for Verstappen - and for Russell in a Mercedes which really comes alive on a cool track. He'd completed the first two sectors before the red flag and was a few hundredths ahead of where Piastri had been at that point. Verstappen had been last out and so had barely even started a hot lap as the red flags came out. He therefore had an almost unused set of softs plus a second brand new set - and there was actually enough time to use them both.
He seemed to be finding time from himself from the extra running. So why not do it again, suggested his engineer Gianpiero Lambiase? The timing would be super-tight and it would involve fuelling the car for two runs, so giving away around 0.15s on the first run (with the part-used tyre set). But Max bought into it - and that lap shaded Piastri's first run by 0.001s! Game on.
Obviously Piastri and Russell would be improving when they went out for their final runs. But so would Verstappen - and he now had more recent experience of the evolving track.
As they each made those final runs, Verstappen was quickest in the first sector, Russell in the second, Piastri in the third (the McLaren's better control of the rear temperatures again). The end result put Verstappen on pole for the second time in three races, by one-hundredth of a second over Piastri, who'd been trailing Norris by a couple of tenths throughout.
Even Russell was only 0.1s behind Piastri and ruing how he'd not given himself the optimum run into Turn 1. Being over-aggressive with the last part of his warm-up lap because he desperately didn't want to make an under-temperate tyre mistake in Turn 1 without a time on the board, he lost a big chunk there. Maybe more than 0.1s. Pole had been achievable, he reckoned afterwards.
Verstappen, with that prior run, had been able to give it full commitment into Turn 1 and was a full 0.35s faster in sector one than on his first run. Piastri had found a similar sector one gain between his first Q3 run and second. Verstappen was further helped by a tow from team-mate Yuki Tsunoda at the beginning of the lap.
Norris had made the crucial error you just cannot do when Max Verstappen has got the Red Bull into any sort of semi-competitive state. This was similar to Suzuka, where the faster McLaren driver (Piastri in Japan) who could have comfortably taken pole had made a crucial error while the slower McLaren driver (Norris there, Piastri here) just didn't quite have the pace to overcome Verstappen's magic.
These achievements in a difficult car are obviously giving Verstappen a huge buzz. But he was as surprised as anyone else. "The car really came alive in the night," he said, after making big changes between Friday and Saturday and then settling on a set-up in FP3 which was calculated to bring a balance as the temperature dropped.
"The grip was coming to me. But no, we didn’t expect this. In FP3 the gap was massive. It just shows when the track is hot all the other teams except McLaren are lacking a lot of pace. Our tyres are overheating more than theirs...tracks where you need a lot of mid-corner rotation and [that have] long-duration corners, that's a big problem for us. But here we're a bit more competitive."
Russell echoed Verstappen's thoughts: "Everyone except McLaren struggles with tyre overheating and the harder the tyre compound the less they overheat. So you'll see the biggest discrepancy on the softest tyre.
"But even on the medium, there was a lot of deg on Friday. So when you get to the race your tyres start overheating again and that's where McLaren will step back up compared to the rest of us. So if Oscar can get into the lead, he'll disappear. Just like in Bahrain. But if he doesn't, it could be a good race."
As for Norris, after such a devastating mistake? He will surely start on the hard tyre, run long and hope for a safety car after the others have pitted but before he has.
