First let’s acknowledge Lewis Hamilton’s super job in taking the Chinese Grand Prix sprint race pole in his second Formula 1 race for Ferrari, comfortably outperforming his struggling team-mate Charles Leclerc.
Let’s also acknowledge that Max Verstappen made a front row which should be out of bounds to a Red Bull.
But McLaren is still the fastest despite qualifying only third (Oscar Piastri) and sixth (Lando Norris).
How so? McLaren got its run plan all wrong in hindsight. It went for the safe and secure push-cool-push sequence in the short-duration SQ3 where you get only one tyre set. That way, any error - perhaps from the gusty wind in a car which is extra sensitive to it - could be recovered.
That was the theory and perhaps McLaren was encouraged in that choice by the raw pace advantage it had shown in practice earlier in the day (Norris had over 0.4 seconds on everyone in FP1).
But on a track which was getting quicker towards the end, McLaren’s run plan meant it would be carrying around an extra 2.6kg of fuel (costing around 0.1s) on the drivers’ first flying laps and that the tyres were past their best on their final ones when the track was at its best.
Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes, having seen just how quick McLaren was, opted to go for broke with single-lap runs, carrying less fuel and going out late.
Within that framework Hamilton took his pole and Verstappen - going out super-late to really squeeze everything possible from the situation - was just 0.018s off pole.
But the fact is that even with the combination of extra fuel and more worn tyres, if Piastri had put the best sectors of his two laps together, he’d have been on pole by 0.039s from the next non-McLaren in a compromised car. Ironically, McLaren’s underlying raw pace was its undoing.
Norris suffered more than Piastri as he was forced to abandon his final lap after a lock-up at the hairpin and his first lap included an oversteer snap moment at Turn 13 coming onto the back straight.
“We seem to struggle a bit more with the wind than the others,” he said, “and I was pushing a bit too much.”
More from Chinese GP sprint qualifying
- Hamilton's 'gobsmacked' reaction
- Edd Straw's trackside verdict of a struggling Liam Lawson
- An unusual stewards summons for Williams
The Shanghai circuit was gusty and Norris believes this brings out the worst of the car.
“The difficulties we’ve had with the car showed more today. This feels more like Bahrain [testing], in fact. The car is still good, though.”
The other difficulty for everyone was the tyres. With a very high Pirelli-imposed minimum of 27.5 psi for the front tyres it was very difficult not to overheat them.
The McLaren’s advantage in Melbourne (and very apparent too in Shanghai FP1) was in having better control of the rear tyre temperatures than the others. But the higher track temperatures of qualifying (around 3°C higher than in FP1) made it all about the fronts.
With only one set of tyres for each of the SQ sessions, those who pitted in SQ1 to cool the tyres (rather than staying out and lapping slowly like the McLaren drivers did) did better. This was partly why Hamilton set the best SQ1 time (from Norris).
But in the shorter SQ3 session there was no time to pit. It was push-cool-push or single push. In hindsight, that tyre behaviour, the reluctance of the fronts to come down to optimum temperature and pressure once they’d done a push lap, meant that McLaren’s overconfident SQ3 run plan was especially wrong, made yet worse by how much the track grip was improving as the temperature dropped towards the end.
But Ferrari and Hamilton called everything right and he was understandably delighted.
“The last race was a disaster for us but we knew there was more pace in the car we hadn’t been able to extract. Here I had a better feeling in the car straight away and it really came alive from lap 1. My first sector was really strong. There’s still time to find, though.”
Although Hamilton was pleased with that first sector around a track at which he is historically extra-quick, that was still a quarter-second slower than Norris. In the middle sector Hamilton was fastest of all and in the final one he was within 0.1s of Piastri. Verstappen’s late run on the improving track had him on much the same pace as Hamilton in the first sector and fastest of all in the final sector – but not quite by enough to overcome Hamilton’s middle-sector advantage.
It was very clear how pleased Verstappen was with his personal performance.
“We shouldn’t really be on the front row,” he said. “The balance of the car is not massively off, it’s just a bit too slow. But if we keep nailing the laps, maximising what you’ve got, then…”
Leclerc, in fourth, was 0.2s slower than Hamilton, struggling particularly through Turns 1-2-3 at the start of the lap.
“I just didn’t do a very good job,” he related, “and Lewis was faster. I struggled through the same place last year too.”
At 0.320s off Hamilton’s pole, George Russell felt that was ‘about right’ for where the Mercedes was at here. Team-mate Kimi Antonelli didn’t get his softs up to temperature by the start of the lap and it just cascaded from there, leaving him 0.569s and two places behind Russell.
