Following a miserable Sprint race, Red Bull achieved an impressive comeback while qualifying for the Qatar Grand Prix.
Max Verstappen will start from the front row having been stripped of his pole position by the stewards for driving unnecessarily slowly and impeding Mercedes driver George Russell.
The Dutchman had initially beaten Russell to pole by 0.055 seconds but the stewards looked at the footage before their final timed laps, ruling the Red Bull driver had forced the Mercedes to take avoiding action at Turn 12 after loitering on the racing line.
As a result, they handed him a one-place grid penalty, meaning Russell inherits the pole for the Grand Prix from Verstappen, with the two McLarens starting from the second row.
Going into the session, Red Bull looked nowhere near pole having finished P8 and P20 in the Sprint race, with Jenson Button claiming he’d never seen Verstappen look ‘so close’ to being out of the top 10 places.
The team made a number of changes in Parc Ferme which helped them figure out their ‘Achilles heel’ according to Helmut Marko, when speaking to Motorsport Magazin.
Red Bull’s improved tyre warm-up helped Qatar turnaround
Verstappen only used a single set of soft tyres during his final run in Q3 having topped Q2 with an impressive lap, owning to Red Bull’s improved tyre warm-up phase.
Red Bull were by far the weakest of the top teams, but the turnaround also enabled Sergio Perez to get into Q3 and up to P9 on the grid.
“It all worked fine and the tyres came up to temperature well. The small working window of the car is our Achilles’ heel. We changed a few things between the sprint race and qualifying, including with warming up the tyres,” Marko told Motorsport Magazin.
“In the end, we drove a total of three laps with one set of tyres. In the second fast lap, you could see that a used tyre was marginally slower than a new one.”
Max Verstappen going for ninth win of 2024 season
Verstappen was dominant in the first part of the season having won seven of the first 10 races, owing to Red Bull’s advantage with the RB20.
As rival teams got more competitive, he endured a more difficult run of races and suffered a 10-race win drought between the Spanish and Sao Paulo Grands Prix.
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The win in Sao Paulo effectively sealed his fourth title, having come from 17th on the grid in tricky conditions around the Brazilian circuit.
Winning in Qatar would seal his ninth win of the season, and put him one away from taking nearly half the victories in 2024 which did not seem possible midway through the year.
