Max Verstappen couldn’t keep the smile from his face after just barely missing out on the fastest time in Sprint Qualifying in Shanghai.

With Lewis Hamilton clinching the top spot in Sprint Qualifying, Verstappen’s second-place start means it is the first time the two World Champions have shared a front row since the 2023 Hungarian Grand Prix.

Max Verstappen ‘very happy’ to secure front row in Chinese Sprint Qualifying

Verstappen’s 1:30.867 would have been a new lap record for the Shanghai International Circuit, had the Dutch driver not been beaten by 0.018 seconds by Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton.

The stellar performances from both World Champions capitalised on an underwhelming SQ3 from favourites McLaren, as Lando Norris made errors on both of his flying laps to consign himself to sixth, while Oscar Piastri secured third – less than a tenth behind Hamilton’s pole time.

Red Bull hadn’t looked in the running to be near the top of the pile as Liam Lawson was knocked out in SQ1, following on from a practice session in which both Lawson and Verstappen had finished outside the top 10.

Verstappen hadn’t troubled the top times in either SQ1 or SQ2, with McLaren and Mercedes playing the lead roles in those sessions, before Verstappen turned up his pace on his one and only run in the final part of qualifying.

With an unexpectedly strong result secured, Verstappen spoke of his contentment with how the new Red Bull RB21 is handling under him.

“I’m very happy,” he said.

“I do think that in the first practice, we were quite a bit off. So I’m very happy to be on the front row. Honestly, the lap was very good.

“It’s always very tough when you go from a medium to a soft to nail the lap with no references. But, I mean, when you look at it, it was 18 thousandths or something off pole.

“But I don’t think we should have even been on the front row anyway. So I’m very happy to be second.”

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With Red Bull’s design philosophy for the RB21 focusing on widening the operating window by reducing the outright potential of the machine, a move away from the “peakiness” of last year’s troublesome RB20 as technical director Pierre Waché described it, the comfort Verstappen is finding is a positive at this point of the season as the quest for chasing more performance begins.

“I don’t think the balance is massively off. Too slow, I would say,” Verstappen said of his discovery of the RB21 on the soft tyre in low-fuel conditions.

“But this is good for us. It’s a little motivation boost, I think, as well for everyone that we keep nailing the laps, we keep trying to maximise everything that we’ve got.

“You need to do that as well, at the same time, when you may be struggling a little bit more for pace.”

Having delivered a strong result to line up on the front row for Saturday’s Sprint race, Verstappen also revealed his personal pride with the way he had driven.

“It’s always very hard to say but I was very happy with what I was doing during qualifying,” he said, before being asked about the threat from behind from the McLarens.

“I think they looked very fast up until that last run, so I think it will be very hard to keep them behind but, hopefully, it will be fun.

“We are all, I wouldn’t say close, but at least we can race a bit around. That would be nice for me.”

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