“That’s what happens when there’s a car in front of you just cruising two seconds in front. So that’s noted. Will be remembered as well.” Max Verstappen was not happy at the end of qualifying, having felt he was negatively impacted in the final sector by Lando Norris slowly returning to the pits after his own final lap.
Norris had run early, a sign of McLaren’s predicament in the face of a mounting challenge from external threats, while Verstappen was the last car on the road and ended up aborting his attempt having been just 0.02s down on George Russell’s pole time entering the Turn 16/17 chicane in the closing stages.
The complaints from Verstappen did not receive much in the way of sympathy when heard by Norris.
“They always complain – they complain about everything,” Norris said. “That’s Red Bull. I didn’t even know. I was like three seconds ahead or something. I can’t work it out either.”
It was hardly a war of words, but it was a touch of needle between two drivers who we can increasingly describe is in the title fight with the way the competitive picture is heading.
McLaren is in defensive mode, as it was in Baku, and so Norris went out first for his final Q3 run in order to avoid any potential yellow or red flags. As it was, he couldn’t improve on his fifth place on the grid.
Red Bull, by contrast, can afford to be far more aggressive. With Verstappen 69 points behind Oscar Piastri and 44 adrift of Norris, outscoring the McLarens is imperative, and with an improving car and a significant deficit to overcome, it has nothing to lose and everything to gain. So Verstappen was last on the road, risking his final lap being interrupted in exchange for the potential reward of the highest track evolution.
Piastri went just before Verstappen and was satisfied, as Norris remains his closest threat and he will start two positions ahead of his teammate. But he will be behind the Red Bull driver once again, on a track where Red Bull was not certain to be competitive.
“The last three weekends now have been really, really nice,” Verstappen said. “Up until that point, we were always throwing the setup left and right because it was just not working. Sometimes you had a weekend where it was OK, but now, the last three weekends, it’s been solid.
“We’ve just been fine-tuning, and that’s exactly what you want throughout the weekend. Of course, some layouts will be a bit better for us, some probably a bit more difficult, but the basis of the car is a lot more solid, and I think that is what you need.”
Verstappen warned on Thursday that the last high-downforce circuit – Zandvoort – had not been promising for Red Bull. But so far this weekend all of the evidence is of a package that can beat McLaren at a track Norris dominated on last year.

There are a number of factors in play making a rougher road for McLaren lately, team principal Andrea Stella says. Sam Bloxham/Getty Images
According to McLaren team principal Andrea Stella, that shift in the competitive picture has come due to a combination of factors, including a weakness in the MCL39.
“Our reflection is more general in terms of our competitiveness and it’s related to the fact that overall I think there were some cars that were faster than us today, and in particular Mercedes and Red Bull,” Stella said. “And we seem to observe a pattern, having been in Baku and then here in Singapore, that resembles what we have seen in Canada. And when we have braking with bumps and with curbs, in Canada we were not the best car, in Baku we were not the best car, and in Singapore we are not the best car.