Qatar GP:

George Upgraded to Pole Position, Lewis Starts P6

The final Sprint race of the season was followed by the next highlight under the floodlights at the Lusail International Circuit with Qualifying for tomorrow's Qatar Grand Prix.

Both George and Lewis made it through the first two qualifying sessions and into Q3. In the first run George took P1 and Lewis P4, in the second Lewis finished P6 and George missed pole by just 0.055 seconds, narrowly beaten by Max Verstappen.

After qualifying, the stewards investigated an incident on George's out lap where he was blocked by Max Verstappen. They found that Verstappen was driving unnecessarily slowly on his cool down lap and penalised him with a drop of one grid position for the race. This means that George will be on pole position for Sunday's race.

The penultimate Grand Prix of the 2024 F1 season starts on Sunday at 19:00 local time (16:00 GMT).

George Russell

Today has been a great day, it’s good to be in this groove at the moment with four front row starts. My first Q3 lap was really strong and I was pleased with it but unfortunately I wasn’t able to improve on my final lap. This was mainly due to the scrappy out lap I had with the near miss with Max that meant I ended up in the gravel so that didn’t help prep wise ahead of my final push lap. I’m still really pleased with P2, I’m taking all the positives and I’m feeling great in the car.

It’s going to be exciting tomorrow as the top four teams are very close. Starting on the right side of the track does seem to have a slight disadvantage, which we saw earlier on in the Sprint Race for the majority starting on this side of the track, which meant I couldn’t fight with Lando. I’m hoping tomorrow we’ll be able to fight with Max and stay ahead of those behind us, our race pace this morning looked good and the tyres seem resilient so I’m hoping we don’t end up in another DRS train and we can have some fun. There’s a lot of possibilities to do something different, I’m looking forward to it.

Lewis Hamilton

It was a pretty straight forward session for us in qualifying, the car was feeling decent and we were able to fix the bouncing. The tyres and the grip of the track was feeling great, this track is amazing. My last lap in qualifying unfortunately wasn’t great, I had the car snapping away from me which meant I lost time and couldn’t improve higher than P6. I was giving it everything and was generally feeling good but didn’t improve when I crossed the line.

Tomorrow I’m hoping for a good race, this track is great to drive so it should be an exciting race. I’m hoping the car will be in a better place tomorrow and we’ll be able to make some improvements. Unfortunately, today in the sprint all of the top Teams were really quick and it was hard to overtake but ’ll be giving it my all in the race tomorrow.

Toto Wolff, Team Principal & CEO

Overall, we are happy with the results we have seen today as a Team. The car seems to function well in these conditions as we can run the car low and stiff on a smooth track which ultimately suits the characteristics of our car and George seems to like the way it drives. We’ve seen this over the last couple of qualifying sessions and races. George was performing well in Q3 but was just lacking half a tenth to secure pole against Max.

For Lewis this generation of cars aren’t always suiting his driving style, he likes to be aggressive on corner entries and unfortunately this car at the moment can’t quite take it, especially on qualifying laps when it’s right on the edge. Lewis in the race, however, usually manages to turn it around like last week where he was overtaking car after car and coming through the pack. We’ll see what tomorrow brings and hopefully we can deliver another good result with both cars for the Team.

Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director

The Sprint Race was a bit frustrating, George lost a place into turn 1, he couldn't quite tuck in and lost a bit of ground to Piastri by not having a tow. It felt like we were close to getting a pass on a couple of occasions but once Lando was helping him out with DRS it was impossible to get through. Lewis had a good start, getting up to P5 but took a bit too much out of the tyres and dropped a place from there. It's a shame that the DRS zone was shortened for this year as it's always difficult to pass on the sprint races with everyone on the same age tyres, this has just made it even harder.

Qualifying was reasonable but frustrating for George to end up less than 60ms off pole for the second day in a row. The car was working well. It felt like George had a good shot at pole with a strong first lap but our second run wasn't clean and he failed to improve. Lewis was lacking a bit of rear stability in places which was preventing him going any quicker but P6 will still put us in the fight at the front. From the Sprint this morning it looks like the long run performance is very similar between all the cars so it should make for an interesting race.

2024 Qatar GP GP Qualifying Result

* Drop of one grid position