Charles Leclerc claimed pole position for the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, threading the needle on the streets of Baku for F1’s first sprint race weekend of the season.
The Ferrari driver beat the Red Bull of Max Verstappen into second place, the first time Red Bull have been denied the top spot this season. Verstappen’s team-mate Sergio Pérez was in third and Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz fourth. Mercedes had a mixed qualifying with Lewis Hamilton taking a solid fifth but George Russell going out in Q2 in 11th place.
With the street circuit rubbering in and improving lap times as the sun began to sink low in the sky the final runs were vital. Verstappen set the benchmark with a time of 1min 40.445sec on his first hot lap, pushing hard to just breathe past the walls of the demanding street circuit. Leclerc was equally brilliant in his challenge however, exactly matching the Dutchman’s time down to the thousandth of a second and was placed second only because Verstappen had set his time first.
On the final laps Leclerc went out first and immediately found an aggressive but beautifully judged line on a track with no margin for error. He went quicker in the opening two sectors with a brilliant lap that Verstappen could not match to claim pole with a time of 1min 40.203s. It was almost two-tenths up on the Dutchman, a huge achievement given the strength of the Red Bull.
Leclerc’s first pole of the season is the 19th of his career and his third in a row in Baku but he has yet to convert one of them into a win in Azerbaijan. After a trying start to the season, this is the turnaround he and Ferrari required. He suffered an engine failure at the opening round in Bahrain, had a 10-place grid penalty at the next meeting in Saudi Arabia and was unlucky to be punted out of the race on the first lap in Australia. Taking pole was the evidence the team required to suggest that without setbacks they can compete with Red Bull.
The pole ensures Leclerc will start at the front of the grid in Sunday’s grand prix as F1 embraces its new sprint race format for the first time. Having been formally approved on Tuesday it is considered within the paddock as an improvement on the previous composition of the sprint weekend.
F1 introduced the sprint meeting in 2021 with three races and this season it has increased that number to six. The previous format has long been considered unsatisfactory. It had held a single practice session on a Friday morning, followed by qualifying to decide the grid for the sprint race on a Friday afternoon and from which pole position for the weekend would be awarded. A second practice session would follow on a Saturday morning and then a sprint race which would decide the grid for the race on Sunday.
This led to the confusing position in which the driver who claimed pole on a Friday might well not be on the front of the grid for the GP. There were also issues with many of the races being lights-to-flag processions, lacking jeopardy or risk-taking by drivers unwilling to take chances of suffering damage before Sunday’s GP.
This weekend Saturday will now host what is being called the sprint shoot-out qualifying, a truncated version of the traditional arrangement which will decide the grid for the sprint race which will follow. The sprint will be over 100km with points from eight to one for the top eight, while both events will be stand-alone and have no bearing on Sunday’s GP, with the sport hoping the new structure will address the shortcomings of the previous format to encourage drivers to race harder.
Verstappen currently leads Pérez by 15 points in the world championship, with Fernando Alonso in third.
The opening session was interrupted by two red flags, the first when AlphaTauri’s Nyck de Vries crashed out, swiftly followed by Pierre Gasly’s Alpine, both hitting the barriers at turn three. De Vries will start from 20th and Gasly from 19th.
