Mexico City: Carlos Sainz clinched pole position for Sunday’s Mexico City Grand Prix with a masterful performance in Saturday’s qualifying, surpassing Red Bull’s reigning champion Max Verstappen.
The Spaniard, set to depart the team at season’s end, recorded a time of one minute and 15.946 seconds, edging out series leader and three-time champion Verstappen—whose quickest lap in the top 10 shootout was annulled—by 0.225 seconds.
This result positioned McLaren’s Lando Norris, trailing Verstappen by 57 points in the drivers’ championship, in third place, followed by Charles Leclerc in the second Ferrari, with George Russell’s Williams and seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton behind.
Norris, facing the fifth-to-last race of the season, risks a significant setback in his bid to prevent his friend and rival Verstappen from securing a fourth straight world title.
Adding to Norris’s challenge, Verstappen is eyeing a fourth consecutive victory on the high-altitude track.
Both Norris and Verstappen will be without their respective ‘wingmen’, Oscar Piastri and Sergio Perez, for support on the grid, as both were eliminated in the first qualifying round.
Piastri, who topped the times for McLaren in FP3, struggled to advance and fell to 19th place, just ahead of Red Bull’s Perez, with two minutes remaining—while Norris surged to the front.
In the closing moments, substantial improvements from other drivers relegated Piastri and Perez to the elimination zone, stunning many and deeply disappointing Perez’s vast home crowd.
