So what do people think. Is Max kind of protesting? It didn’t seem like he tried that hard in qualifying. Obviously he doesn’t need to do shit for the rest of the season, but it kind of seemed like he hung it up early in Q3. I wonder how hard he is going to try during the race…
He didn’t phone it in, he never does. He went into this weekend knowing two things:
the Ferrari was likely to be faster over one lap due to the circuit’s mixture of long straights, big braking zones and slow corners suiting their car (see Monza).
the Red Bull usually has the best pace on race day regardless of its qualifying performance.
Gone are the days where Max has had to regularly risk crashing his car in quali to start as high up the grid as possible - he knows that as long as he has a strong qualifying and a clean start, he can almost always move forward in the race. His banker lap in Q3 was excellent and proved good enough to keep hold of P3 even as other drivers improved.
The only weekend this year where Max has really treated qualifying like life or death was at Monaco where your qualifying position is crucial because overtaking is almost impossible.
Albono said that their car is very temperature-dependent, so the cold helps. Combine that with the fact that they’re generally good on fast circuits and Bob’s your uncle.
I think the AT has improved massively with the upgrades this season (as have McLaren obviously). Didn’t look like McLaren would be anywhere based on practice though. Tsunoda is right to be annoyed, he should be further up.
I’ve gone Sainz pole for my predictions, I reckon Alonso will do well tomorrow.
Don’t hold out much hope for Hamilton catching Perez at this point
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