Winners and losers from Spanish GP F1 qualifying at the Madring The Race Formula One 2026: Norris pips Antonelli to Spanish Grand Prix pole by 0.011sec - as it happened The Guardian Verstappen explains focus for Spanish ...
Just 0.011s separate first and second in the first-ever Formula 1 qualifying session at the Madring, and the first four slots on the Spanish Grand Prix grid will be occupied by drivers from four different teams too.
But considering all the fears of a Sunday procession, is this the end of the action?
And if it is, who's maximised their opportunity, and who's been found wanting?
Eighth in Q1, ninth in Q2...Piastri was well off the pace throughout qualifying.
He had to abort his first flying lap of Q1 and, from then on, it was a "messy" session by his reckoning.
He even called it a "pretty crap" go in Q3, as he laboured to seventh.
"That's how it goes sometimes unfortunately," he said. "It's been a bit of a better weekend, like Monza, in that I at least am...happier with what the car's doing, and today was simply just one of those sessions."
More painful will be the fact that it's expected to be hard to overtake here. And even more painful will be the fact that team-mate Lando Norris took a stunning pole position - so the pace was definitely there.
A winner not just because of the end result, but because of the manner in which it arrived - pretty much out of nowhere.
The earlier stages of qualifying suggested this would be a fight between Mercedes and Ferrari, with Max Verstappen's Red Bull maybe interloping.
Norris was fifth in Q1 but only seventh in Q2, and when Kimi Antonelli stuck his Mercedes on provisional pole with the first 1m31s lap of the weekend, having been narrowly usurped by Lewis Hamilton in the first Q3 runs, it looked at though the session was going to form.
But then came Norris, with a full-send, ultra-committed lap in his McLaren.
The last corner was untidy - team principal Andrea Stella reckoned Norris lost three tenths there - but the rest of it Stella called "a masterpiece", and what Norris reckoned was probably the best qualifying lap of his entire career was enough to snatch pole from Antonelli by a hundredth of a second.
Not totally clean from the world champion, but certainly brilliant. - Ben Anderson
Gap to Antonelli in pace: 0.314s (not great) Gap to Antonelli in positions: four (also not great)
Reporting synthesized and verified under Nexvoro.tech editorial guidelines. Full primary records referenced via Google News US Sports.
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