Formula 1

MAX AND CHECO ARE BEST OF FRIENDS HELPING EACH OTHER TO LOCK OUT THE FRONT ROW IN ABU DHABI! TOTO SAYS MERC QUALI RESULTS ARE FOR THE TOILET!

Max  will start the final race of a 2022 season that he has dominated from pole position after finishing ahead of Oracle Red Bull Racing team-mate Sergio Pérez in Abu Dhabi.

Mercedes had been fastest during the practice sessions but were unable to challenge during qualifying as Verstappen took pole by 0.228 seconds from Pérez at Yas Marina Circuit.

Such was the dominance of the double world champion that once he had secured pole he was able to provide his Mexican team-mate – who is aiming to clinch second place in the championship – with a tow to help him secure second place.

Pérez is currently locked on points with Charles Leclerc in the standings and will start one place ahead of the Ferrari driver on Sunday.

There were mixed fortunes for Scuderia AlphaTauri with Yuki Tsunoda showing plenty of pace as he qualified in 12th, while team-mate Pierre Gasly failed to make it out of Q1 and will start from 17th in his final race for the team.

MAX: “It couldn’t have been better today, the tow worked out well as we managed to lock out the front row. We went out there and did our thing. As a Team we had an almost perfect qualifying and we are very excited for tomorrow. The most important thing is that Checo stays ahead of Charles so we’ll do what we can to make that happen.

I do think that our car is quick, there’s a massive question mark around the other teams though and how much long-run performance they will have gained overnight. We made a few mistakes in Brazil I guess but we learn from that and we are back where we should be.”

CHECO: “It is a great Team result for everyone back home and here in Abu Dhabi, we are in the best position to finish off the job and get that result tomorrow. It certainly was good teamwork with Max today, it was important to get both cars as high up as possible for the race. My Q1 and Q2 were looking strong, and I was hoping for more, but then Q3 wasn’t ideal, especially our first run.

That put us on the back foot a little and in the end, it wasn’t good enough for P1. We have a very long race ahead of us, so we need to finish the job off tomorrow and deliver a massive result for the Team. It will be important to get off the line well and get a strong start to get away from Charles.

We are certainly confident going into tomorrow that our race pace is good and we can race harder. We are a lot happier with performance than we were in Brazil. It would be a huge year for us if we are able to get second place in the Drivers’ Championship and make history for the Team. We will work hard and hopefully we can succeed.”

LCH:  We came here expecting this to be a difficult one for us but we didn’t expect a gap of eight tenths to pole position. We were losing six tenths today on the straights to the top cars. I gave it everything, so it’s a bit of a surprising result and just being so far behind Red Bull and Ferrari. Hopefully our race pace tomorrow will be better than our qualifying pace today.

There’s also some bouncing at this track, which adds to our lack of performance and issues with temperature splits on the brakes which we’ve experienced throughout the whole season. The whole team is working hard and they’re doing an incredible job to fix these issues, especially also for next year. I’m looking to tomorrow and the final race of the season!

Toto:  Today didn’t go our way unfortunately. We didn’t get the job done right and went backwards in terms of our performance, while our competitors made a step forward. We opted for a higher downforce and higher drag setup, and it was just too slow on the straights during the session.

We’ve also had issues with the brakes that we need to investigate. The weekend looked positive for us so far, especially during the earlier sessions but in the end, we didn’t deliver when it came down to qualifying. All in all, a disappointing day for the team. We want to be in the front, fighting for victories. Hopefully, our set-up will benefit from the earlier start time of the race tomorrow and the higher temperatures, which seemed to result in better car performance for us so far here in Abu Dhabi.