In the city of the game the qualification test for the 2025 Las Vegas Grand Prix It was fought on very wet pavement, a real roulette. However, two skillful you’re crazyLando Norris and Max Verstappen, emerged winners. Lando, the English leader of the championship, achieved his third pole position consecutive with a time of 1m47s 934/1000, beating the Dutchman Verstappen, second, who clocked 1m48s 247s. They both won, because their main rival, the Australian Oscar Piastri, finally qualified in fifth position after losing his fastest lap in the last seconds of the third part of the session, when he went off the track at turn 12 in the attempt to overtake Isack Hadjar’s Racing Bulls.
Verstappen is third in the competition, just 24 points behind Piastri, who is trailing Norris in the championship. with three grand prizes to go and a sprint race with 58 points at stake.
Norris, with an advantage of 24 points over Piastri and 49 over Verstappen, will not only have the advantage of starting from the best position this Sunday (from 1 a.m. in Argentina), but he can afford to wait calmly for the development of the race. Piastri, who will start on the third row behind Carlos Sainz, third with Williams in the qualyand George Russell, fourth with Mercedes, will have difficulty advancing. The Englishman from Mercedes, who was on pole and won in Las Vegas last year, clarified that in the decisive moments of Q3 he was handicapped by a problem with the power steering of his car.
As expected, after FP2 on Friday night in Las Vegas, The Alpine of Franco Colapinto and Pierre Gasly managed to advance to Q2the Argentine in 11th position and Gasly in 5th, in Q1.
With the extreme rain tires, which were used for most of the qualifying, Franco set a time of 1m54s 847/1000 and Gasly, 1m54s 432/1000.
The wet track conditions were changeable and the cars made numerous incursions through the escape streets.. This prevented multiple accidents and too many yellow flags. In Q1, with a Ferrari that he said was undriveable, Lewis Hamilton was left out while his teammate, Charles Leclerc, could even advance to Q3. At the end of the qualifying test it was said that Lewis had stepped on a “bollard” (a plastic cylinder that limits the track) and that it had become embedded under the car, creating a serious problem. Never before, with his car without breakdowns or crash, had Hamilton finished last in a Formula 1 classification.
Another eliminated by surprise in this part of the classification was the Italian Kimi Antonelli (Mercedes) who had finished second in the Brazilian GP.
Already in the second part of the classification, in the decisive moments and wearing intermediate tires, Colapinto had two attempts at a fast lap. The first opportunity was lost when, with the steering wheel turned, he stepped on a curb at turn 15 and the car almost spun. The second attempt, when he was already running out of battery power, forced him to adjust the braking too much in the penultimate corner and he continued on the escape lane. The stewards removed his one-lap record and this determined that he did not go beyond Q2. This is what Franco said before the ESPN cameras:
-How was that classification? Was it possible to go (to Q3)?
-Yes, (my) second-to-last lap was good, I was going down a lot, (up to) a second, and I touched the piano in the second-to-last corner, and everything went sideways. Then, I didn’t have any battery for the last lap, the rubber (was already) very hot, I couldn’t do the last lap. A shame, because that lap was quite good, I don’t know if (it was supposed to be) tenth, but eleven would have been safe. It was a difficult qualy, I think (a) good experience… (there was) very little grip and a lot of spray. The rubber overheated a lot. Tomorrow we will work to be better.
-You were there, just to go to Q3…
-Yes, well, a shame because we didn’t make it to the end, but I think we were closer than in the dry, and that’s good. You have to understand a little about the problem we have in the dry, but in the rain we were a little better.
He didn’t look happy, obviously, but he stressed that he had noticed progress in himself and in his car. In the lottery that resulted in the first part of the classification Behind him were Alex Albon (Williams), who hit the wall, Kimi Antonelli (Mercedes), Gabriel Bortoleto (Sauber), Yuki Tsunoda (Red Bull) and Lewis Hamilton (Ferrari).
Pierre Gasly He was still inspired in Q2 and was seventh, 825/1000 behind the fastest in that session, George Russell.
In Q3, with “intermediate” tires, it was difficult for him to bring the intermediate tires to the best operating temperature and he had to settle for tenth starting position.
It can be considered another surprise attributable to the rain that Charles Leclerc finished ninth in Q3, but the excellent set-up and The great traction capacity of the Racing Bulls proved superior to the Ferrari on this occasion. The New Zealander Liam Lawson was classified sixth, ahead of the Spanish Fernando Alonso (Aston Martin), 7th, and the Algerian Isack Hadjar, 8th, his teammate. The Racing Bulls team is sixth in the constructors’ competition and intends to secure that position coveted by Aston Martin and Haas.
The drastic change in weather was what threw the dice in the classification, although in the third training session in the middle of the afternoon, in Las Vegas, events were more within normality.
Russell had been the fastest with a time of 1m34s 054/1000, ahead of Max Verstappen at 277/1000. Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris had dedicated themselves to testing with a high fuel load and without taking risks. Therefore they were 19th and 20th, respectively.
In the Mercedes pit, Toto Wolff, the team boss, was especially smiling. He had informed the press that He had sold 15% of his stake in the AMG-Petronas-Mercedes squad for $300 million. This would put the team’s total value at $6 billion. The buyer is George Kurtz, a billionaire friend of his, an expert winning GT driver and a regular in endurance racing, and the main shareholder of the cybersecurity company Crowdstrike.
In FP3, Colapinto had been 16th, just over 7/10 of a second behind Gasly, who was ninth, 1s 508/1000 behind Russell. With the dry pavement you could see sparks flying when the bottom of some cars rubbed against the track.
After the race in Brazil, it was learned that the FIA had quietly forced several unidentified teams to remove from their cars heating devices for the titanium skid pads that are embedded in the wooden bottom. These skates should be flush with the level of the wooden board. When heated, they expand, protrude and you can roll with the chassis closer to the pavement without the wood rubbing and avoiding wear, thus maintaining the regulatory thickness. It was the excessive wear on the bottom of the car that led to Hamilton’s disqualification in the race in China this year.
In Las Vegas, at the moment, that episode has not been reissued. The teams focus on planning their strategies for the Grand Prix. Some rain is expected around seven in the afternoon this Saturday in the city of the state of Nevada, but the circuit should be dry, or almost so, by eight pm local time (1 on Sunday in Argentina), when the start takes place.
Lando Norris, who is already testing the crown, will have to decide how and against whom he will really race: against Verstappen who will attack him thoroughly or against Piastri who will try to come back from further back?
