Round-Up of F1 Qualifying

21 September 2019, Singapore - Charles Leclerc rewrote the Marina Bay Street Circuit form books by taking a stunning pole position, his fifth of the season and his third in a row, for Ferrari ahead of the 61-lap Formula 1 Singapore Airlines Singapore Grand Prix 2019 on Sunday.

Leclerc took a serious mortgage on his third successive race win as well with a stunning final lap of 1 minute 36.217 seconds, good enough to relegate four-time Singapore pole-winner Lewis Hamilton and his Mercedes to second place on the grid.

‘What a lap! What a lap! I lost control three times!’ radioed the 21-year-old Monegasque driver, winner at Spa and Monza since the summer break. ‘The team has done an amazing job to bring the package we needed and I am extremely happy to be on pole for tomorrow.’

Dismissed as contenders for pole or victory in Singapore, Ferrari confounded all expectations. In the other scarlet car, Sebastian Vettel looked all set to silence critics of his 2019 form when his first run in the third section of qualifying put him on top, but an erratic second run which he aborted cost him his own fourth pole position in Singapore.

Max Verstappen, expected to fight Hamilton for pole, will start alongside Vettel on row two, while rookie teammate Alex Albon performed outstandingly well and will start sixth behind the second Mercedes of a low-key Valtteri Bottas.

The Q1 shoot-out pitched Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull against each other for the top places on the grid, but the two McLarens and both Renaults were also fighting it out for ‘best of the rest’ as they are doing in the Constructors’ Championship.

Carlos Sainz won that battle by putting his McLaren on row four, but the Renaults of Daniel Ricciardo and Nico Hülkenberg are menacingly close in eighth and ninth. F1’s other stand-out rookie Lando Norris completed the top ten in the second McLaren.

Two drivers only just made it into the qualifying hour: Daniil Kvyat needed repairs on an oil leak to his Toro Rosso, while Sergio Perez’s Racing Point took a new gearbox – and a five-place grid penalty – after hitting the wall hard on the outside of Turn 22 in third practice.

Both teams performed heroics to get their men on track again, and in the last seconds of Q1 Perez just edged Kvyat out. Perez could get no further than Q2, in which he was eliminated by an agonising 0.040s along with the two Alfa Romeo drivers Antonio Giovinazzi and Kimi Räikkönen, who clouted the wall hard, Toro Rosso’s Pierre Gasly and the second Haas of Kevin Magnussen.