Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia Qualifying: Verstappen Takes Pole as Sepang Shuffles the Order
Formula One has somehow ended up in Malaysia for the Bahrain Grand Prix. It sounds strange, and it looks even stranger, but that is the consequence of the major armed conflict in the Middle East. With the original race unable to go ahead, Bahrain and Formula One found an unusual solution: move the event to Kuala Lumpur and bring back the legendary Sepang circuit. And what better place to throw the championship order into the blender?
Sepang is famous for spectacular races, brutal tyre degradation, and weather that can turn a normal Sunday into complete chaos. This time, there was no rain to complicate qualifying – just 33°C air, a 58°C track, and an abrasive surface that was more than capable of exposing weaknesses across the grid.
Red Bull thrived, with Max Verstappen taking his first pole of the season. Lewis Hamilton put Ferrari on the front row, while Mercedes and McLaren – the two teams that have dominated much of this and the previous championship – suddenly found themselves asking rather different questions.
Why Sepang matters
What makes Sepang so good? Its character. Long straights, heavy braking zones, and fast sequences of corners are combined with an abrasive surface and famously unpredictable weather – a demanding combination that leaves very little room for a car that is good at one thing but compromised everywhere else.
The technical challenge is equally interesting. The fast corners encourage teams to run plenty of downforce, but too much aerodynamic load comes at a serious cost on the straights. Braking stability is crucial, while the heat puts additional pressure on the brakes, power unit, and cooling systems.
In other words, Sepang rewards versatility. Ideally, you want a car that can do everything reasonably well, which should sound like good news for Mercedes. Instead, the championship leaders have looked unusually uncertain in Malaysia.
Q1: Aston Martin survives, Cadillac does not
Q1 was relatively quiet at the front, although Arvid Lindblad (Racing Bulls) had an unusual complaint over the radio. “I don't know why, but I hear on the front right, like on the front right-hand side of the car, a tiny rattling noise.”
The real surprise came at the other end of the timing sheet. Nico Hülkenberg (Audi), Oliver Bearman (Haas), Esteban Ocon (Haas), Alexander Albon (Williams), Valtteri Bottas (Cadillac), and Sergio Pérez (Cadillac) were all eliminated.
Hülkenberg apologised to his team for his mistake, while Ocon was left frustrated by the timing of his final run. “I think we were too early, guys. But... yeah, the car was good, so it’s a shame.”
Both Aston Martins, however, made it through to Q2. Considering how much the team has struggled for pace this season, that was already a rather unexpected result.
Q2: A scare for Antonelli
Q2 brought a small warning for Max Verstappen, who was shown the black-and-white flag for driving unnecessarily slowly. Kimi Antonelli then had a lap deleted for track limits, to his apparent surprise – another little complication for Mercedes as the pressure began to build.
Fernando Alonso subsequently received the same black-and-white flag as Verstappen for driving unnecessarily slowly. The Aston Martins could not repeat their Q1 success. Alonso was eliminated in P12, while Liam Lawson (Racing Bulls), Carlos Sainz (Williams), Lance Stroll (Aston Martin), Franco Colapinto (Alpine), and Arvid Lindblad also failed to make Q3.
Stroll at least had something to celebrate: P14 meant he had finally broken his rather unfortunate qualifying record. Meanwhile, Gabriel Bortoleto (Audi) was understandably delighted to make it through to Q3.
Q3: Verstappen finally gets his pole
Q3 was all about Max Verstappen. The Red Bull driver put together the fastest lap of the session to take pole position, with Lewis Hamilton (Ferrari) alongside him on the front row. For Verstappen, it was his first pole position of the season and another indication that Red Bull’s recent progress is beginning to translate into results.
Hamilton, meanwhile, was visibly delighted with second. After a difficult weekend for Ferrari so far, the front-row start gave the team something to celebrate.
McLaren, meanwhile… Well. The last year’s championship leaders could only watch as Red Bull and Ferrari complicated the top end of the grid. Norris qualified fifth and Oscar Piastri sixth – a disappointing result for a team that had arrived expecting considerably more.
But the most interesting part was perhaps not the final classification itself – it was what the qualifying order revealed about the cars.
Red Bull: Finally finding the balance
Red Bull may have finally figured out what its car actually wants. Verstappen had looked like a genuine contender from Friday onwards, suggesting that the progress made in Baku was not simply a one-weekend anomaly. At Sepang, the slippery surface exposed understeer across the grid, but the RB22’s sharper front end allowed Verstappen to benefit from the characteristic.
The upgrades introduced in Baku have also made the car more predictable through different phases of the corner. It is still not perfectly balanced everywhere, but there is now a much clearer sense of what the car will do when the driver asks it to. That predictability matters: Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar can push harder without having to constantly compensate for an unexpected loss of balance, while the improved platform also appears to be kinder to the tyres.
The RB22 was also able to carry strong speed through the corners without giving too much away on the straights – a combination particularly valuable at Sepang, where there is nowhere for a one-dimensional car to hide. The more predictable platform also makes energy deployment easier to exploit, allowing Red Bull to remain competitive across the entire lap rather than relying on one particular strength.
For a team that has spent much of the season trying to understand its own car, that may be the biggest change of all. Red Bull did not suddenly find a magic setup in Malaysia; it arrived with a car the drivers seem to understand much better.
Ferrari: A front row with caveats
Ferrari’s front-row result did not exactly look inevitable after the first few sessions. The SF-26 had spent much of the weekend struggling with an unstable rear and giving away too much on the straights, but the picture gradually changed as the track evolved. Ferrari found a more convincing balance and, crucially, seemed to keep the tyres under control better than several of its rivals as the speeds continued to rise.
Sepang also happened to soften one of Ferrari’s usual weaknesses. The low-grip surface made outright straight-line performance less decisive, while the long corners rewarded a car with a confident front end and good entry speed. Instead of trying to recover time on the straights, Ferrari could build it in the corners – exactly the kind of trade-off that suddenly made the SF-26 look much more competitive.
Hamilton and Leclerc then showed just how fine that window was. Lewis extracted more from the high-speed section through Turns 5 and 6, using more energy in the process, while Charles was able to match him elsewhere. But Leclerc admitted that he had underestimated just how quickly the track was evolving. As the surface improved and speeds increased, the tyres were taking more load, and a few slides later in the lap cost him the chance to fight Hamilton for second.
So Ferrari is approaching the race with a front-row start, but also a useful reminder that this was not simply a case of the SF-26 suddenly becoming faster everywhere. Ferrari found the right conditions, found the right balance, and managed to exploit the window when it mattered.
Mercedes still does not understand the problem
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff admitted the team had been caught out by car behaviour the team had not seen all season. The different Sepang tarmac appears to have exposed some unexpected weaknesses, with the W17 losing significant time on the straights and struggling to rotate through the slower corners.
The biggest problem was drag. “It looks like we are very draggy, because it’s the first time that we’re losing a lot of time on the straights, especially to Max,” Wolff explained. The car also suffered from too much understeer in Turn 2.
The problem was not simply a lack of downforce, though. Mercedes tried to add more load for qualifying, hoping to unlock performance through Sepang’s fast corners, but the extra aerodynamic drag came at the expense of one of the W17’s traditional strengths: straight-line speed. Worse, the higher-downforce configuration pushed the aero balance further rearwards, while taking load off brought a new problem – too much oversteer.
In other words, Mercedes was caught in a rather awkward compromise. Add downforce and the car becomes faster through the quick stuff but harder to rotate in the slower corners; take it away and the W17 becomes more nervous at the rear. The team could improve one part of the lap only by making another part more difficult, leaving Russell and Antonelli with a car that never quite seemed to find the right balance.
For Wolff, however, the result did not mean the upgrade package itself had failed. Mercedes still believes it works; the problem is understanding why it is not working at Sepang. “We still believe that the upgrade works. We just need to understand why not here.” That made the result particularly frustrating: Mercedes had expected the upgrade to bring roughly three-tenths of performance, only to find itself three, four, or even five-tenths backwards instead.
George Russell was similarly unsure about the lack of pace. Mercedes had been off the Red Bulls from Friday onwards and simply failed to make the progress it had expected through the weekend. The good news is that Russell expects Sunday to be a very different proposition. With high degradation and all three compounds looking viable, Mercedes should have more strategic options and George believes a podium is still possible.
Mercedes may therefore have simply stumbled into one of those circuits where its usual strengths stop working. The W17’s straight-line efficiency and power-unit performance are normally among its biggest assets, but Sepang’s low-grip surface reduced the value of both. Add in the balance problems, and Mercedes suddenly had far fewer ways to recover the time it was losing – making this look more like a very Sepang-specific headache than a fundamental problem with the car.
For now, though, even Russell could not quite explain what had happened. “It was a strange one out there today.”
McLaren has an even bigger problem
Lando Norris was rather more blunt about McLaren’s struggles. “No, we’re just slow. The car’s not good enough here.”
The reigning world champion believes the unusual Sepang surface has played a major role in shaking up the competitive order. “I think this tarmac is very different to a lot of other tracks we’ve been to this year, and therefore, I think you see Mercedes struggle a lot more today, especially. You see Red Bull quicker than they usually are. So, I think the order is just shaken up a little bit.”
McLaren had expected the surface to hurt more than usual, but perhaps not quite this much. Norris also pointed to the straights as another weakness, saying he was still losing time regardless of whether the problem came from the car design or the power unit.
The straights were a major headache for McLaren. The MCL40 was losing time through less efficient power-unit deployment, while the cooling requirements forced the team to run more open cooling than it would have liked, adding yet more drag. And the losses did not stop there: the car was also weaker under braking, leaving McLaren with very few places on the lap where it could claw the time back. At a circuit like Sepang, that is a particularly unpleasant combination. McLaren was not simply missing one big strength – it was giving away small chunks of lap time almost everywhere.
At least Lando was satisfied with his own lap. The problem, in his view, was simply that the car was not quick enough, which leaves McLaren with plenty to think about before Sunday. The abrasive surface, high temperatures, and fast corners are likely to make tyre management one of the defining factors of the race, yet Norris still sees opportunities to recover positions through strategy. “It’s a long race. There are a lot of pit stops that could be up for grabs, and potential to make positions, so we can still be optimistic, for sure.”
So, what happens on Sunday?
Sepang’s abrasive surface, high temperatures, and fast corners put enormous loads through the tyres. Degradation is expected to be high enough that strategy could become just as important as outright pace, changing the picture significantly compared with qualifying.
Red Bull has the obvious advantage of starting at the front, but the ace up its sleeve may be elsewhere: it appears to understand its car better than it did earlier in the season. Verstappen found the balance he needed when it mattered, and now he has a clear opportunity to fight for his first victory of the year.
Mercedes, meanwhile, has work to do before it can realistically expect the upgrade to deliver what was promised. McLaren has an even larger gap to close, and Ferrari has suddenly found itself on the front row. In other words, Sepang has done exactly what Sepang tends to do: shake everything up.
Now comes the difficult part. Can Verstappen finish the job?
Starting Grid
Max Verstappen (Red Bull) – 1:35.130
Lewis Hamilton (Ferrari) – +0.298
Kimi Antonelli (Mercedes) – +0.501
Charles Leclerc (Ferrari) – +0.536
Lando Norris (McLaren) – +0.627
Oscar Piastri (McLaren) – +0.632
George Russell (Mercedes) – +0.741
Isack Hadjar (Red Bull) – +0.428 (5-place grid penalty for using a seventh ICE of the season)
Pierre Gasly (Alpine) – +2.080
Gabriel Bortoleto (Audi) – +2.543
Liam Lawson (Racing Bulls) – 1:37.023
Fernando Alonso (Aston Martin) – 1:37.220
Carlos Sainz (Williams) – 1:37.527
Lance Stroll (Aston Martin) – 1:37.566
Nico Hülkenberg (Audi) – 1:37.970
Oliver Bearman (Haas) – 1:37.980
Esteban Ocon (Haas) – 1:38.233
Alex Albon (Williams) – 1:38.600
Valtteri Bottas (Cadillac) – 1:38.611
Sergio Pérez (Cadillac) – 1:38.933
Franco Colapinto (Alpine) – No time (15-place grid penalty: 5 places carried over from Azerbaijan + 10 places for using a fifth ICE)
Arvid Lindblad (Racing Bulls) – No time (30-place grid penalty for using a fifth ICE, fifth turbocharger, and fifth exhaust system)