Max Verstappen took his fifth pole position of 2024, but McLaren's Lando Norris and Ferrari's Charles Leclerc were hot on his heels in the nail-biting shootout for the Miami F1 Sprint. F1Technical's senior writer Balázs Szabó analyses Verstappen's performance compared to his direct rivals' pace.

The sprint qualifying session saw Max Verstappen secure pole position, but the session was far from clear-cut because McLaren and Ferrari had much to offer in the shootout.

McLaren have arrived in Miami with low expectations, stating that the challenging Florida track had not favoured their cars in the past. However, as it has happened multiple times this year, McLaren looked extremely fast yesterday despite their pre-event expectations.

Elsewhere, Ferrari had a challenging day after Charles Leclerc made a mistake in the sole practice session. The Monégasque suffered a spin in the early stages of the single practice, which brought out the red flags. With the Ferrari driver unable to get his SF-24 pointed in the right direction, he could not record any further mileage during the session, leaving him with little to go on when Sprint Qualifying began.

Crucial lap times

In the end, Verstappen secured pole for the 100km Miami dash ahead of Leclerc with Norris only taking ninth following a mistake on his final tour. So far in 2024, the Dutchman has been quickest in all grid-deciding contests with the one exception of the wet session for the first Sprint Qualifying of the year, when Norris conquered the rain in Shanghai.

Interestingly, Verstappen has been quickest when it counted, but the quickest lap was recorded by Norris. The McLaren racer posted a 1m27.597s on the mediums in SQ2, meaning that Verstappen’s pole lap was by 44 thousands of a second slower than Norris’ best. It was not unique among the top ten to record the best lap on the mediums as five of them did not improve their times in the final segment on the red-banded tyres.

Having virtually played no part in free practice due to his mistake, Leclerc put in an eye-catching performance to set the second-quickest lap time. The Monegasque recorded a 1m27.749s in SQ3 which was two tenths of a second quicker than what he managed in the middle part of the shootout.

Pace comparison

As a comparison, we take the absolute best times of Verstappen, Leclerc and Norris. For the Dutchman and the Monégasque, it was their soft-compound lap in SQ3 (1m27.64s and 1m27.75s) while Norris recorded his quickest lap on the medium in SQ2.

Comparing these quickest lap times, Norris was quickest in 36.3 per cent of lap while Verstappen took a share of 34.3 per cent. Leclerc was in around 29.4 per cent of the lap quickest as shown on the graphic of Fdataanalysis.

There was a clear pattern to recognize between the performance of the three drivers. Verstappen was the strongest through the medium-speed sections (Turn 1, Turn 4-8 and Turn 11-15), all of which featuring quick changes of direction. It was therefore no surprise that he recorded the quickest time in Sector 1 with a 29.036s which was a tenth faster than what Norris managed with Leclerc a further tenth of a second behind.

Continuing to display staggering pace through fast corners, Norris was the quickest of the trio in Turn 3 which is a brutally fast, long-radius corner. The high-speed corners used to favour McLaren’s 2023 F1 car which the team managed to carry over despite having been eager to make the car more versatile over the winter.

Interestingly, the heavily-upgraded McLaren looked the quickest on the straights yesterday with Norris having been the quickest in the extremely long full-throttle sections between Turn 8 and 11, and he was the fastest down the back straight as well. The latter enabled the Briton to set the quickest time in Sector 3, albeit he was only fractionally quicker than Leclerc and Verstappen.

Leclerc was quickest in the initial section of the long full-throttle section after Turn 8 which confirmed Ferrari’s excellent traction. The Monégasque then dominated the slowest part of the Miami track, having been the strongest one in Turn 15 and 16. Interestingly, this latter corner was the one where he lost control of his SF-24, which forced him to sit out the majority of the sole one-hour practice session.

The five-time grand prix winner was then quickest once again in the slow Turn 17, and he dominated the entire medium-speed section from this corner until the finish line. This has confirmed Ferrari’s speed in low-to-medium-speed corners, but it was also down to the fact that Leclerc managed to keep his tyres in good shape for the last part of the track.