The inaugural qualifying session of the season saw Leclerc take pole position, with Verstappen, Sainz, Perez, and Hamilton completing the top 5 qualifiers. Differences between teammates that are worth noting are Bottas and Zhou, with the rookie’s fastest qualifying lap being nearly a second slower than his teammate, Hulkenberg - Aston Martin’s substitute driver for the weekend due to Sebastian Vettel’s positive COVID diagnosis - beating Stroll despite having not driven the car, and Albon being almost a second faster than Latifi.
The following image details the fastest minisectors of the Top 4 qualifying drivers. Since the top 4 is comprised of the Ferrari and Red Bull drivers, it is easy to make assessments of where each car was better throughout a single lap on this circuit. In this qualifying session, Ferrari had higher speeds in the slower speed corners and the early part of the straights (meaning greater acceleration), while Red Bull clearly has the advantage in top speed and the higher speed corners.
Let’s now compare the speed traces between pole-sitter Leclerc and the rest of the Top 4 qualifiers. In the first graph we can see that in the harder braking zones Leclerc broke a little later than Verstappen.
Looking further down the grid, here are the qualifying time differences between teammates:
The time difference between Zhou and Bottas is massive, yet unsurprisingly bigger than Schumacher’s difference to Magnussen. The unexpected result here is Ricciardo’s near 0.875 seconds difference between himself and Norris - after the previous season, that gap should be closing.
