Mercedes got the front-row lockout for the start of the Mexico City Grand Prix.
The challenge will be holding off the hard-charging Red Bulls and Formula One championship leader Max Verstappen over 71 laps on Sunday.
Valtteri Bottas and Lewis Hamilton seized on what Verstappen called a “terrible” qualifying for Red Bull today, to earn Mercedes its first 1-2 start of the season.
Bottas starts from pole position and, most critically, Hamilton gets an early race advantage over Verstappen in their fight for the season championship.
Verstappen and teammate Sergio Perez looked strong in practice and the first two stages of qualifying before things took a sudden turn.
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Verstappen blamed his eventual qualifying struggles on poor tire grip in the last session and an incident ahead of him when Alpha Tauri driver Yuki Tsunoda ran off the track and interfered with Perez, which forced Perez to bail out of a corner run off the track with Verstappen coming up quickly.
The moment between Tsunoda and Perez clearly frustrated Verstappen.
“Unbelievable, what a dumb idiot,” he said on team radio.
It’s unclear whether that was directed at Tsunoda or Perez.
After the race, he spoke further on the incident, which he claimed forced him to back out.
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“I don’t know what happened in front of me. I just saw a lot of dust, I thought a car crashed,” Verstappen said.
“I backed out of it a bit. No yellow flag came, so I continued pushing but I was basically finished. I want to look at what happened there.”
He had to be cautious and slow down, having been stripped of pole position in 2019 when he ignored yellow-flag warnings after Bottas crashed. It cost him dearly as Hamilton went on to win.
Verstappen is chasing his first career championship, and Hamilton his eighth, which would be a Formula 1 record.
Perez will start fourth, a disappointing result in front of a home crowd of more than 100,000 that loudly cheered his every lap. The only Mexican driver in F1, Perez is adored in Mexico City and expected to have a realistic chance at pole position, and possibly even a race victory.