Speaking afterwards, Verstappen said: “I think the whole of qualifying actually went quite well, we managed to improve the car run after run. I’m happy to be on the front row if you look at where we came from yesterday.
“Q3 was tough [after Carlos Sainz’s crash], your lap gets cancelled with a double yellow, then everyone only has one run and you don’t want to overdo it so you want to stay within the limit. I’ll take second, I’m happy with that.”
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Asked about the challenge of getting the tyres into the right window for that final, decisive lap, the Dutchman added: “It’s always quite difficult.
“Tyres can give you a lot of lap time or lose you a lot of lap time. I think today for us in qualifying it worked quite well, so I was happy with that.
