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‘Going through hell’: The flop that baffled Merc... and opened door to Max stunner — Talking Pts
Verstappen claims first pole of 2026 | 01:57Mercedes brought a big upgrade to the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia this weekend anticipating it would boost performance by as much as 0.3s per lap.
Instead the team bombed to by far its worst qualifying result of the season, with a whopping half-second margin to pole-getter Max Verstappen. It was Verstappen’s first pole since last year’s Abu Dhabi Grand Prix and the first time in 2026 that pole position has gone to a car without a Mercedes engine.only place to watch every practice, qualifying session and race in the 2026 FIA Formula One World Championship™ LIVE in 4K. Even Ferrari, after some pre-qualifying tweaks, found a performance boost that put it ahead of the supposedly upgraded Mercedes.
Formula 1’s return to Malaysia for the Bahrain Grand Prix has completely shaken up the order, completely turned upside down the late-season form book that looked so well established. With 56 laps on this highly abrasive, extremely hot circuit to come on Sunday, you’d be brave to bet on the result. Mercedes took pole position in Azerbaijan by more than 0.8s just one week ago.
Sepang is almost as diametrically opposed to Baku as possible, but a 1.3s turnaround was not on the bingo card. After all, this is a team that’s started from pole position 11 times this season at all sorts of different tracks — and it’s achieved that with a car that’s had only one major upgrade, all the way back in May. Mercedes’s second upgrade of the season was supposed to bring as much as 0.3s of performance to the car.
Both drivers have suggested they’ve felt the boost in downforce, but on paper the trade-off has been deleterious to the car’s overall speed, with the team off the pace all weekend except for a brief glimmer of speed in final practice that evaporated as quickly as it appeared. Andrea Kimi Antonelli was quickest, qualifying fourth, but was 0.501s off the pace. Teammate George Russell’s new-found title momentum appears to have stalled immediately, with the Englishman eighth and 0.741s adrift.
“Very difficult to understand,” a baffled Toto Wolff told Sky Sports. “We have been a little bit caught out on Friday with some car behaviour that we didn’t see all year, but then you can say it’s very hot and the tarmac is very different to all the tracks. “It looked really good in the morning . We seemed to have, at least with Kimi, made a step in understanding.
Then qualifying was a little bit back to what we saw before, just no performance. ”Antonelli lost time down every straight and in every slow corner. The only places he made up time were through the high-speed sweeps of turn 5 and 6 and then turn 12. He was also quicker through the medium-speed turn 11.
“It looks like we are very draggy, because it’s the first time that we’re losing a lot of time on the straights,” Wolff said. “Then through the low speed … in turn 2 we are not able to turn the car, there’s just too much understeer. “Something else is going on, and we have to understand.
This is now working through the data and putting our heads together, because we still believe that the upgrade works; we just need to understand why not here. ” It’s impossible to say that the previous car spec would have been quicker this weekend, especially because Mercedes’s upgrades this year have all fired as expected.
But given how big an outlier this track is, and given teams had only around two months notice that it was going to feature on the calendar, you have to wonder whether this was the time to bring an upgrade that appears to have made some fundamental changes to the way the car works. Mercedes’s lack of pace was clearly a qualifying storyline from early in the piece, but even so, Antonelli threatened an additional upset when he had a Q2 lap deleted for track limits at turn 6.
It forced him to use another set of soft tyres to ensure he made the pole shootout, which meant he could complete only one lap in Q3. It wasn’t exactly the Q1 crash of Baku, but it was another tantalising vulnerability he exposed to Russell, who’s been talking a good game of getting himself back into the title fight all week.
Instead Russell lumbered to seventh with his first Q3 lap, and though he improved with his second attempt, he actually ended up dropping to eighth once Antonelli set a time good enough for fourth.
“Definitely it’s a shame for the mistake, but … it could’ve been much worse, and we’ll focus on tomorrow,” Antonelli said. There’ll be two rows separating them at the start of Sunday’s race — not a great outcome for Russell, who can’t afford to be outscored at any more races and who, ideally, needs to be winning every weekend.
The would-be title contender, who has between seven and eight weekends to close his 66-point deficit, pinned his hopes on the race being as unpredictable as qualifying.
“It’s a very demanding circuit on the tyres, the tarmac’s all broken up, it’s extremely rough, it’s hot out there and the tyres are going through hell, and for whatever reason it seems to be affecting us far more than others,” he said. “I hope we can fight for the podium. I think Max and Red Bull are probably out of reach, but … I think tyre deg is going to be huge tomorrow.
I think all three tyres are probably going to be viable as well. He’ll need to do a better job of capitalising on that opportunity than he did in qualifying, though. This weekend, round 16, is the second-longest wait Verstappen has ever had for his first pole of any season since he took his maiden P1 start in 2019. On Sunday he hopes to win the race.
It would be the deepest he’s ever gone into a campaign before claiming his first victory since his 2016 first. This is the first time a non-Mercedes-engined car has taken pole position this season.
More to the point, it’s the first pole position for Red Bull Powertrains, Red Bull’s in-house engine program, which made its debut this season, Ford, Red Bull’s technical partner, can also claim its first Formula 1 pole positions since Rubens Barrichello started from P1 at the 1999 French Grand Prix for Stewart with a Ford Cosworth engine bolted to the back.
“It’s just an amazing moment to get our first pole from where we came from at the beginning of the year, with all the difficulties that we had. “As a team we want to win. We’re here to win. We’re not here to just grab podiums.
“We are looking forward to tomorrow, but we also know that it’s not going to be that straightforward. There are so many things that we still need to see that have to work well or in our favour. But we’ll see tomorrow. ” Red Bull Racing has looked the most confident of any of the teams this weekend.
Verstappen didn’t blitz qualifying, but his lap times, often on different tyre compounds, have been quietly impressive, and he’s clearly built to an impressive pole position. His long-run pace in FP2 also looked competitive — a Formula 1 analysis concluded Red Bull Racing was the fastest car over a stint ahead of Ferrari and McLaren, with Mercedes a long way back.
The wait for Verstappen’s first win of the season — and the first win for Red Bull as an engine supplier — may have just a few hours remaining. Verstappen will share the front row with Lewis Hamilton for the 15th time — and the first time since the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.
Ferrari has built gradually into contention this weekend, and though it hasn’t looked like a match for Red Bull Racing — and Hamilton, 0.238s off pole, clearly was not a match for Verstappen — it’s at least as well prepared. Intriguingly Charles Leclerc gave up a set of hard tyres during FP3 to conduct a long run.
He’s the only driver — Ferrari is the only team — that’s used the hard tyre all weekend, and it’s expected to be crucial to the race. Hamilton also feels that the team has unlocked something important in the car just in time for qualifying.
“We made so many changes through all these practice sessions,” he said. “Because the cars are sliding, the tyres are overheating, it was really, really had to find a good balance. “But tomorrow’s a completely different ball game. ”Hamilton was quickest in the more twisty middle sector, showing again that Ferrari has the best chassis — though his total lack of speed down the straights also shows again how big a weakness the Ferrari motor is.
But downforce in the race, through the tyre-damaging faster corners, will help with stint length. It will allow Hamilton — and Leclerc, starting P4 — to manage their tyres and lean on them more when required. This is expected to be at least a two-stop race.
Hamilton won a three-stop race in Barcelona, where degradation was also high, and he did so because stopping three times allowed him to thrash his tyres hard enough to cover the car’s other deficits without having to worry about stint lengths. Of course everyone has come a long way since Barcelona, especially Red Bull Racing.
But if degradation ends up being so high that every team gives up on management in favour of more pit stops, then Ferrari could come into range again. McLaren ended up anonymous at the end of qualifying, as the fourth-quickest team of the session for just the fifth time this season. Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri were closely matched but more than 0.6s off the pace in sixth and seventh respectively, having never looked in contention for the front row.
Excluding Baku last week, where Russell put nearly a second on everyone, this is McLaren’s worst qualifying result since its Hungary upgrade put it on a run of three poles in four races, and it’s well below its season average overall.
“I think we struggled a bit more than we thought this weekend. My lap was good … but the performance of the car is a long way off. ”“I thought it was a pretty good session in general,” he said.
“We’re just not fast enough here. “ is going to be tough. I think our long-run pace did look pretty good yesterday, but the others around didn’t look bad. As has been the case all year, McLaren struggled in the slow corners, though it was more competitive down most of the straights than every other frontrunner.
McLaren boss Andrea Stella, though, believes the race will be decided not by pure pace alone but by who reacts best to the circumstances.
“Whether the track is wet or dry, we’re expecting a race full of twists and turns,” he said. “Tyre degradation will be a key factor for everyone, and based on what we saw in free practice, we believe we’re in a good position. “It’ll be a tight race, and our aim is clear: to capitalise on every opportunity that arises and fight for a place on the podium. ”
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