What a difference a day makes. In practice on Friday, Max Verstappen was nowhere, his Red Bull car, in his words, “understeering to the moon”. Twenty-four hours later, the four-time world champion had somehow claimed the 44th pole position of his career, stunning the 100,000-plus Silverstone crowd who had been eagerly anticipating a battle of the Brits on home soil, with McLaren’s Lando Norris and Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton looking all weekend as if they would be challenging for the front row.
In the end, neither man did. Norris will start third, just behind McLaren team-mate and championship leader Oscar Piastri, while Hamilton will start fifth, ahead of his team-mate Charles Leclerc which represents a win of sorts for Hamilton but behind Mercedes’s George Russell.
With Brits in third, fourth and fifth, there is still plenty for the home crowd to look forward to on Sunday. But they are all going to have to get past Verstappen, with the Dutch driver delivering once again when it mattered.
Verstappen has cut a frustrated figure of late. Punted out of Red Bull’s home grand prix in Austria last weekend, the 27-year-old’s future has been the subject of frenzied speculation with Mercedes’s Toto Wolff openly courting him.
On Friday, Verstappen finished fifth fastest in FP2, half a second off the pace and highlighting an “unbelievable” lack of balance in the car, particularly in cornering.,
