Norris\u2019s chance disappeared when he set off in the dirty air behind Alex Albon\u2019s Williams, and he also erred at the final corner when running into the gravel.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been a good day, which is nice for a change,\u201d smiled Piastri, who\u2019s a long shot for the title now but has not given up belief, having quickly rejected McLaren\u2019s overtures about him helping Norris to the title.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m pretty happy. It has been a while since I\u2019ve been on P1,\u201d said Piastri, whose last sprint pole was at the Belgian Grand Prix in July and who was last on any pole in the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort a month later.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt almost went horribly wrong at turn four,\u201d he reflected. \u201cTurning left in a right-hand corner is never a good thing. I lost two-tenths. I thought that lap was over, but I kept pushing and was able to find some more time.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is only the sprint, but I\u2019ll take what I can get. The pace was there all day, and hopefully we can keep that going.\u201d<\/p>\n
Norris can lift the title this weekend in the penultimate race of the year if results go his way, but Piastri demonstrated he\u2019s not about to give up the fight quite yet as he beat his teammate by 0.230 seconds.<\/p>\n
If he can win the sprint race \u2013 which he did for his first ever F1 success on the same circuit in 2023 and repeated the dose last year \u2013 Piastri could grab a maximum eight points and reduce the deficit to Norris before Saturday evening\u2019s qualifying for the main race.<\/p>\n
Verstappen was moaning all day about his Red Bull, and the man who won brilliantly in Las Vegas at the weekend even finished behind fifth-placed teammate Yuki Tsunoda, while Aston Martin\u2019s evergreen Fernando Alonso was fourth.<\/p>\n
Lewis Hamilton\u2019s miserable time at Ferrari continued as he was knocked out in Q1 in 18th. The unhappy seven-time champion complained his car \u201ccouldn\u2019t go any quicker\u201d and, when asked if there were any positives he could take from the weekend, added: \u201cThe weather\u2019s nice.\u201d<\/p>\n
Earlier in the day, Piastri had set out his stall with the fastest lap of 1:20.924 in practice, ahead of Norris by 0.058sec.<\/p>\n
AAP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Norris\u2019s chance disappeared when he set off in the dirty air behind Alex Albon\u2019s Williams, and he also…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315601,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[64,63,817,813,816,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-315600","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-formula-1","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-f1","11":"tag-formula-1","12":"tag-formula1","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315600\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}