Verstappen said: “It’s already slippery in the dry, but in the wet it’s not fun. It felt more like driving on ice.<\/p>\n
“I did feel we were a little more competitive on the extreme tyre. We were not quite competitive enough to fight for pole but second is still good.<\/p>\n
“Excited for tomorrow, I hope the inside [of the grid] is OK in terms of grip but we will see.”<\/p>\n
Sainz’s run to third was a strong performance in a car not expected to be quick in the wet, but he faces an investigation for rejoining unsafely in the first session.<\/p>\n
Behind Piastri, the Racing Bulls of Liam Lawson and Isack Hadjar were sixth and eighth, split by Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso.<\/p>\n
Leclerc and Alpine’s Pierre Gasly were ninth and 10th.<\/p>\n
Piastri had a decision from Aston Martin to switch Lance Stroll to intermediate tyres for a final run in Q2 to thank for progressing into the top 10 shootout.<\/p>\n
Stroll had been quick until then but could not switch the tyres on in time before the end of the session to improve his earlier time.<\/p>\n
Hamilton struggled throughout the first session and qualified last on outright pace for the first time in his career.<\/p>\n
“It was very slippery and the first set of tyres didn’t work for us and I just struggled to generate the heat in the tyres for some reason,” he said.<\/p>\n
“It’s a shame because the guys have done such a great job and the car was feeling awesome in FP3 and I really felt like we had good pace, but then the rain came. There’s not a lot to say, to be honest.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Verstappen said: “It’s already slippery in the dry, but in the wet it’s not fun. It felt more…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":147679,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":{"0":"post-147678","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-new-zealand","9":"tag-newzealand","10":"tag-nz","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147678\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}