Verstappen takes 40th pole after Austrian sprint win

SPIELBERG: Red Bull’s triple world champion Max Verstappen followed up a Saturday sprint win by putting his car back on pole position for Sunday’s Austrian Grand Prix, with McLaren’s Lando Norris again alongside on the front row.

The pole was a career 40th for the Dutch 26-year-old and his fifth at the team’s home Red Bull Ring, where he has won more times than any current driver and can count on huge support from his ‘orange army’ of fans.

George Russell was third fastest for Mercedes, after McLaren’s Oscar Piastri was ruled to have exceeded track limits and was demoted to seventh on the grid.

Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz will start fourth at Spielberg’s Red Bull Ring with Mercedes’s seven-times world champion Lewis Hamilton fifth and Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc sixth.

“We tried to adjust the car a little bit after the things that we learnt this morning, I think it worked well,” said Verstappen, who was chased hard by the McLaren drivers in the sprint but looked much faster in qualifying.

Verstappen nailed provisional pole with a lap of one minute 04.426 seconds and then went even faster with a final flying effort of 1:04.314.

“It has been a while that we have actually been on pole (for a grand prix), so it’s great,” said Verstappen, not counting top slot in the sprint.

“It’s a great feeling. The team has been working really hard to make the car more competitive and I think this is a great statement.”

Norris, the champion’s closest title rival but 71 points adrift and feeling under the weather all weekend, had no answer to that and finished the session 0.404 slower.

“I think it was as much as we could do today. Max was in a league of his own. Clearly much quicker than what we had, so I’m happy,” said the Briton.

Piastri had gone second momentarily but Norris pushed the Australian down to third and the stewards then added another four places after ruling he had gone completely off track at turn six.

The McLaren driver was unhappy with a knife-edge decision he called embarrassing.

“I didn’t go off the track, I stayed on the track,” he said.

“I was right to the limit of the track, I think that’s what everyone wants to see... there’s no reason this corner should be an issue for track limits, especially when you stay on the track like I did. Or not in the gravel.”

Red Bull’s Sergio Perez qualified eighth with Nico Hulkenberg ninth for Haas and Esteban Ocon completing the top 10 for Renault-owned Alpine.