Red Bull’s Max Verstappen was left disgruntled after missing out on pole position to Lance Stroll at Istanbul, despite leading every session up to Q3.
Verstappen was the fastest driver in the early stages of the session on the Wet tyres but he switched to Intermediates after Sergio Perez, who was on the green-walled tyre, pipped his lap time.
Verstappen improved his overall time on his last lap but couldn’t beat Lance Stroll to the top spot, with the Canadian claiming his first career Formula 1 pole.
“I think it’s the first time I sit here this year upset,” Verstappen said after the session. “I think that says it all.
“It was all going quite well on the wet tyres but already in Q1 when I tried to go on the Inters, it was not working at all compared to other people on Inters around me.
“I was in Q3, not very sure to go on the Inters because I felt really comfortable on the Extreme tyre.
“So once we boxed and went out I had no grip at all compared to the laps I was doing before. So just very disappointed to be in second.
“I think the track was definitely leaning to Intermediates but for me it just felt so poor that if I had just stayed out on the wets I could have done have done the same lap time.
“So clearly something was not working for us today on that tyre.”
After pitting for Intermediates, Verstappen rejoined the circuit behind Kimi Raikkonen; despite admitting that that may have hurt his tyre warm-up procedure “a bit”, he refused to label it as the cause of missing pole.
“I don’t want to blame it on that,” he said. “For us that tyre was just not working so we just need to look into that.It was probably the right tyre to be on but it was not good.
“We should have been doing better switching to that tyre compared to what we were doing before, we were comfortably in first compared to everyone else on an extreme [wet] tyre.
“So we definitely missed something there, doesn’t matter if you go purple compared to yourself.”
