Mercedes: "It seems there wasn't much left in it"

Mercedes was supreme at the Paul Ricard circuit in previous years. That they are beaten by Verstappen here is not a good sign for the world champions. Mercedes has no excuse afterwards. They got the maximum out of Q3.

"There's quite a gap to pole and our laps were pretty good in the end so second and third is a fair result for us", said Andrew Shovlin in a team press release. "Valtteri continued build through the day from the solid baseline he'd established yesterday and Lewis managed to recover some confidence in the car after a difficult Friday; quite a bit of work has gone into fine tuning the balance and it doesn't feel like there was much more to come."

Mercedes was hampered in Q1 and Q2

Indeed, both Mercedes drivers came closer to pole position in the final stages of qualifying than it initially looked. That's partly because they were hindered a few times in the first part of qualifying by cars overtaking them during the outlap. According to Shovlin, this meant they had trouble getting the tyres up to the right temperature. But he also has to agree that Verstappen was simply too fast.

"Our main issue seems to be a loss on the straight from turn 9 down to turn 11 and by sector three we're no longer able to gain anything back in the corners. We've seen many times this year that our race pace is better than our qualifying and we've shown that we can win races from behind so we're still optimistic that we're playing for the win tomorrow", said Shovlin.