Ferrari pair rue cold tyres in very close Austrian GP qualifying duel

Both Ferrari drivers rued cold tyres for their final runs in Q3 after losing out to Max Verstappen in Austrian Grand Prix qualifying.

The Red Bull driver thrilled the Orange Army by claiming just his third pole of the season in Spielberg on Friday, beating Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz by less than 0.1s.

And commenting afterwards, the Monegasque and the Spaniard highlighted the loss of tyre temperature caused by two red flags following crashes for the two Mercedes’.

“I think we are all three very, very close, so it was an exciting qualifying,” Leclerc said.

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“In the last lap I struggled a little bit bringing the tyres back after such a long time in the pits, but Max was just a little bit quicker, so congrats to him.”

Third-placed Sainz added: “When you look back and you see how close it is, you go back to the lap and find places where you’ve left that tenth of a second that could have given us pole.

“I know where the lap time is. I just wish I could have done it a little bit better.

“I’m sure these two guys also know more or less where they lost it or where they gained it. The good thing is that we put a good lap there at the end of Q3.

“It wasn’t easy because the tyres were very cold after the red flag,” he added. “Trusting the car into Turn 1 and Turn 3 wasn’t the easiest.”

Verstappen has already warned his car will be better over the Sprint on Saturday and the race itself on Sunday.

For Leclerc though, after recent disappointments due to poor reliability or strategy, he just hopes for an optimised weekend.

“Hopefully we’ll have an exciting race tomorrow,” he continued.

“I just want to have a clean race. Obviously, there’s been five races that it’s [been] a bit of a disaster on my side so I just hope that everything will go clean and that we can finally score the points that we deserve.”