Red Bull's Max Verstappen admitted that he had not been confident about taking pole for this weekend's Bahrain Grand Prix and that the outcome of Saturday's qualifying session had been something of a positive surprise.
Verstappen's final round 1:29.708s was the first time that the reigning world champion had been on top of the timing screens all weekend.
He was 0.138s quicker than team mate Sergio Perez, after ferrari's Charles Leclerc made the surprise decision to save tyres by not making another run at the end of the round to challenge for the top spot, leaving him in third.
Verstappen admitted that he'd been struggling to find his rhythm this weekend up to this point, with the new RB19 tending to understeer and the overall behaviour differing from what he'd noted in pre-season testing here a week ago.
"I was actually positively surprised being on pole after the struggles I had in practice," he told David Coulthard in parc ferme after the end of the night time session under the floodlights. "That's positive, and normally our race car is better.
"I think it's been a bit of a tough start to the weekend yesterday and today," he acknowledged. "Not really finding my rhythm. But luckily, in qualifying, I think we managed to put the best pieces together."
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Asked how this year's car compared with last year's, Verstappen said that the lack of major rule changes over the winter meant that everyone had a better idea what they were dealing with coming into the new season.
"Compared to last year, I think everyone knows a bit more what they're doing with the car," he said. "So naturally, I think you already start off better and more competitive."
The FIA did make some tweaks to the rules to tackle the problem of porpoising experienced by other teams in 2022. They had expected to slow the cars by up to half a second, but that hadn't been apparent in testing, practice or qualifying.
"The changes I think slowed down the car a bit, but we are still going faster," Verstappen said. "That's a great thing to see. I think again, throughout the year, you will see that everyone is increasing their performance again a lot."
The entire field seemed much closer this year than at the same stage last year. All 20 cars were covered by 1.18s at the end of Q1, compared to 2.163 seconds from first to last in 2022's equivalent session.
In Q2, there was just one hundredths of a second covering Verstappen and Mercedes duo George Russell and Lewis Hamilton. And in Q3, the times set by the top seven cars were within seven tenths of a second.
But Verstappen clearly feels that there is a lot more to come once he's got more comfortable with the car. And his team mate Sergio perez also feels that today's result was not the best that can be expected from the RB19.
"I wasn't totally comfortable with the balance. I certainly believe that you can always improve a tenth on your lap," he said. "But I think to get this [front row lock-out] start for the team is really special."
And Perez suggested that the team had actually been focused more on race pace than on qualifying, making today's outcome even more impressive for Red Bull.
"If anything we prepared much more to the race," he explained. "We have more of a Sunday race car at the moment underneath us.
"We knew we had to do some compromises for quali, which we ended up doing, [and] they were not ideal. But hopefully tomorrow it pays out and we can have a very strong race."
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