Sprint qualifying continued on Friday's Brazilian Grand Prix program, with Oscar Piastri ultimately emerging as the big winner.
The first few laps of SQ1 were interesting and it was already clear at this stage that this stage would bring some serious fireworks: on an ever-improving track we saw Liam Lawson in the lead, then Oscar Piastri and finally Lando Norris finishing the stage ahead of his teammate and Alexander Albon. Among the eliminated were two Aston Martins, Yuki Tsunoda, Guanyu Zhou and also Esteban Ocon.
In SQ2, Norris opened the lead again, followed by Oscar Piastri and Max Verstappen, and there was no doubt about the top three. However, almost anything could have happened behind them, in any way it could have developed. Who would have thought, for example, that Oliver Bearman, who replaced Kevin Magnussen due to illness, would smoothly advance to SQ3? However, we were not surprised by Sergio Pérez's elimination, a much bigger shock was the smooth elimination of Lewis Hamilton and Nico Hülkenberg - since both their team-mates had advanced -, next to them Franco Collapinto and Valtteri Bottas could not continue the fight.
In the last stage of sprint qualifying, the battle was already on soft compounds and the forces reversed: Oscar Piastri was the fastest and surpassed Lando Norris and Charles Leclerc, and will start from first place in the sprint of the Brazilian Grand Prix.
