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Reports this morning are that RBR's grease monkeys were up all night beavering away on Verstappen's car. And observers can't feature them working this long on changes that would have remained within the purview of parc fermé. So the pit lane start hasn't yet been announced but the evidence strongly suggests that's what's coming.

What (allegedly) happened in Qualies was that Tsunoda was more comfortable (than Max) with the setup he had in the Sprint race, so they took the decision to put Max in a similar set-up going into Qualies for the race. Except Max was better than 4/10ths further off the (Q1) pace than he had been in (Q3) Sprint qualies.

I think the Red Bull cars always have a narrower working window than the competition, but Verstappen drives with the precision that enables him to exploit those narrow parameters. Tsunoda can't match Max's consistency so he can't extract as much from the car. In race qualies, Verstappen still extracted (slightly) more from the setup than Tsunoda but it definitely was less to his liking than the Sprint setup had been.

I keep looking at that grid in disbelief because the slowest Racing Bull is nine slots better than the fastest Red Bull. Hadjar and Lawson simultaneously have their second best grid positions of the year.

Antonelli is on the front row for the first time in his career, third youngest driver ever to do so. He was 3rd on the start grid at Miami but this only makes the 3rd time this season he's qualified better than teammate Russell.

And there is NO RAIN in the forecast for today for São Paulo. Which can only mean one thing. Expect a repeat of the Floods of Noah.