Lawson qualifies 15th in Las Vegas, Russell storms to pole

Liam Lawson has qualified 15th for tomorrow’s Las Vegas Grand Prix after he was eliminated from Q2 this evening.

Lawson scraped through to the second stage of qualifying at the expense of Red Bull’s Sergio Perez but aborted his final flyer in Q2 moments before Franco Colapinto crashed heavily.

Colapinto’s crash came when he clipped the inside wall on the Turn 16 kink, seeing him rebound into the outside wall and severely damage his Williams. Work to clear debris and the barriers resulted in a delay for the start of Q3.

Once proceeding’s did resume, George Russell went on to claim the pole with the very final lap of the session, relying on rapid track evolution before making a late run to better Carlos Sainz by one-tenth.

Sainz had gone better than teammate Charles Leclerc moments earlier, only for a resurgent Pierre Gasly to surprise everyone to provisionally move to the front row with only three cars yet to complete their laps.

Yuki Tsunoda could not better Sainz’s or Gasly’s time, nor could Max Verstappen, but Russell did, to claim his fourth career pole.

Sainz will start from second, while Brazilian Grand Prix podium-placer Gasly will line up from third next to Leclerc.

Verstappen, who can clinch the title tomorrow unless Lando Norris outscores him by three points, will start from fifth, next to his title rival.

Tsunoda improved to seventh with his final effort and has Oscar Piastri for company on the front row, while Nico Hulkenberg and Lewis Hamilton complete the top ten.

Hamilton has shown strong pace all weekend, having topped each of Friday’s practices, but locked up and slid into the Turn 14 runoff on his first Q3 effort. He then had his final time deleted to fail to set a competitive time in the session.

Esteben Ocon and Kevin Magnussen lineup on the sixth row, having been eliminated in Q2 alongside Guanyu Zhou, Colapinto and Lawson.

Stroll was late to take to the track in Q1 after his Aston Martin suffered an energy recovery system failure in FP3. Lengthy repairs saw his car in pieces in the garage when qualifying began, but the team worked wonders to get him out for one timed lap.

It was to no avail for the Canadian, however, whose single-lap effort kept him at the bottom of the time sheets.

Lawson relied on his final lap to scrape through into Q2, pipping Perez by just 0.007 seconds to survive in 15th. Perez’s best Q1 effort was nine-tenths off Verstappen’s. Joining Perez and Stroll in the bottom five was Fernando Alonso, Valtteri Bottas and Alex Albon.

Bottas brings a five-place grid penalty to the weekend, with Sauber having deployed a fourth energy store on his car. The limit for a season is two, and the penalty relegates him to the rear of the grid.

The Las Vegas Grand Prix begins at 7.00 pm NZST on Sunday and will be shown live on Sky Sport.

Las Vegas Grand Prix Provisional Starting Grid