Perez on pole for Miami GP & 'upset' Verstappen 9th, as crash ends qualifying early

“There’s still a very long race ahead. I’m not really thinking about that. For now. I just want to to focus on to my race preparation and get through it”.

Alongside him on the first row will be Fernando Alonso, whose lap time may have been 0.36sec slower than that of Perez, but was 0.15sec better than Carlos Sainz’s Ferrari.

“The car came alive in qualifying,” said the double world champion. “[I’m] extremely happy with P2 – front row of the grid”.

Behind him is an unconventional grid, with Kevin Magnussen, fourth, followed by Pierre Gasly, then George Russell, Leclerc and Esteban Ocon.

Far behind is McLaren: the only team to lose both drivers in the first Q3 stage, as it continues a disastrous start to 2023 — despite the presence of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos on the pitwall.

From the start of qualifying, strong winds for qualifying brought unpredictability to the session, and a series of errors.

The margin for error was miniscule too, with only 0.4sec between the second-fastest time of Sainz and eleventh-placed Russell.

Joining the McLarens in exiting at this stage were Logan Sargeant — racing ten minutes from where he began his karting career — as well as Yuki Tsunoda and Lance Stroll, who had attempted to complete the session on a single set of tyres, where rivals used two.

They were joined, after Q2, by Lewis Hamilton, Zhou Guanyu, Nyck de Vries, Nico Hülkenberg and Alex Albon.

Then came the key mistakes on the first flying laps of Q3. Oversteer in Turn 5 sent Verstappen wide in Turn 6 and he abandoned the attempt, pitting without a time on the board, which left him relying entirely on his final flying run.

Perez had no such difficulties, as he became the first driver to post a time under 1min 27sec, leaving him on provisional pole.

However Leclerc, who started first in Azerbaijan, nudged the wall on his flying lap and locked up at the very next corner — the final big stopping point ahead of Turn 17. He crossed the line a second behind Perez.

Verstappen and Leclerc had it all to do in their final runs but Leclerc, on the limit and taking a large chunk of kerb in Turn 5, lost the Ferrari into Turn 6 and spun into the barriers, in a repeat of the spin he had during Friday practice.

“I think what’s unacceptable is doing twice the same mistake in the same corner,” he told Sky Sports. “I am really disappointed with myself. You can always find excuses in those situations: the wind was really strong, it was really tricky. The set-up of the car was really tricky but I put myself in this condition. I wanted this set-up but I thought I would be able to extract the maximum out of the car in Q3, which is normally one of my strong points. I know also that I’m taking more risks than others probably in Q3 and that’s why, most of the time I’m doing good Q3s but this is too much.”

Within seconds of the crash, the red flag had been deployed, forcing several drivers to abandon their laps, including Verstappen, who had been fastest in the previous  Q1 and Q2 stages.

“That was definitely a mistake of mine —  tried to put in on the limit,” Verstappen said of his initial, abandoned Q3 attempt. “Then you rely on a bit of luck. I’m just a bit upset with myself.