Valtteri Bottas finished third in the second Mercedes, with both the Black Arrows cars and the leading Red Bull, along with the other Q3 runners, surviving the middle qualifying segment on the soft tires on which they will start the race.
Hamilton was in the lead after the first runs in the third quarter with 1: 16.741 minutes, Verstappen 0.036 seconds behind.
But none of the top three went faster in his second run, with Hamilton falling back from a personal best in the first sector and lagging behind overall – in particular, he lost a part that slid far onto the large curb at the exit of the penultimate corner.
That gave Verstappen a chance to assert himself, but couldn’t improve his best times in any of the three sectors of the Barcelona track, as was Bottas.
Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc set a personal best on his final lap of Q3, finishing P4 ahead of Alpine driver and Carlos Sainz, who had led Leclerc in Q1 and Q2.
Daniel Ricciardo returned from his first quarter elimination at Portimao, taking seventh place for McLaren. He defeated Sergio Perez, who spun into Turn 13 on his first run in the third quarter just before the final chicane.
Perez had dipped his left wheels in the gravel and was spun around violently as a result, but was able to move away from the danger spot before Hamilton, who ran behind the Red Bull, set pole time. came through.
Lando Norris was ninth in the second McLaren ahead of Fernando Alonso.
In the second quarter, Ricciardo’s improvement in his final flight lap – which also included the segment’s best time in the first sector – knocked out Lance Stroll.
Pierre Gasly had looked fast in the first quarter, but retired for the first time in the second quarter of 2021 and ended up just ahead of Sebastian Vettel, who did not set a personal best with his last flight lap and ended up in 13th place.
Antonio Giovinazzi defeated George Russell in 14th place after the pair escaped the first quarter together for the second straight year.
Russell ran out of sequence with the rest of the Q2 runners and set his time before the final runs, which was a single effort that deviated significantly from the pace in the middle of the session.
Giovinazzi took hold of the media early in the second quarter and then improved as he returned to the softs for one final run in the final moments of the session to comfortably sit in front of Russell.
The first quarter had several big moments with traffic pulling back before the flying laps. One of them, in which Norris completed a hot lap and caught three cars at the final chicane, with two more slowing down the sequence, is under investigation. Qualifying is now over.
Yuki Tsunoda was the shock elimination in the first quarter after the AlphaTauri rider kept going during his warm-up lap to overtake Leclerc and run at the front of the field.
He set a personal best on his final lap, as did all the other drivers eliminated in the first quarter, but Tsunoda was shuffled back in order as others improved. Russell finished the final flight lap to oust Tsunoda at the very last moment.
Kimi Raikkonen finished in 17th place ahead of Mick Schumacher, who achieved his best F1 qualifying position in 18th (the Haas driver also took 18th place in Imola qualifying after Tsunoda was out at the beginning of the first quarter).
Nicholas Latifi landed behind Schumacher after severely driving his car over the curbs at the Campsa exit in the middle of the first quarter – an incident that also smashed the Williams’s left wing mirror.
Nikita Mazepin brought out the back of the field.
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