Lando Norris took pole position for the SĂŁo Paulo Grand Prix on Saturday, beating George Russell by 0.204s in a qualifying session repeatedly halted by torrential rain. It is his third consecutive pole at Interlagos and his first anywhere since Madrid in September. Russell will not start alongside him: engine penalties to five drivers have reshaped the grid, and newly crowned champion Kimi Antonelli lines up second. The full starting grid.
Standing water and a red flag
The rain arrived just as qualifying began. Minutes into Q1, with the field on intermediates, Russell radioed race control to warn of aquaplaning, and the session was red-flagged with standing water across the circuit. It restarted only after the medical car had inspected the track, and further interruptions turned the afternoon into a long, stop-start affair.
Norris made the most of the conditions when it mattered. "You feel you want to push so much more but you can't," he said of the shifting conditions.
Both Brazilians in the wall
It was a difficult day for the home drivers. Gabriel Bortoleto crashed his Audi and starts 19th. Rafael CĂąmara, making his Formula 1 debut for Haas in place of Esteban Ocon while still racing in Formula 2, also hit the wall but had done enough to line up 11th.
A grid rewritten by penalties
Russell, second fastest, drops five places to seventh for a new engine. Charles Leclerc qualified fourth but takes a 10-place penalty for exceeding his allocation of internal combustion engines and starts 14th, after arriving in Brazil late on Thursday following the birth of his daughter.
The heaviest penalties fall on two drivers who had already struggled. Lewis Hamilton, 11th in qualifying, changed his entire power unit after problems in final practice and starts from the back. Max Verstappen, out in Q2 in 16th, takes 30 places for new engine, turbocharger and exhaust components and joins him there. Sergio PĂ©rez, with a fresh engine, turbocharger and MGU-K in his Cadillac, starts last.
That promotes Liam Lawson to third, ahead of Nico HĂŒlkenberg, Isack Hadjar and Oliver Bearman, with Russell seventh, Fernando Alonso eighth, Alex Albon ninth and Oscar Piastri tenth.
Interlagos history says don't count anyone out
Starting at the back is not the end of the story here. Verstappen won the 2024 race from 17th on the grid in similar conditions, and Hamilton won from tenth in 2021. Pole has still been the strongest position in recent years: Norris won from it last year. Every winner at Interlagos.
With the title settled in Mexico, the fight is now for second place. Verstappen, Hamilton, Russell and Leclerc are separated by 16 points, and three of them start outside the top ten. The standings.
I'm Alex Da Costa, a systems engineer with more than ten years of experience designing and maintaining data-heavy infrastructure. I've been watching Formula 1 since the 2005 season â Alonso's first championship, the year Schumacher's seven-title era finally cracked â and it's been an obsession ever since. Pit Lane F1 is what happens when that IT background meets a lifelong F1 habit. I started this site because the big outlets cover the headline result but rarely the data underneath: why a pit-stop window mattered, how a circuit's lap-record history actually compares, what every driver has done at every venue. So I built it. Race recaps for every Grand Prix since 1950, head-to-head career comparisons, telemetry replays for 2024 onward, and per-circuit deep dives â all from open data sources, fact-checked against multiple references, and written in plain language. The site is run independently. No team, driver, or commercial partner influences what gets published. If you spot a factual error or want to suggest a feature, the contact page is the fastest way to reach me.
