2024 Japanese Grand Prix - Qualifying Results & Summary

Max Verstappen won the qualifying session in Japan and scored the fourth consecutive pole position in 2024.

Coming into qualifying, it wasn't clear just how big Red Bull's gap to the rest of the field could be. In FP1, Ferrari was quite close to the team from Milton Keynes, and Helmut Marko expressed his worries about the Italian team.

However, Max Verstappen established his dominance with the first lap (1:28.866) 0.388 quicker than everyone else. Interestingly, this lap was already quicker than the fastest qualifying lap from last year.

Aston Martin brought significant upgrades to Suzuka Circuit. While they helped Alonso, who had the second fastest lap of Q1, they didn't help Lance Stroll at all, who was knocked out of Q1 in P16.

Suzuka is one of the tracks where drivers' input really matters and can make a difference. This was shown when five drivers from five different teams were knocked out of Q1.

The second part of qualifying didn't bring many surprises, with only drivers from the bottom five teams in the Championships being eliminated.

Yuki Tsunoda pleased his home crowd in Japan by being the only driver from the bottom five teams to put in a fast enough lap to make it out of Q2. His lap was half a tenth faster than Daniel Ricciardo's.

In Q3, Tsunoda just didn't have the pace on the top five teams and lacked more than a second on the quickest Verstappen in the end.

The Japanese Grand Prix qualifying session was perhaps the closest so far in terms of the final difference between the first and the second place.

Sergio Perez, who struggled at Suzuka Circuit last year, matched the times of his triple World Champion teammate this time around and was only 0.066 seconds slower.

Lando Norris, who didn't show much pace throughout the weekend, waited for the right moment and completed the top three.

The session didn't go as well as hoped for Ferrari drivers, both lacking around half a second on the Flying Dutchman.

Notably, Lewis Hamilton out-qualified his teammate George Russell for the first time this season. Nevertheless, he was still far off the pace of the best, only in P7, and was left confused as to where he could have gained more time.