Leclerc Takes Pole Position In Las Vegas As Ferrari Finish One-Two

Charles Leclerc will be starting on the pole position at the 2023 Las Vegas Grand Prix, when he dominated Saturday's qualifying.

After very mixed results in Free Practices, no one really knew what to expect of the Las Vegas Strip Circuit heading into the qualifying, but Ferrari's Charles Leclerc was confident that his team could get the pole position.

It was the Monegasque driver that won the first two Free Practice sessions, as Mercedes' George Russell won the third Free Practice, only hours before the qualifying started.

The first surprise came already in the first part of the qualifying, when both McLarens of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri didn't make it out of the Q1, meaning there was even less competition for the pole position.

Two more Top 10 runners were out of the qualifying in Q2, when Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton and Red Bull's Sergio Perez finished eleventh and twelfth, respectively.

Going into the Q3, drivers struggled to really improve their lap times. With the first three drivers separated by less than one tenth of a second after their first runs (Leclerc, Sainz, Verstappen), the stakes were high ahead of their second runs.

First, Leclerc managed to improve to all-time best 1:32.726, as Max Verstappen couldn't respond, with his lap 0.378 seconds slower than the Ferrari driver, but the Dutchman will still start from the front row.

Sainz didn't manage to beat his teammate with his second run, finishing 0.044 seconds behind Leclerc, but because of his 10-place grid penalty, the Spanish driver will be starting out of the Top 10, alongside the likes of Perez and Hamilton, who were eliminated in Q2.

It seemed that no one would be able to get nowhere near the Top 3, but Mercedes' George Russell nearly did that, finishing only 0.008 seconds behind third Verstappen, with Alpine and Williams also surprising positively in the qualifying.

Pierre Gasly finished fifth, 0.513 seconds behind the pole-sitter, with two Williams cars finishing sixth and seventh. Alex Albon placed sixth, 0.597 behind the Monegasque driver, while Logan Sargeant finished seventh, 0.787 behind the leader.

For Leclerc it marks his fifth pole position in the 2023 F1 season, but he's yet to translate that into a race win, but with a clear pace advantage ahead of Red Bull's, he will try to do that during the Saturday's race, which will start only 21 hours after the conclusion of the qualifying.