Sprint qualifying continued on Friday's Brazilian Grand Prix program, with Oscar Piastre eventually emerging as the big winner.
The first few laps of SQ1 were interesting and it was already clear that this stage would bring some serious pyrotechnics: on an ever-improving track, we saw Liam Lawson in the lead, then Oscar Piastri, and finally Lando Norris closing the stage ahead of his teammate and Alexander Albon. Among the dropouts were two Aston Martins, Yuki Tsunoda, Guanyu Zhou and Esteban Ocon.
In SQ2, Norris opened again at the top, followed by Oscar Piastre and Max Verstappen, there were no questions about the top three. However, almost anything could have happened behind them, it could have developed in any way. Who would have thought, for example, that Oliver Bearman, who replaced Kevin Magnussen due to illness, would smoothly advance to SQ3? However, we are not surprised by Sergio Perez's elimination, a much bigger surprise was the smooth elimination of Lewis Hamilton and Nico Hülkenberg - since both had teammates who advanced -, next to them Franco Collapinto and Valtteri Bottas could not continue in the next competitions.
In the final stage of the sprint qualifying, the battle was already on soft compounds and the forces were reversed: Oscar Piastra was the fastest and overtook Lando Norris and Charles Leclerc to start from the first position in the sprint competition of the Brazilian Grand Prix.
