Mark Hughes: What did the McLaren-Red Bull battle mean again?

George Russell’s accident with two corners to go saved Lando Norris’ victory and kept the McLaren Formula One driver in pole position at the United States Grand Prix when he was in danger of being demoted by Max Verstappen’s Red Bull.

Even if you could call it a lucky break, it was a phenomenal round on the brink. It’s very rare to see a driver at this time who keeps a car on the absolute edge for the entire lap, uses every millimeter of track width on the exits, really pushes himself without losing momentum, he has that did.

No wonder he said it was the round of his career. It could have been one of the turning points in anyone’s career. Because the McLaren wasn’t particularly quick around the bumps on the Circuit of the Americas.

Depending on whether the tire pressure was increased, the McLaren was actually on a knife edge between pretty bad (P10 and P12 in Q1) and OK.

McLaren scraped around here, driving incredibly low and stiff to squeeze out whatever was in there. This put a real strain on the car with the esses not being replaced and still bumpy.

The car that had to get through there was the Red Bull, and it’s clear that the changes the team were able to make in the four-week gap (applied here only to Verstappen’s car) build very effectively on the progress made since Singapore.

The esses made it incredible, almost immune to the ups and downs of the others. But in the slower corners, of which there are several here, he would give way to the McLaren and – especially – the Ferrari.

But on Max’s first Q3 outing, he lost some of the time in turn 19 – more than Norris suffered in his wild oversteer moment there. Max lost so much momentum that he had to downshift again to regain momentum, and yet he was still only a few hundredths away from Norris. “I knew there would be a pole lap,” said Max, “so I wasn’t too worried.”

Except George Russell…turn 19 again, but on the final runs. The Mercedes was super fast in sprint qualifying on Friday. But that was before everyone had lowered their cars in response to the reduced severity of the bumps since the track was resurfaced.

On the hotter track on Saturday it wasn’t the same car at all. According to his own statements, Verstappen tried to find a time that was not yet possible. As he was running as the lead car on the track, the yellow flags his accident caused meant no one could complete his second lap.

Obviously it was a blow for Verstappen. For Carlos Sainz it was perhaps an even bigger disappointment because in that second Q3 run his Ferrari was magically better than when he had set his third fastest time in the first few runs, more than 0.3 seconds behind Norris and Verstappen .

“I don’t know if it was the drop in track temperatures, but for some reason the car came alive,” said Sainz. His time to the end of Sector 2 wasn’t quite as quick as Verstappen, losing 0.15sec to the Red Bull through Sector 1, but he appeared to be much closer to P3 than the official times would suggest.

As always, the Ferrari was super fast in the slow corners. But on the soft tires the balance wasn’t quite good enough – until the last aborted run. It was clearly the fastest car on the mediums in SQ1 and SQ2 the day before – and showed great racing speed in the sprint on these tires.

Sainz was very pleased with the fact that the car was just as good as before on the first conventional race track since its major upgrade at Monza. “I thought it would be a Monza/Baku special, but this is a track with long combined corners that we struggled with.”

In this final Q3 run, with the lower track temperatures, it looked like we were seeing the true pace of the soft tires for the first time. Charles Leclerc was just under 0.1 seconds behind, but well ahead of Oscar Piastri, who simply couldn’t muster the same confidence in the McLaren as his teammate and was over half a second behind.

In fact, Norris had little confidence in the car before Q3. He was 0.3 seconds behind Verstappen in the second qualifying, but a little encouraging comment from engineer Will Joseph. “Let the car come to you,” he advised. “Not too much together.” This was an indication that the limited tolerance of the front tires should not be overused when combining braking and lateral forces at corner entry.

This is something that Ferrari does very well, but McLaren doesn’t really like. So he just let it hang – and when he did that, with the car flying through these super-fast esses, crashing into the ground, the tail popping out but still grippy, he got into a different zone.

But would Verstappen have put Norris on pole if Russell hadn’t crashed? His time to the end of Sector 2 (midway between turns 12 and 13) was still 0.014 seconds behind Norris’ first run. In fact, at this point it was a little slower than Max’s own first run. But in the remaining long corners, which followed just before the yellow flags, he began to gain time. It is possible that he could have made up this deficit to Norris in the final sector. But not sure.

“It was a beautiful lap,” said Norris about his pole. “I knew I wouldn’t do it again.” In fact, his second attempt at the end of Sector 2 was already 0.23 seconds slower.

“I took a little more risk – everywhere. I tried to limit the high-speed battle compared to the Red Bulls. Then stop braking [Turns] 12-16 – as soon as one part goes wrong there everything goes wrong, I was hooking it up for the first time all weekend. It fit together perfectly. Do you know when you go for a ride and think it won’t get any better? I pulled it out. We were behind Red Bull and Ferrari here.

“People might hate me when I say this, but even though we’ve had the best car in some races over the last few months, it definitely hasn’t been the case in every race. We were there in Singapore, but not in the race before that in Baku. Red Bull and Ferrari were faster. We believe that. That was just two races ago. When you’re on a team, you can confidently say where you stand.”

The McLaren wasn’t as fast here as Norris’ lap made it seem. Where was it missing? “Drive through and drive at high speed,” he said, “and compared to the Ferraris we lose time in the slow corners.” Their slow speed is incredible. In Singapore they were super fast, but just didn’t make it in qualifying. We’re not quite there yet and the others have taken a step forward.”

The last point is perhaps the most significant. The Red Bull hasn’t returned to its dominance from earlier in the season here, but it has found its performance in fast corners without losing balance in the slower corners – and that’s something it just couldn’t do a few races ago .

It’s good enough to allow Verstappen to compete – and that’s an impressive prospect for the others.