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Ferrari came prancing in to shake things up at the end of Qualifying at the Formula 1 Mexico City Grand Prix.
With Charles Leclerc in P2, and Lewis Hamilton in P3, this marks the first time that both of them will start a race in the top three this year, and the Scuderia’s best qualifying result as a whole for the 2025 F1 season.
Both Leclerc and Hamilton have looked rapid throughout the weekend, with Hamilton crediting this to the approach the team has taken in Mexico.
“We've not really moved the car forward necessarily in development,” Hamilton said after the session was over, “But we've extracted more from it. Our process is better this weekend, and that's what you're seeing.”
This is also Hamilton’s personal best Qualifying result in a grand prix so far this year, something that the crowd seemed cognizant of as they roared and cheered so loudly that he could barely hear the questions being asked of him during the post-Qualifying on-track interview. And that energy and support will certainly buoy him going into the main race.
“P3 is kind of the perfect spot actually at this track,” Hamilton also said, “so I'm hoping I can make the most of that at the start.
“I think our race pace is not too bad... It's difficult to know really, but I'm really hoping, you know, with this crowd–I know it’s going to be an amazing crowd here tomorrow–so we’ll try and give it a good race.”
Ferrari has done well at this track in the recent past. In fact, the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez is the last track at which the team took a victory, with Carlos Sainz claiming the top spot of the podium here last year.
On what a victory here would mean, Leclerc said, “It would mean a lot. So we'll do everything in order to get the first place into the first corner, and then see what's possible.”
Leclerc put down a lightning-fast lap early on in Q3, which set the benchmark for the rest of the field. And the only person who was able to get ahead of him was Lando Norris, who has found himself in pole position for the first time since the Belgian Grand Prix.
This gives him a significant up on both Max Verstappen, who qualified in P5, and his own teammate and current leader in the Drivers’ standings, Oscar Piastri, who qualified in P8 and will start in seventh as Sainz moves down the order from P7 to P12 due to a five-place grid penalty he received after making contact with Kimi Antonelli at the United States Grand Prix.
See the table below for a full breakdown of the 2025 Mexico City Grand Prix Qualifying Results:
Cover image via Ferrari Media Centre
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