Ahead of today's Sprint, the air temperature is 29 degrees C, while the track temperature is 43 degrees, warmer than yesterday. Pirelli was the first to admit that yesterday's Shootout was 'rather unusual', for while the track continued to evolve significantly for the first half, as from the end of SQ2, it was clear the times were not coming down or were even getting slower. The phenomenon became even more marked in SQ3 when the usual improvement going from the mediums to softs was negligible or at least not significant, while usually the step in terms of lap time is usually quite marked. Indeed, Lando Norris' 1:27.597 in SQ2 was faster than Max Verstappen's pole-winning time of 1:27.641,...
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