Mercedes: 'Couldn't quite keep up with Verstappen on that stretch because of that'

"After the final practice this morning [Saturday morning], it looked like we would be in contention for pole; in the end, the gap to Max at the end was a bit bigger than we had hoped. We were very close to him in the last sector, but couldn't quite keep up with him there in the warmer afternoon conditions," Shovlin is honest.

George Russell was incredibly close to his second pole position of 2022. The Briton himself said he was a tenth ahead of Max Verstappen's time when he made a mistake and lost more than a second. It was precisely in that third sector that things went wrong for Russell. Mercedes struggled in the twisty final section with the higher temperatures.

The British top driver argues that Mercedes can take courage from the way the W13 responded to the introduced updates. "And our longruns looked competitive yesterday [Friday] and we tend to race a bit better than qualifying. We lack a bit of straight-line speed compared to the Red Bulls, so it doesn't hurt to start with both drivers directly behind Max," he concludes.