The Latest Breaking News from V Bottas

Verstappen beat McLaren’s Lando Norris and Red Bull team-mate Sergio Perez in a race that was twice interrupted by the safety car.

The championship leader had rarely looked beatable throughout the session and ploughed a lonely furrow in pursuit of pole position, particularly as nobody had been able to beat his opening 1m33.977s effort - let alone his ultimate pole lap.

Rain emerged at the end of the SQ2 session and continued to pepper the Shanghai circuit during the intermission, necessitating the use of intermediate tyres for the final stage of qualifying to decide pole.

Verstappen will start ahead of team-mate Sergio Perez and McLaren’s Lando Norris after the one-hour qualifying session, which is split into three segments with five cars each being knocked out in Q1 and Q2 before the top-10 shootout of Q3. 

The F1 world champion led a Red Bull 1-2 in opening practice which was red-flagged midway through as Logan Sargeant crashed heavily, which ruled him out of FP2 as his Williams car was repaired.But the American driver missed relatively little running as damp conditions meant no representative running in the…

Max Verstappen set the pace for Red Bull in FP1, which was the only representative session on Friday, as he posted a time of 1m30.056s in his RB20.

Rain started sporadically falling in the paddock with under an hour to go ahead of FP2’s 3pm local time commencement, but this intensified with 15 minutes to go.

Rain started sporadically falling in the paddock with under an hour to go ahead of FP2's 3pm local time commencement, but this intensified with 15 minutes to go.

Sainz beat Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris at the Albert Park Circuit on Sunday after polesitter Max Verstappen retired early on with mechanical troubles.