Round-up: Ocon thrilled with Q3 place after “lowest moment of the season”, and more

Welcome to Sunday’s edition of the RaceFans round-up.

Comment of the day

Championship contenders have slowed down their rivals before and used their team mates to do the same – but are these tactics fair game?

Not sure why backing up the field would be bad or tainted, done all the time at Monaco. It’s Verstappen’s best prospect, lead the race and bunch the field if Norris is in third or second (if not, then the opposite perhaps). Plus a Safety Car or Virtual Safety Car means that there’s more jeopardy to pitting with a more compact field. Plus it’s Verstappen taking the risk.

Not so sure about team mates slowing down rivals for you (e.g. Perez 2021) as they’ve nothing to lose. In that case, it’s anti-sporting but highly unlikely to incur a penalty (less so still a penalty for the team mate being indirectly assisted).
@David-BR

Social media and links

Qualifying recap (Haas)

Esteban Ocon: ‘I’m super happy – delighted to say the least. It was honestly the lowest moment of the season yesterday, it was really a bad feeling being half a second away from where we should be. We were lost and changed everything on the car overnight, and the car today feels much better. It’s transformed, and we’re suddenly where we should be, so a big thanks to the team for their continual support.’

Saturday (Sauber)

Gabriel Bortoleto: ‘It feels great to finish the season with a qualifying like this one. The whole session was incredibly tight: we were just a few thousandths away from being knocked out in Q1, then pulled out a mega lap in Q2 and kept it strong in Q3 as well. I think it’s been a really good performance today, one to be proud of, and hopefully we can turn it into a top ten finish tomorrow – it would be a great way to wrap up the season.’

Mixed final Saturday of the season (Mercedes)

Andrew Shovlin: ‘For Kimi though, his session began it to unravel in Q2. We didn’t change anything in our approach, but he started to get the odd snap which in turn caused high temperatures and compounded these issues. Unfortunately, he couldn’t reproduce his Q1 pace and finished the session in 14th.’

A third row start for the final race (Ferrari)

Charles Leclerc: ‘I’m satisfied with my lap in Q3 and I don’t think there was much more to extract today. I feel that our team has done a really good job in turning things around this weekend. We made some changes on the set-up between FP2 and FP3, and if paid off.’

Sprint race: Lindblad holds off Duerksen to claim victory at Yas Marina (Formula 2)

‘Arvid Lindblad was pushed right to the end by Joshua Duerksen, holding off his AIX Racing rival across the line to claim victory of the Yas Marina sprint race.’

Final practice at Yas Marina had way more action than the sprint race at Losail.#F1 #AbuDhabiGP #RaceFans

— Keith Collantine (@keithcollantine.bsky.social) 2025-12-06T11:28:48.948Z

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