The last time Formula 1 raced at Sepang, Max Verstappen was a day past his 20th birthday. He’d qualified third on it, then went out on the Sunday, got past Lewis Hamilton and won the Malaysian Grand Prix. Malaysia dropped off the calendar after that. Nine years later F1 is back, running the Bahrain Grand Prix here, and on Saturday the two names at the top of the timesheet were the same two who fought for that win: Verstappen on pole, Hamilton next to him.

Sepang has never been kind to anyone who isn’t the real thing. Every pole here since 2011 has gone to Hamilton or Sebastian Vettel, and Hamilton has five of them, more than anyone. This one is Verstappen’s first of the season and the 49^th of his career. It’s also the first pole of 2026 that hasn’t come from a car with a Mercedes engine in the back.

It was supposed to be Mercedes’ weekend. The championship leaders turned up with a big upgrade package, their rivals didn’t bring much, and even Hamilton expected them to pull further clear. For a while that’s how it looked. Kimi Antonelli topped final practice on Saturday morning, with George Russell fourth. Then qualifying came round, in much the same heat, and the pace just wasn’t there. On low fuel, at least, the upgrade hadn’t worked, and Verstappen was quickest in every part of qualifying.

Antonelli’s day had started to unravel in Q2. His first lap was deleted for track limits, he had to use an extra set of softs to get through, and that left him one new set for Q3 and one shot at the front row. He took fourth, which turns into P3 on the grid once Isack Hadjar’s penalty is applied.

Some of the better stories were further back. The heat was chewing through the tyres so quickly that the top four teams sent each car out for a single run in Q1 and left it there. Aston Martin got both cars into Q2 for the first time this season, which Fernando Alonso called a “miracle”. Gabriel Bortoleto got his Audi through as well. His teammate Nico Hülkenberg didn’t, after a mistake at the penultimate corner, and went out with Franco Colapinto, Arvid Lindblad, Alex Albon and both the Haas and Cadillac cars.

In Q2 the top eight cruised through, and everyone else scrapped over the last two places in the shootout. Pierre Gasly, about as reliable on a Saturday as anyone in the midfield, took one. Bortoleto took the other, two tenths ahead of Liam Lawson. Both went into Q3 on used tyres. Gasly qualified ninth, Bortoleto tenth, and you could hear what that meant to him on the radio.

Hadjar is just back from injury, and he put the second Red Bull third, 0.428 behind Verstappen. He thought the lap was terrible, and said so. “I was quite happy up until that very last lap… It’s the first time in my life that I actually feel like we do a terrible job and we’re third, so that’s the perks of having a very good car, and I won’t lie, it’s very satisfying.”

He won’t start there. Hadjar has a five-place grid penalty for using a seventh engine this season, so he drops to eighth.

Hamilton arrived at Sepang with a lot of noise around him. There’s been plenty of negativity in the media lately, about him, about Ferrari and about his team principal, and his car doesn’t have the straight-line speed of the Red Bull.

His first Q3 run put him third, on a 1:35.745. On his last he found more than three tenths, braking later and carrying more speed through the corners to win back what he was losing on the straights. Charles Leclerc called it a “super lap”, and F1’s ghost-car comparison with Verstappen shows how little room there was in it. It’s his first front row since Barcelona, and his seventh at a track where nobody has taken more poles. The first thing he did afterwards was thank the mechanics and engineers who’d spent the weekend working in that heat.

Verstappen was fastest in Q1, Q2 and Q3. On his last run he went quicker again and finished 0.298 clear, giving Red Bull’s new Ford-powered engine its first pole. Red Bull had a rough start to this season, and he didn’t play down what it meant.

Hadjar’s penalty shuffles the grid: Antonelli up to third, Leclerc fourth, Lando Norris fifth, Oscar Piastri sixth and Russell seventh. That puts three different teams in the top three.

Sunday could go a lot of ways. All three tyre compounds are in play, two or three stops are possible, and judging by what they ran in practice the teams have already split on strategy. If it stays dry, Red Bull might just disappear up the road: F1’s strategy guide puts them about 1.4 tenths a lap clear of Ferrari and 1.5 clear of McLaren and Mercedes. But there’s a 40% chance of rain, and Antonelli is counting on things getting complicated. “The tyre degradation is likely to be very high and, in all probability, it will be a multi-stop race. That will hopefully open up opportunities for us if we have good race pace.”

Leclerc starts next to him on the second row, and was honest about how he got there. “It wasn’t a great qualifying, particularly in Q3. I tried my best, but from sector two onwards, I was sliding around with the rear, probably being a bit too aggressive with the setup.” He still called fourth “not a bad place to start from”, and, like everyone, he’s watching the tyres: “Tyre management and strategy will both be key in the race.”

More than half of this grid has never raced at Sepang, and the weather could turn at any point. The two at the front have, and they both remember how 2017 ended. Tomorrow they start side by side.