Charles Leclerc had stopped arguing with his car. For two rounds of qualifying on Saturday night his Ferrari had been pulling under braking, at a circuit with nineteen corners and a wall waiting at most of them. On his last lap he ignored it. “I just went for it,” he said later, “no matter how it felt.”

At the second timing line he was a tenth of a second up on Max Verstappen’s pole time. Then came the last sector, and the tenth was gone, and then some. Leclerc crossed the line in 1:31.427. Fifty-four thousandths of a second short.

Verstappen had set that time ten minutes earlier, the first driver to post a lap in the final round. When Leclerc fell short, he was already out on his own last lap, running slower than his first. It didn’t matter. Pole for the Singapore Grand Prix, the fiftieth of his career and his first for the main event at Marina Bay.

Singapore has never been his. Apart from Madrid, new to the calendar this year, it is the only Grand Prix on the schedule he has yet to win. He has finished second here three times. In 2023, the season Red Bull won every other race, he went out in the second round of qualifying and started eleventh. This weekend, Singapore seems to have run out of ways to say no. On Friday night he took pole for the city’s first Sprint. On Saturday, in the rain, he won it, his first win of any kind here. Then, under the lights, he took the pole he had really come for. “This is, of course, the one that I wanted,” he said.

Only four drivers in the history of the sport have more poles. Asked what fifty meant to him, he answered the way only he would.

It had not been an easy day to read. Rain arrived just before the Sprint, the whole field started on intermediates, and by the end of it George Russell had crashed out of the lead on the opening lap, the two McLarens had collided on the last, and nine cars had failed to finish. By the time qualifying began, the track had dried, the air still close to thirty degrees and thick with humidity, but the rain had taken Friday’s rubber with it. “Track seemed a little bit slower,” Verstappen said. It was: his pole lap was two tenths off the time that won him Sprint pole the night before.

On the other side of the Red Bull garage, the night was over almost before it started. Isack Hadjar had already lost a shot at the podium at Sepang last weekend to a battery problem, and the Sprint here to a power unit failure. His mechanics had rebuilt the car in time for qualifying. On his first flying lap, the gearbox broke at Turn 8. “The car was absolutely damaged,” he said. “I knew it was the end, but I didn’t want to stop on track.” He nursed it back to the pits and went out again, but he never set a time, and he starts last. “We need to send a good apology to Isack, really,” said team principal Laurent Mekies. “We didn’t give him any chance to express his speed this weekend.”

Up front, Lewis Hamilton topped the first round, and then the second, with a 1:31.529 that nobody would beat until the final round. Jolyon Palmer, interviewing him in parc fermé afterwards, described a weekend of “so much oversteer, you’re hanging on to it.” Verstappen, meanwhile, complained during the second round about “insanely bad shifts.” The problem never went away. “That stayed,” he said, “so we just had to live with that.”

Further down, a rookie found his feet. A day earlier, Arvid Lindblad had gone out in the first round of Sprint Qualifying, and in the Sprint itself he had spun behind the safety car and briefly driven the wrong way to turn his car around, which earned him a trip to the stewards and, in the end, no penalty. On Saturday night he put his Racing Bulls into the top ten alongside Liam Lawson’s. “We’ve had a decent turnaround today,” he said, which undersold it.

The second round ended with the strangest moment of the night. Carlos Sainz was still on a push lap when he came up behind Nico Hülkenberg’s Audi, driving slowly on the racing line into Turn 5, and had to abandon the lap. Both teams’ screens had told them Sainz had already taken the chequered flag. They were wrong. The timing data reaching the teams had not caught up, and by the time it corrected itself, it was too late. At 2:45 in the morning the stewards ruled that Sainz had been impeded, and that there would be no penalty.

So it came down to thirteen minutes and three cars. Verstappen went first and set the target. Hamilton went out a minute after him and began badly. The Ferrari snapped at Turns 1 and 3, and he was more than a quarter of a second down by the end of the first sector. Then he drove the fastest middle sector anyone managed all night, and at the second timing line he was two thousandths of a second ahead. The last sector cost him 0.125 seconds, and his second run was no better. Third, 0.123 seconds from pole, after leading both rounds before it.

One hole of wing, he reckoned, “just on the knife point.” He was candid about the rest of it. “I’m grateful to be third, to be honest,” he said, “given that those laps weren’t very good.”

Leclerc’s night had been the opposite, a struggle that came good at the very end. “Let’s say that the good lap was on the right lap at the end,” he said. His first run in the final round had been a 1:31.661, and he blamed “a bit of misjudgement in Q3 with the wing.” His last found more than two tenths, and by the second timing line it was enough. Where did the rest go? “Turn 13, Turn 16/17, these probably are the two main ones,” he said. “I think there was potential to be on pole today, but Max just did a better job.”

Behind them, the gaps opened up. Kimi Antonelli, who leads the championship by 89 points, put the updated Mercedes fourth despite abandoning his final lap, and felt “there was more lap time in it.” Russell, who also abandoned his last lap, was sixth in the older-spec car a few hours after his Sprint crash, but a 40-place grid penalty for a fifth engine sends him to 21st. Lando Norris called fifth “undoubtedly a disappointment,” and Oscar Piastri was seventh, which means that once Russell’s penalty is applied, the two McLarens that collided at the end of the Sprint will start side by side on the third row. Pierre Gasly was eighth for Alpine and admitted he had “touched a few walls” getting there.

When the press conference was nearly over, a reporter asked Verstappen and Leclerc about the front rows they used to share as kids, and about an incident between them at a kart track in France fourteen years ago. Leclerc had to ask which one he meant. “There’s been quite a few,” he said. Then he repeated what he had just told Verstappen in the cool-down room: that “the karting days felt like yesterday.”

Verstappen remembered that, back then, only a few drivers looked as if they might really make it to Formula 1. “Charles was definitely one of them.” Leclerc put it more simply. “He’s a bit too many championships ahead, but hopefully I’ll catch one day.”

On Sunday, at eight in the evening, they start side by side again, for 62 laps under the lights. Verstappen has the pole, the Sprint win and a car that has been fastest in three qualifying sessions in a row. What he has not had lately is a good start. “It cannot get worse,” he said, “so it can only get better, right?” Next to him will be the boy he used to race in karting, closer than anyone got on Saturday night, and ahead of him the one race in this city he has never won. He has been chasing it since 2015. One more night.