The correct word should be relief; when Spanish sport magazine Marca claimed to have an insider that Verstappen 2019’s contract may contain a clause for which if the Dutchman did not score a win until Budapest round, he could have been allowed to look around for another seat in 2020, the bomb exploded. Loudly. Before the market season was even started, rumours covered all teams and drivers, making the next year’s line-up more like a sorter box game rather than a battle of contracts and deadlines. Marko and Horner can now look forward to the race and to the other half of races with less BPM in their veins: Max should be satisfied enough, both for reliability from the Honda side and for the car handling, in order to remain where he is. Tomorrow’s mission is to avoid the poor start of Austria and Hockenheim. Or maybe to do one more, for bringing luck to race result!

It has been a great day and the car was hooked up straight away in Qualifying. To come out on top is incredible and my first pole position will always be a special one. It’s also nice to get pole on a great track like this as a qualifying lap on low fuel is so enjoyable. You can really feel the grip of the car with the full downforce and it’s a lot of fun out there. We are closing in on the front-runners all the time and Honda keep pushing hard to optimise everything. Today was another great day for everyone within the Team, but that Team also includes Honda, so a big thank you as the car has been flying. I haven’t done a long run this weekend but lately our car has been even better in the race, so I don’t feel too worried. We just need to try and get a clean start and get the job done. We are all very close so tomorrow should be another exciting race

Max Verstappen sets a new lap record and takes the first pole position in his F1 career.

The complex theme, as we are used to in this 2019, comes with teammate Pierre Gasly: another second (nearly) suffered from Verstappen in one of the shortest circuits of the F1. A 6^th place beside both Mercedes and both Ferrari with the same car of the polesitter should be enough for claiming a long holiday period in order to breath and charge piles up: if seat’s not in danger, the credibility of one of the most promising young drivers alongside Leclerc, Norris and Russell may be in peril. A wet Grand Prix should be his desire for Sunday, making the conditions good enough for another chaos in where put his car into.

I’m disappointed as I didn’t put a clean lap together and I made a few mistakes otherwise I think I could have taken the fight to Ferrari for P4 or P5. In the end we’ve qualified in P6 which is still a decent position but for sure we wanted a better lap time. Tomorrow we start on the medium tyre, we’ll keep pushing flat out and hopefully we can do something with the strategy and recover some positions. In Free Practice, no one managed to do any long runs so we don’t know what the tyres are going to do over 70 laps which could also make things interesting