For months, Red Bull wore the reputation of a car that gasped for breath through medium-speed corners — and that exact weakness now looks fixed, with impeccably inconvenient timing for everyone else in Sepang. Max Verstappen took pole by three tenths over Hamilton, fastest in all three segments of qualifying, a trick he simply couldn’t pull off for most of last season.

The turnaround wasn’t a sudden leap but a slow dismantling of old problems: the Miami and Austria upgrades targeted the low- and medium-speed corner deficit, by Madrid Verstappen was already within 0.140s of pole, and the Baku upgrade — which looked underwhelming on that circuit — only showed its real teeth once Sepang’s varied corners gave it room to work. “Pushed some of the weaknesses out of the car,” is how Verstappen summed it up, while Isack Hadjar, back after missing three races, was just as blunt: “Definitely feel like I jumped in a car that’s way better than when I left it in Budapest.”

Edd Straw’s sector breakdown fills in the detail: Verstappen banks 0.138s on the straight in sector one, Hamilton claws back 0.304s through the flowing sector two, before Verstappen slams the door with a 0.464s swing in the mostly full-throttle final sector. McLaren boss Andrea Stella has already clocked the shuffled order — Mercedes’ straight-line edge has “disappeared,” and Ferrari now owns the best cornering numbers on the grid.

Whether this is a genuine new pecking order or just Sepang’s heat playing tricks, Singapore next weekend will have the final word.

Source: The Race (https://www.the-race.com/formula-1/key-weakness-red-bull-has-eradicated-malaysia-max-verstappen/)