Scuderia Ferrari HP’s Carlos Sainz will start his final race for the team in Abu Dhabi from third place behind his former team McLaren Racing. The Spaniard, who moves to Williams in 2025 set a time of 01:22.824s and starts the race just ahead of champion Max Verstappen while Pierre Gasly had a great qualifying for the Alpine F1 Team as he starts the race from fifth place.
George Russell rounds out the top six for Mercedes just ahead of Nico Hulkeberg who received a grid penalty for an incident in the tunnel on pit-road. Fernando Alonso starts the race from eighth place just ahead of Valtteri Bottas and Sergio Perez.
Yuki Tsunoda starts the race from P11 just ahead of Liam Lawson and Lance Stroll while Kevin Magnussen starts his final race for the MoneyGram Haas F1 Team from 14th place just ahead of Zhou Guanyu.
Seven-time Formula One world champion Lewis Hamilton starts his final race as a Mercedes driver from 16th place and speaking following the action he said:
Today was really unfortunate. We’ve worked so hard to get the car into a good place and it has been feeling strong all weekend. Sadly, our timing at the end of Q1 wasn’t the best. We weren’t able to optimise the out lap, having to push through traffic. That compromised my last effort in that session; a bollard then got stuck under the car at turn 14 and affected the final few corners of the lap. To that point, I was level on pace with George and looking good to make it through to Q2. It is obviously really frustrating.
It is difficult to say what would have been possible if we had made it through to the final part of Qualifying. We have been looking good across the practice sessions so I think we could have challenged for the first couple of rows. It is what it is though, and I will be giving it my all to end as strongly as we can tomorrow. It will be difficult from P17, but I will be trying to enjoy it as much as possible and make up as many positions as we can.
Jack Doohan starts his maiden Formula One race from 17th place for Alpine just ahead of Alexander Albon and Charles Leclerc while Franco Colapinto rounded out the grid in 20th.