Scuderia Ferrari HP drivers Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc will start the Chinese Grand Prix Sprint race from the second and third rows of the grid respectively.

As per the regulations, all drivers had to use Medium tyres for the first and second parts of the session, choosing to run with sufficient fuel to complete several flying laps. Lewis and Charles got through to SQ3 without any difficulty. Now with Soft tyres they each did two runs. Lewis got the most out of his SF-26 on his first flying lap, stopping the clocks in 1'32"161. The Englishman was third on the timesheet for a long time and it was only in the closing stages that Lando Norris beat him by just two hundredths of a second, to relegate him to fourth. However, Charles struggled to put together a good lap, first posting a 1'32"732 before going again to improve slightly to 1'32"528, which secured him sixth place on the grid.

Now the team will study all the data acquired today to prepare for tomorrow's Sprint race which, apart from assigning points to the top eight finishers, will also be an important test for Sunday's Grand Prix, delivering useful information on how the cars behave over a longer distance.

Lewis Hamilton: I'm really pleased with how the session went today. After a tricky practice, the team did a great job getting the car into a much better window, and it felt fantastic to drive in Sprint Quali. There's still some work to do back in Maranello to find more performance on the straights, which has been our main weakness but we're strong through the corners, which is encouraging. Overall, the car felt good, and tomorrow's Sprint will be a good opportunity to keep building our weekend.

Charles Leclerc: It wasn't a great session. Unfortunately, I lost half a second on the back straight on my second lap in SQ3, and we will have to analyse the reason for that to make sure we can come back tomorrow.
We should be a bit stronger in the Sprint race than we were today, however, the front runners still seem to be a step ahead, so we will see what we can do to challenge them.

Fred Vasseur: Today's Sprint Qualifying was more positive for us than the result might suggest. Lewis did a good job in what was a very tight fight with the McLarens. Charles' was also very competitive but in his second run in SQ3 was not as strong in the final sector and we will analyse the data in detail to understand what happened, as he didn't have the same energy deployment as on his first attempt. Tomorrow we will see what we can achieve in the Sprint race, but I'm confident we can aim for another solid result. In free practice we also ran the reverse rear wing to gather additional mileage before introducing it on the car.