Oscar Piastri has bemoaned his “pretty scruffy” qualifying lap for the Sprint, as he starts behind his two championship rivals on Saturday.

The championship leader will start third at the Circuit of the Americas, with Max Verstappen and Lando Norris having claimed the front row positions.

Oscar Piastri: I feel fortunate to be third

With Norris topping the times in SQ1 and SQ2, Piastri never quite looked to have the same single-lap performance as his McLaren teammate around COTA on Friday.

This was borne out in SQ3 as Norris claimed provisional pole as the chequered flag fell, only for Verstappen to wrest it away from him by just seven-hundredths of a second.

Piastri was left a relatively disconnected third, almost four-tenths of a second behind Verstappen’s lap, and the Australian s

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