• Mercedes dominance still at full strength

Lewis Hamilton continued to show Mercedes' ease at the front of the pack finishing 0.163 seconds ahead of teammate Valtteri Bottas.

The two drivers had a very straight forward session on Saturday morning, with the former being over half a second ahead of third place.

The interesting thing about that third place was that it was Lando Norris in the McLaren. Not only that he was third, but that he set his time on the medium tyres. 

A tyre that almost everyone will appear to try and use in Q2 due to the soft being too soft this weekend. With maybe a first-ever hard tyre time getting into Q3 by the Mercedes.

  • Midfield seeming tighter, somehow

Despite the anomaly of Norris' third-place time, McLaren, Racing Point, Ferrari, Red Bull, Renault and even the Alpha Tauri's all managed to get times within half a second of each other looking like the tightest and most competitive midfield we have seen to date.

Nico Hulkenberg put in a great performance to prove his pace had not disappeared, finishing in P4 and 0.007 seconds ahead of his teammate Lance Stroll, injecting talks into the paddock of a potential full-time return to the grid.

Charles Leclerc, Max Verstappen, Alex Albon and Esteban Ocon kept the theme of the tight midfield going by all being within two-tenths of each other just behind the Racing Points.

  • Desperately close to competitiveness for the rest of the field

Behind the midfield were the ever-present Haas, Williams and Alfa Romeo teams, just not quite clinging on to the back of the midfield just yet.

Romain Grosjean put a good time in to finish just 0.261 seconds off the back of Daniel Ricciardo showing the small gap required to make that step up the order.

Nicholas Latifi also put in a good show of needed pace to finish 0.224 seconds ahead of his teammate George Russell as he has out-qualified his teammate in every qualifying session he has been a part of in F1.

With the fight upfront for pole and an unbelievably tight midfield battle, all is to play for as we move onto qualifying.