Logan Sargeant will miss the Sprint race in Baku after smashing his Williams into a wall in the shootout session earlier on Saturday.
The American went quick enough to secure a place in SQ2 in the shorter qualifying session in Azerbaijan. But, when trying to improve on his final flying lap, he lost control of his Williams and hit the wall hard with the right side of his car.
It caused significant damage and left his mechanics with a lot of work to do to get it ready for the Sprint itself a few hours later. However, despite the best efforts of those in the Williams garage, they were not able to complete the repairs in time and so the car was withdrawn from the event.
It was bad news also for those in the bottom five at the time. The session was red flagged and, as there was less than a minute left in SQ1, it was not restarted and those five slowest cars were eliminated from qualifying.
That was especially tough to swallow for Yuki Tsunoda, who was only a few meters shy of the finish line when the red flags began to fly. As a result, his lap did not count and he let out a scream of anguish over the radio as he was forced to settle for 18th on the Sprint grid.
Pierre Gasly suffered more mechanical problems and was also in the bottom five, along with Tsunoda's AlphaTauri team-mate Nyck de Vries who went slowest. The two Alfa Romeo drivers Zhou Guanyu and Valtteri Bottas were the others to miss out on SQ2.
With Sargeant not taking part, only four drivers would be eliminated from SQ2. The two Haas drivers were among that unlucky quartet along with Esteban Ocon and Oscar Piastri, who missed out because Lance Stroll got a tow from team-mate Fernando Alonso.
Lando Norris scraped through to Q3 but had no new soft tyres left to use, so could not try to qualify any higher than 10th. He shares the fifth row with Stroll with Alonso one place further ahead and the impressive Alex Albon setting the seventh quickest time.
Charles Leclerc crashed on his final flying lap but did enough with his first to take another pole position this weekend. Sergio Perez was his closest challenger beating Max Verstappen to second place, with George Russell fourth, Carlos Sainz fifth and Lewis Hamilton sixth.
