Sao Paulo Grand Prix Predictions, Odds & F1 Best Bets After Qualifying

• Saturday put a few extra names on one contender’s to-do list. The main straight at Interlagos is a good place to start crossing them off.
• One of our bets can cash with a driver finishing exactly where he starts. His teammate has the tougher assignment.
• The São Paulo Grand Prix starts Sunday, Nov. 8, at noon ET, live on Apple TV in the U.S.

Heavy rain held up qualifying for more than an hour at Interlagos on Saturday. Once the cars got going, Lando Norris took pole, and the engine penalties shuffled the grid behind him. Liam Lawson and Nico Hulkenberg share the second row, while Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen start 20th and 21st. If you filled out a grid prediction on Friday, we hope you used pencil.

With rain in the forecast again Sunday, there’s a chance the race starts on intermediates and ends on slicks. Friday’s long runs give us a sense of who can keep the tires under them over a stint. Saturday showed us who could get up to speed in the wet. With several quick cars starting out of position, we’re also looking at who can find clear track early. A driver can have all the pace in the world and spend the first stint staring at somebody else’s rain light.

Sao Paulo Grand Prix Odds

Sao Paulo Grand Prix Picks After Qualifying

Oscar Piastri Top 6 Finish (−125, Caesars)

Piastri starts 10th after a red flag cut short his final Q2 attempt. Friday’s longer runs give us another read on where he fits. Over ten laps on the softs in FP2, he averaged 1:15.520, within five hundredths of George Russell. They ran at different points in the session and on tires of different ages, so we’re using the comparison as a rough measure of pace. Steve has Piastri sixth in his finishing order, and our race-pace projection has him fourth.

His first two targets are Alex Albon in ninth and Fernando Alonso in eighth. Farther up, Lawson and Hulkenberg earned their starting spots with good laps in the wet, and Oliver Bearman starts sixth. Interlagos gives Piastri a place to use his pace. A good exit onto the main straight can set up a pass under braking into Turn 1. That opportunity is there for Charles Leclerc, Hamilton, and Verstappen too, which makes it all the more important for Oscar to get through the midfield early.

Caesars has −125, compared with −140 at DraftKings and theScore. At −125, we need Piastri to finish sixth or better about 56% of the time. We’ll take that price given his Friday pace and his head start on the other quick cars coming through the field.

Mercedes Over 29.5 Team Points (−130, theScore Bet)

Kimi Antonelli starts second after putting together the quickest sustained soft run we logged in FP2. His first ten clean laps in that run averaged 1:15.144. Russell’s best evidence came in the rain, where he qualified second, just 0.204 seconds off Norris, before an engine penalty dropped him to seventh. If the track dries, Kimi has shown the pace to challenge for the win. If it stays wet, we’ve already seen George find more grip than most of the drivers he’ll have to pass.

Second for Antonelli and fourth for Russell adds up to 30 points. If Kimi wins, George can spend the afternoon defending seventh and we’ll still cash with 31. Third and fourth only gets us to 27, so we need one Mercedes in the top two. Kimi starts there, and George’s wet qualifying pace gives him a shot to move forward from seventh.

Our race-pace order gives Mercedes 33 points, and Steve’s projection gives it 37. Steve puts less weight on the grid in the rain, and his order still gets the over home. We’ll take Mercedes over 29.5 at −130.