Pierre Gasly's Stunning Pole Position at Monza
Fifteen minutes before the biggest qualifying shock Formula 1 has seen in years, Pierre Gasly wasn’t visualising apexes or scrolling through data. He was on his phone, quietly dismantling George Russell at online chess.
“I must say before the quali, I felt pretty confident,” Gasly smiled. “Because I was picking piece by piece after piece.”
His performance coach Ben Thorne watched on and couldn’t resist a jab. “OK, well, you’re getting George here,” Thorne told him, “but he’s going to get you in a few minutes.”
Gasly’s response involved a swear word and a grin. The punchline arrived later. Russell, beaten on the board and then on the track, could only laugh: “He beat me there, and I thought, ‘Well, I think I’ll beat you in qualifying,’ and here we are, he’s ahead of me again.”
Chess, then Monza. And Gasly, improbably, on pole.
A pole built, not gifted
No one in the Alpine garage walked into Saturday expecting this. Not with a car that has spent too long as a midfield curiosity. Not even with the memory of Gasly’s only F1 victory, taken here six years ago in the eerie, empty stands of the pandemic season.
That 2020 win owed plenty to chaos: a red flag, a restart, Lance Stroll sliding off, Lewis Hamilton serving a penalty. Gasly, then in the junior Toro Rosso outfit, simply kept his head while the race fell apart around him.
This time, nothing fell into his lap. He took it.
The Alpine, trimmed out for low drag, has been slippery all weekend. Its Mercedes power unit – the class of the field – bites hard down Monza’s endless straights, and an upgrade introduced in the Netherlands has nudged the car into more dangerous territory. On Saturday, driver and team stitched together the kind of qualifying session that leaves the usual heavyweights staring at timing screens in disbelief.
“Monza is a bit of a unique track as we know,” Gasly said. “It definitely exceeded all our expectations.
“Since this morning, the pace has been better. We managed to make a good step from P3 to quali and I think slightly bigger than the other guys around us.
“Straight from Q1, we were a bit surprised to see us up there. Our target was Q3. But then I was P1 in Q1, then P4 in Q2. I didn’t want to get too excited but then first run in Q3, I was third again.
“And then I felt, ‘OK, well, I really have a shot at it.’ It’s probably the first time I really get a true chance and tried to leave everything I had out there.”
The lap itself was on the edge.
“It was quite hectic through Ascari and Parabolica. I don’t think there was definitely much left in there. And crossing the line, I knew it will be one of these laps that will be rewarded. But to the point to get to the pole position, I didn’t expect that.”
Gasly crossed the line with the lap of his life. Behind him, others flinched, fumbled or found traffic. He did not.
From forgotten talent to Monza’s front man
Gasly is one of the paddock’s good guys. Popular, open, with friends up and down the grid. Yet his career has often felt like a cautionary tale, his talent overshadowed by the brutal reality of Red Bull’s driver system.
Promoted to the senior team in 2019, he ran straight into the Max Verstappen machine and was chewed up. Demoted mid-season, he rebuilt his reputation in the junior squad, but the path back to a front-running car never quite reopened.
Alpine looked like the reset button. A factory team, French colours, the chance to lead. Instead, the project stumbled. Results stuttered. Then came a strategic reset: Renault scrapped its own engine programme and bought Mercedes power. Slowly, the car began to move in the right direction.
The turnaround has been noisy this weekend for reasons that have nothing to do with lap time.
On Friday, Gasly briefly celebrated a Monaco podium he thought he’d regained after Alpine won an appeal against two pit-lane speeding penalties. Hours later, the FIA court of appeal reinstated the punishments and took the trophy back.
Alpine’s de facto boss Flavio Briatore then detonated a controversy in the team principals’ press conference, suggesting one of the four appeal judges had “links” with McLaren. The claim rested on a charity event in California in 2018 where the judge had been present and a local McLaren garage had apparently supplied “two or three” cars. No more, no less.
Briatore produced no evidence beyond that. McLaren team principal Andrea Stella branded the insinuation “insulting” on the spot. Behind the scenes, McLaren’s anger simmered.
On Saturday, the FIA court of appeal took the unusual step of issuing its own statement, rejecting any “questions (about) the independence and impartiality of the judges”.
The ruling itself, while it left plenty of debate about the original pit-lane penalties, at least ensured every driver involved was treated the same way – even if it still feels like none of them should have been penalised in the first place.
Inside Alpine, the mood was raw. They remain convinced Gasly never broke the speed limit and that the two penalties cost them a deserved podium.
“Two or three days ago, we were on the floor,” managing director Steve Nielsen told Sky Sports. “It is really from being down to being on top of the world in just two days and it is amazing. We need to soak it up and make the best of it.
“Pierre is a class act. If you give him the machine, he will deliver. We failed to do that a few times last year.
“We haven’t always given him the most competitive machinery this year, but when we have, he has delivered, particularly earlier in the season. So to see the team bounce back, to see him deliver on the track he knows well, he lives locally, he lives in Milan. It was wonderful.”
Monza, once again, has become Gasly’s refuge.
Slipstreams, gamesmanship and a missed Mercedes plan
The final act of qualifying turned into a high-speed chessboard of its own.
Gasly slotted himself second last in the pack on the decisive run in Q3. At Monza, that is the sweet spot: close enough to pick up a strong tow, far enough back to avoid dirty air in the corners. Alpine executed the positioning perfectly.
Others did not.
Mercedes had drawn up a neat plan to use Kimi Antonelli as a tow for Russell. Then Max Verstappen arrived. The Red Bull driver slipped between the two silver cars at the end of the out lap, disrupting the carefully crafted arrangement and leaving Russell with a compromised run.
“We had a bit of a mess with Verstappen entering the lap,” Russell said. “He wanted to go for the tow, Kimi was there as well, and I did my lap a second and a half behind Max, which wasn’t ideal.
“It takes nothing away from what Pierre achieved because, as he said, they were flying all day, quickest in Q1 and right up there from the beginning. So I’m happy for Pierre and, of course, disappointed we weren’t on pole ourselves. However, great place to start for tomorrow.”
Russell will line up alongside Gasly on the front row, with a huge chance to resuscitate his title bid.
He trails championship leader Antonelli by 59 points. All season long, the Italian has had the edge. This time, though, Antonelli starts 20th after a grid penalty for exceeding his engine allocation. Russell knows this is the window he has been waiting for.
“The win is going to be very important tomorrow but I’m more pleased about the performance,” he said. “Since the summer break, every lap I have been in the top three positions, while I had that tough run of form before the break when every lap wasn’t in the top five.”
Antonelli is still expected to carve back through the field into the top six or so, but that would leave Russell with a rare opportunity to hack a meaningful chunk out of the deficit. With a similar engine penalty looming over Russell in the coming races, he cannot waste it.
Ferrari fumble again as Hamilton eyes the bigger picture
Behind Gasly and Russell, Ferrari and Mercedes tripped over their own shoelaces.
For the third race in succession, Ferrari found a way to undercut their own qualifying potential. At their home grand prix. On the weekend they rolled out an upgraded engine.
Both cars came perilously close to dropping out in Q2. In Q3, Charles Leclerc left the pits as Lewis Hamilton still sat on his stands without wheels, leaving the seven-time champion out of position for the all-important tow.
Leclerc and Hamilton will start third and fourth thanks to a penalty elsewhere: McLaren’s Oscar Piastri was dropped three places for impeding Red Bull’s Liam Lawson.
Hamilton, also 59 points behind Antonelli, sounded like a man who wants the team to think hard about priorities, even if he stopped short of saying it outright.
“(Piastri’s penalty) puts us in (with a) fighting chance, hopefully, with George,” Hamilton said. “That’s one Mercedes up front, so hopefully that gives us a chance to work as a team to try and topple them.
“We’re at a point in the year where 59 points is a huge – huge – deficit to recover from, especially when Mercedes continue to be the leaders in speed.
“So yeah, we do have to work as a team. Have we been… if and when that would ever change… we’ll find out, but all I can do is just try to arrive and do the best job I can.”
The implication is clear: if Mercedes want a real crack at Antonelli, they may have to choose a horse.
Can Gasly turn pole into something more?
Friday’s long-run data suggested Alpine would struggle to live with Mercedes and Ferrari over a race distance. Monza’s long straights promise overtaking; its narrow braking zones and DRS trains often deny it. Gasly knows the scale of the task.
“Obviously not to the pace of these guys around us, but we seem to have picked up more pace from yesterday to today,” he said. “So we’ll obviously give our best shot and see what we can get out of it.”
The script says the faster cars will swarm him, that Russell must convert, that Ferrari cannot afford another strategic misstep in front of their own tifosi, that Hamilton will push for every point in a title chase that already feels like last chance territory.
But Monza has never been much for scripts. Gasly, of all people, knows that better than most. Now he has a pole that nobody can label lucky, a car that finally looks alive, and a grid of heavy hitters trying to work out how a “forgotten hero” has suddenly planted himself right in their way.
