Intriguing Saturday Sets Up Fascinating Italian Grand Prix

In a thrillingly close qualifying session, several teams and drivers threatened for pole position.

George progressed through Q1 as the fastest driver on the Medium tyre, which enabled him to carry two new Soft tyres into Q3.

Kimi meanwhile used a set of the red-walled compound to progress to Q2 and showed good pace to set the second fastest time of that segment.

In Q3, neither driver felt that they extracted the maximum from the car to set the sixth and seventh best lap times. That becomes P5 and P6 on the grid by virtue of Lewis Hamilton’s five-place grid penalty.

George Russell

We come away from today slightly disappointed with where we qualified. There was a miscommunication as to what tyre to run in Q3 but ultimately, we didn’t do the job in that final segment. We were fastest in Q1 on the Medium and Kimi was second quickest in Q2 on the Soft, so we know that there was likely more that we could have achieved than P6 and P7 in the final order.

With grid penalties applied, we start P5 tomorrow so let’s see what we can do. With the low downforce wings that everyone runs, it is hard to overtake here. Ferrari look very quick in a straight-line too and we have Charles (Leclerc) starting just in front of us. We will therefore need to take any opportunities that come our way if we are able to move forward. I hope we can make progress.

Kimi Antonelli

That is a much better result than we have managed to achieve in Qualifying recently. I had to rebuild my speed having lost track time in FP2 so to be starting near the front again is a good result. We can therefore be pleased with how today went, even if we know that there was likely more performance there. My last lap wasn’t my best so I think we could have been starting higher up but I am still happy with how our session unfolded.

The field is very tight, and we have a slight top line speed disadvantage to Ferrari this weekend due to set-up choices. We know overtaking is already difficult here so it may be a challenge to make much progress from P6. That said, our race pace has looked useful, and we can hopefully use that to good effect on Sunday to gain positions and come away with a strong result.

Toto Wolff, CEO & Team Principal

We were hoping for more today than P5 and P6. Our qualifying session started well with George topping Q1 and having both cars in the top four in Q2. Unfortunately, our competitors improved much more in Q3 relative to ourselves and that meant we slipped back on the grid. There was definitely more performance in the car than we showed on those last laps so that is ultimately a frustrating end to our day.

Some of our rivals have opted to set-up their cars to have less downforce and therefore be able to defend better on the straights tomorrow. That will make our ability to progress forward harder. We have shown good race pace though and we will see how everything plays out; if we can make that pace count then we can hopefully look to come away with a solid points haul.

Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director

As we expected, today’s Qualifying was incredibly close across the whole field. Under one second covered the field in Q1 and gaining even one tenth would have impacted our starting positions considerably. We are disappointed by finding ourselves starting on the third row as our pace looked more competitive than that in the first two segments of the session. Sadly, our competitors improved more than ourselves in Q3; George suffered some snaps of oversteer in Turn 11 on both of his laps and Kimi felt a lack of rear grip and therefore confidence on his one new Soft tyre run.

We know overtaking is a challenge here so, despite having solid race pace, making progress won’t be straightforward. Degradation looks low so the default is clearly a one-stop for the whole field. We will see what opportunities we can create though and do our best to bring home the best result possible. We are in a tight fight for second in the Constructors’ so any points we can gain on our competitors will be very beneficial.

FP3 Result

Qualifying Result

* +5 grid penalty from Zandvoort