Pierre Gasly's Improbable Pole Position at Monza
Fifteen minutes before the most improbable pole lap Formula 1 has seen in years, Pierre Gasly wasn’t visualising apexes or poring over data. He was hunting down George Russell’s king on an online chessboard.
Piece by piece, move by move, Gasly dismantled the Mercedes driver. “I must say before the quali, I felt pretty confident,” he said. “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,” he told him, “but he’s going to get you in a few minutes.”
Gasly’s reply involved a swear word. The smile that followed said the rest. “Turned out that it worked out well. So yeah, it’s been fun.”
Russell laughed too. “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. Gasly 2, Russell 0.
A pole built on pure merit
No-one in the paddock – least of all Gasly or Alpine – walked into Monza expecting the 30‑year‑old to start on pole. His only F1 win came here six years ago, in that strange, echoing, pandemic season. That day, luck and chaos did the heavy lifting.
Back then, driving for Toro Rosso, he inherited the lead after a red-flag restart, Lance Stroll’s mistake and Lewis Hamilton’s penalty. It was a fairytale, but a freak one.
This was different. This was cold, hard pace.
The Alpine, trimmed out for low drag, has looked sharp all weekend. Its low-downforce aero philosophy, married to a Mercedes power unit many regard as the class of the field, suddenly made sense on the fastest track in F1. An upgrade introduced in the Netherlands has clearly nudged the car forward. In qualifying, Gasly and his engineers threaded everything together on a day when the usual heavyweights stumbled.
“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.
“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 found himself second last in the queue on his final run – the ideal place for a tow. Behind him, the big names wrestled with traffic, timing and nerves. Alpine, for once, got every detail right. The lap that followed was the product of a driver who sensed a rare opening and refused to leave anything on the table.
The forgotten talent finally resurfaces
Gasly is popular in the paddock, a driver with plenty of friends but not always a place in the headlines. Even that Monza win in 2020 never quite shifted the perception of him as one of F1’s overlooked talents.
His first shot with Red Bull in 2019 ended brutally. Max Verstappen crushed him. Within half a season, Gasly was sent back to the junior team, another name on a growing list of drivers unable to live with the Dutchman.
He stayed loyal to the Red Bull system for three more years before Alpine handed him a factory drive. It looked like a lifeline – a chance to anchor a works project and rebuild his reputation.
The reality bit hard. Alpine faltered, stumbled, and then fell behind. Only this season, after Renault scrapped its own engine programme and signed up for Mercedes customer units, has the team shown signs of life.
The last 48 hours have summed up the chaos around them.
Alpine’s bruising week off the track
On Friday, Gasly briefly thought he had a Monaco podium back in his hands. Alpine had won an appeal against two pit-lane speeding penalties, promoting him into the top three. Then the FIA court of appeal reversed course and reinstated the punishments. The podium vanished.
A few hours later, Flavio Briatore lit the fuse in a news conference. The de facto team boss claimed one of the four judges involved in the Monaco case had “links” with McLaren, pointing to a charity event in California in 2018 where the judge had been present and a local McLaren garage had apparently donated “two or three” cars.
He produced no evidence beyond that. McLaren team principal Andrea Stella called the suggestion “insulting” in the room. Behind the scenes, the team were said to be furious at the insinuation.
On Saturday, the FIA court of appeal issued a rare public statement, rejecting any “questions (about) the independence and impartiality of the judges” and swatting away the idea of bias.
The verdict itself at least restored one key principle: all drivers penalised in Monaco were treated the same way, even if the underlying decision to hand out pit-lane speeding penalties still looks deeply questionable. Alpine remain convinced they were wronged, insisting their data proves Gasly never exceeded the limit.
Managing director Steve Nielsen gave a raw snapshot of the mood to Sky Sports. “Two or three days ago, we were on the floor,” he said. “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.”
From legal defeat to pole at Monza in the space of a day. Alpine, a team accustomed to blows, suddenly had a reason to breathe again.
Russell’s title lifeline
Behind Gasly, Russell knows exactly what Sunday represents.
He starts second, 59 points behind championship leader Kimi Antonelli, who has largely controlled their intra-Mercedes fight all year. Antonelli, though, carries a grid penalty for exceeding his engine allocation and will launch from 20th.
Russell’s chance is obvious.
“We had a bit of a mess with Verstappen entering the lap,” he explained. “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.”
The Briton knows a win is non-negotiable if he wants to drag himself back into the title conversation.
“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 widely expected to carve through the field and reach the top six or thereabouts. Even so, that would allow Russell to slash the gap – vital, given he has his own grid penalty looming in the coming races for the same engine reason.
For Russell, Monza isn’t just about beating Gasly. It’s about clawing back a season that risks slipping away.
Ferrari stumble at home, Hamilton turns the screw
If Russell’s eyes are on Antonelli, his immediate threat will likely wear red.
Ferrari, unveiling their upgraded engine at home, contrived to make life harder than it needed to be for the third race running. Both cars flirted with elimination in Q2. The tension in the garage was palpable.
Then came Q3. Charles Leclerc rolled out of the pits at a moment when Lewis Hamilton’s car still sat on its stands without wheels. The timing left the seven-time champion poorly placed in the slipstream games that define Monza qualifying.
Leclerc and Hamilton will start third and fourth after Oscar Piastri collected a three-place grid penalty for impeding Liam Lawson. Ferrari have a front-row seat to the fight ahead, but not the grid positions their pace might have promised.
Hamilton, also 59 points behind Antonelli, let a hint of frustration seep through when asked about the bigger picture.
“(Piastri’s penalty) puts us in (with a) fighting chance, hopefully, with George,” he 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 message was clear enough. Hamilton wants the team to think strategically about which car offers the strongest title shot, even if he stopped short of spelling it out.
Can Gasly hang on?
Strip away the romance of the story and the reality remains brutal. On Friday, Gasly and Alpine did not look to have the race pace to fight Mercedes or Ferrari over a full Grand Prix distance.
“Obviously not to the pace of these guys around us, but we seem to have picked up more pace from yesterday to today,” Gasly admitted. “So we’ll obviously give our best shot and see what we can get out of it.”
Monza’s long straights suggest overtaking should be simple. The truth is more complicated. Cars run such low downforce here that following closely through the chicanes becomes tricky, and the DRS effect is often smaller than expected. Track position still matters.
Gasly has that. He also has a car that is slippery on the straights, a team riding an emotional high and a driver’s instinct sharpened by years of being overlooked.
He beat Russell on the chessboard. He beat him to pole. Now comes the only battle that really counts: 53 laps at Monza, with a title fight raging behind him and a career-defining chance staring him straight in the visor.
