Pierre Gasly Takes Unlikely Pole Position at Monza

A quarter of an hour before the biggest qualifying lap of his life, Pierre Gasly was not staring at data traces or meditating in the back of the Alpine garage. He was playing online chess with George Russell.

And winning.

“I must say before the quali, I felt pretty confident,” Gasly smiled later. “Because I was picking piece by piece after piece.”

His performance coach Ben Thorne watched the game unfold 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, by his own admission, contained a swear word. The grin stayed.

It turned out Thorne was wrong. Gasly beat Russell on the board, then beat him on the track. Pole position at Monza. In an Alpine. In 2024.

No-one saw this coming. Least of all Alpine.

A pole with no asterisk

Gasly’s only Formula 1 victory came at this same circuit six years ago, in the eerie quiet of the pandemic season. That win owed plenty to chaos: a red flag, a restart from third, Lance Stroll running wide, Lewis Hamilton serving a penalty. Gasly, then in the Toro Rosso, kept his head while the race fell apart around him.

This, though, was the opposite. No lottery. No fluke. Just a lap that stood up to forensic scrutiny.

The Alpine has been slippery all weekend, trimmed out for Monza’s long straights, its low-downforce aero philosophy finally finding a stage that suits it. The Mercedes power unit behind Gasly has been the class of the field this year, and an upgrade introduced at the last race in the Netherlands has clearly moved the car forward.

From the first timed laps on Saturday, the signs were there.

“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.”

He did. The lap that followed was messy in the best possible way: right on the edge through Ascari, knife-edge commitment at Parabolica, the kind of driving where the car looks a fraction too loose until you see the time.

“It was quite hectic through Ascari and Parabolica,” Gasly said. “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.”

The stopwatch said otherwise.

From forgotten man to Monza front man

Gasly is one of the paddock’s good guys, popular with rivals and mechanics alike. Yet for years he has lived in the shadows, his reputation frozen in time by that brutal half-season at Red Bull in 2019 when Max Verstappen crushed him and the team sent him back to the junior outfit.

He rebuilt himself at Toro Rosso and AlphaTauri, added that Monza win to his CV, but the perception lingered: talented, yes, but not quite top tier.

The Alpine move was supposed to change that. A works team, factory backing, a platform to prove he belonged at the sharp end. Instead, Alpine stumbled. Internal upheaval, underpowered Renault engines, technical missteps. The team slid down the grid while Gasly waited for the car to match his ambition.

This season, the story has started to turn. Renault’s decision to abandon its own F1 engine and become a Mercedes customer has stabilised one of Alpine’s key weaknesses. The latest updates have finally bitten. Saturday was the clearest evidence yet.

Managing director Steve Nielsen didn’t hide how much it meant.

“Two or three days ago, we were on the floor,” he 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.”

Alpine’s turbulent weekend

All of this came at the end of a stormy 48 hours for Alpine.

On Friday, Gasly briefly thought he had inherited a Monaco podium after Alpine’s appeal against his pit-lane speeding penalties was upheld. Then the FIA court of appeal reversed course and reinstated the sanctions. The podium was gone again.

A few hours later, de facto team boss Flavio Briatore detonated a political row. In a news conference, he suggested one of the four judges in the Monaco case had “links” with McLaren. The supposed evidence? Attendance at a 2018 charity event in California where a local McLaren garage had apparently donated “two or three” cars.

There was no proof of anything improper. No suggestion of direct involvement from the F1 team. No documentation. Just innuendo.

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella called the claim “insulting” in the room. Off-camera, the anger ran deeper. For a rare moment, the FIA court of appeal itself issued a statement, rejecting any “questions (about) the independence and impartiality of the judges” and pushing back firmly on the insinuation.

The verdict on Monaco still leaves a sour taste. Many in the paddock feel the pit-lane penalties should never have been applied to any of the drivers. Yet at least the court ensured everyone was treated the same.

Alpine, though, remain convinced they were wronged, their own data showing Gasly never exceeded the pit-lane speed limit. The mood in the camp swung from frustration and suspicion on Friday to elation on Saturday as Gasly parked the car in pole position.

From the floor to the front row in two days.

Slipstreams, gamesmanship and a perfect tow

Monza qualifying is always a traffic jam disguised as a session. Every driver wants a tow, nobody wants to be the one punching the air.

On the final runs in Q3, Gasly found himself second last in the train. That is the sweet spot: a strong slipstream, clean enough air, and minimal risk of being baulked.

Behind him, chaos.

Mercedes had planned a textbook tow for Russell from team-mate Kimi Antonelli. Then Max Verstappen inserted himself between the two silver cars on the out lap and blew up the plan.

“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 second, alongside the man who beat him at chess and then on track. Behind them sit Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton, promoted one place each by Oscar Piastri’s three-place penalty for impeding Liam Lawson.

Ferrari, launching an upgraded engine at home, again managed to complicate their own afternoon. Both cars flirted dangerously with elimination in Q2, and in Q3 Leclerc rolled out of the pits at a moment when Hamilton still had no wheels on his car. The seven-time champion ended up poorly placed in the slipstream queue.

For Ferrari, this was supposed to be the day their new power unit roared at Monza. Instead, they will start from the second row, chasing an Alpine and a Mercedes.

Russell’s title lifeline

For Russell, Sunday is about more than a race win. It is about the championship.

He trails Antonelli by 59 points, the Italian having largely had him covered all season. But Antonelli will start from 20th after a grid penalty for exceeding his engine allocation. It is the kind of opening title contenders dream about.

“The win is going to be very important tomorrow but I’m more pleased about the performance,” Russell 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 expected to charge back into the top six, such is Mercedes’ pace, but that would still give Russell a chance to hack a sizeable chunk from the deficit. He knows he has his own engine penalty looming in the coming races. Days like this cannot be wasted.

Hamilton, also 59 points down on Antonelli, made his own priorities clear. With Piastri’s penalty bumping him to fourth, he hinted that Mercedes might need to think carefully about how they play the race.

“(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.”

Team orders, alliances, quiet conversations on the pit wall – they could all come into play once the lights go out.

Can Gasly hang on?

Friday’s long runs suggested Alpine might not have the race pace to live with Mercedes and Ferrari. Even at Monza, where overtaking is trickier than the long straights suggest, a slower car on pole is vulnerable.

Gasly knows it.

“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.”

He will need the perfect launch, the perfect first lap, and a car that hangs on when the tyres start to go. He will also need Alpine to execute flawlessly on the pit wall, something that has not always been guaranteed in recent years.

Yet there is a different feel to this one. Gasly is not the beneficiary of a freak red flag or a penalty cascade. He is the man everyone has to beat at a circuit where he has already written his name once.

On Saturday, he out-thought Russell on a chessboard and outdrove him on a racetrack. On Sunday, with a title fight twisting behind him and a resurgent Alpine around him, the question is simple:

Can he turn the most unlikely pole of the season into the most complete drive of his career?