How Gasly and Alpine beat Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren and Red Bull to Italian GP pole

Revenge is a dish best served on a hot Monza afternoon. A day after being “robbed” (his words, to Canal+) of his Monaco Formula 1 podium, Pierre Gasly claimed his first career pole at the track where he registered his sensational maiden victory in 2020.

It wasn’t just a case of beating George Russell by 0.060s on a day when Mercedes only had one car in the mix for pole, owing to Kimi Antonelli’s grid penalty for adding a new power unit to the pool.

Gasly also saw off cars that might not have been outright pole contenders, but which have made his Alpine A526 at best a fringe player for top-10 finishes over the balance of the 2026 season. Having a Mercedes power unit helped, of course, as did better understanding of the latest upgrade package applied at Zandvoort, but this was a triumph of execution.

“Our expectation on our performance tracker had us going into Q3 and being 8th, 9th, 10th,” said Alpine managing director Steve Nielsen.

“We got everything out of the car. So, honestly, we didn't expect this, but of course we'll take it.”

To unpick how Gasly and Alpine did a better job, we need to examine how the latest technical regulations have complicated what has always been a difficult proposition at the home of the Italian Grand Prix.

The value of the tow

Since Tazio Nuvolari was in short trousers, getting an aerodynamic ‘tow’ from the car in front at Monza has ranged between a valuable leg-up and a nice-to-have, critical only in unusual circumstances, as in 1992 when Ayrton Senna helped his countryman Mauricio Gugelmin scrape on to the grid in the miserably under-powered Jordan-Yamaha. This season, the huge contribution of the electrical motor to total power output has made a tow at Monza nothing less than utterly necessary.

Getting into the slipstream of the car ahead requires you to use fractionally less battery power, which pays back in the form of delaying the inevitable “staircase” as electrical deployment ramps down in stages as the charge depletes. This is just one facet in the overall mix, but it complicates the approach to all the other prerequisites for a strong lap time in a current F1 car.

Take the out-lap: all the usual tyre preparation and battery charging has to be completed with part of the driver and pitwall’s mental bandwidth directed towards synchronising all this with the opportunity for a tow. All this while bringing the brakes up to temperature – difficult when the biggest braking areas come early in the lap, and cycling through acceleration and braking phases later on the out-lap could cost battery power.

While some teams struggled to set up a tow, Alpine's drivers stuck together

Photo by: Manuel Eletto / Getty Images

Once in the lap, the nature of this track demands utmost precision: corner speed has to be optimum. Again, the demands of power management have added to the challenges of assembling a lap.

It’s not necessarily a case of driving to the limits of adhesion, more a balance between avoiding scrubbing off speed through understeering into the corner or letting the rear step out at the exit – because all that lost momentum has to be recouped out of the electrical energy budget, giving less to ‘spend’ on those long straights. Every tiny slip comes back in the form of the algorithm turning off the taps that little bit earlier. At an energy-starved track such as this, there are innumerable ways of leaking lap time.

Hence the importance of the tow. And, with it, team discipline. The temptation to ‘accidentally’ fail to give a team-mate that vital leg up is powerful here, especially when there are big rewards at stake. Let’s not forget Charles Leclerc’s landmark victory here in 2019 from a pole position gifted to him via a tow from Sebastian Vettel – which Leclerc didn’t reciprocate. In F1, agreements between team-mates aren’t worth the paper they aren’t written on – unless the boss is prepared to wield the rod.

Teamwork

The auguries were there all through qualifying if you studied the live GPS trace as the sessions unfolded. Unfailingly, Gasly and team-mate Franco Colapinto towed each other around neatly, while Gasly was also able to duck into the slipstream of other cars ahead. This is a factor of sharp pitwall operations and good communication as well as the driver seizing the moment.

In contrast, Ferrari barely managed to get its cars out in proximity to each other at the same time, seemingly too fixated on big-picture hardpoints such as saving tyres in Q2 and ensuring total equality between drivers to react improvisationally in the moment. Given events more recent than Leclerc/Vettel in 2019 – the failure to implement team orders promptly at Zandvoort two weeks ago springs to mind – this is perhaps to be expected.

“We got everything out of the car. So, honestly, we didn't expect this, but of course we'll take it,”
Steve Nielsen

Ferrari’s execution was off throughout, as Leclerc suffered battery issues in Q2, which team boss Frederic Vasseur put down to him not getting enough charge on his out-lap. Lewis Hamilton only escaped Q2 by a millisecond, denied only by Audi’s Gabriel Bortoleto having a moment on his final run. Then the Briton was left running on his own in his first Q3 run – according to him, because the wheels hadn’t yet been put on his car while everyone else was leaving the pits.

“We do work as a team, but have we been?” mused Hamilton.

“What I can say is, Pierre did a great job. But clearly, looking from a distance, it looked like they [Alpine] worked really well as a team.”

If Ferrari, despite the latest Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities (ADUO) tweaks to the turbo, needed to execute perfectly to be in with a chance of beating Mercedes to pole, McLaren and Red Bull didn’t have the outright pace to get there and needed others ahead to fail. Instead, they contrived to shoot themselves in the foot.

Max Verstappen arrived in Q3 without his wingman, Liam Lawson having been eliminated in Q2. Red Bull had fitted Lawson’s car with a new power unit, which would have incurred a grid penalty, but then failed to get him into a proper tow.

Max Verstappen was without wingman Liam Lawson in Q3

Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images

Hence Lawson’s expletive-laden radio message saying the team had “hung me out to dry”. Although Oscar Piastri impeded Lawson on his final Q2 lap – and lost three grid spots for doing so – Liam was already swinging in the breeze on the washing line by then.

That left Verstappen needing the charity of others for a tow, or running an interference line to scupper somebody else’s lap. He chose the latter, infuriating George Russell by trying to get between the two Mercedes at the end of their outlaps on the final Q3 runs.

Not that the “papier-Wache” Red Bull would have been a contender for pole anyway, but the Dutchman could have expected to be ahead of Gasly on the grid.

Ditto McLaren. Monza wasn’t expected to favour the MCL40, given its aero efficiency deficit to Mercedes as well as its marginal brakes. But while Piastri, with a tow from Norris, strung together a first Q3 run good enough for P3 until his penalty, holding up Lawson was sloppy.

He then speared off at Turn 1 on the final Q3 runs when he was supposed to be giving Lando Norris a tow. Accidental or Leclerc 2019-style Machiavellian shenanigans? Either way, Norris ended up without a tow since the McLarens were running at the head of the field. He had also been too far behind Russell at the start of his first Q3 run to get a reasonable tow down the main straight.

The blunder at the end of Q3, team boss Andrea Stella explained, was partly a function of their garage’s position at the pit entry rather than exit. This gives a cleaner entry during race pitstops but made the timing of the final Q3 runs dicey. Leave it too late and they ran the risk of being at the back of the queue, perhaps even missing out on a final push lap if the chequered flag came out before they crossed the line. In the end they went too soon.

“Overall, there are multiple areas in which we have not executed at the level that we should have,” rued Stella afterwards. “Because in Monza, which is so peculiar, position of the car on track is as important as the underlying car performance.

“And also, the management of the power unit and the brakes is, once again, as important as these other factors. So, there was more that we could have achieved.”

Gasly vs Russell

Pierre Gasly, Alpine

Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images

If Ferrari ultimately took itself out of the equation for pole, Russell’s second Q3 run, which Gasly beat by 0.060s, is slightly trickier to decipher. Comparing the Briton’s first and second runs – the first one of 1m21.929s being good enough for provisional pole – suggests a big difference in deployment over the second half of the lap.

On his second run, Russell lost about half a second overall through the first chicane compared with his first, where he was later off the throttle and on the brakes from a slightly higher top speed, then neater on the throttle at the exit.

Towards the second chicane on that final run, he was marginally quicker on top speed, but then built to a peak of around 10km/h faster than his previous run on the straight between the Lesmos and Ascari, then again between Ascari and Parabolica. This is where he pulled back the time he lost at Turn 1 and more, despite carrying too much speed into Ascari and having to dodge an appointment with the run-off.

George felt he was impeded by Verstappen on his final run, but was he?

"We had a bit of a mess with Verstappen entering the lap," he said. "Everything was all looking fine but then going into Parabolica, Max just slammed on the brakes and he didn't want to be the lead car.

"It's just one of those things, you know, you can't control what other people do. Kimi was there to give me the slipstream, which he did perfectly on the first run. But obviously with Max, I think it also made it difficult for Kimi to know what to do as well. So, it was just a little bit unfortunate.

"I did my lap a second and a half behind Max, which wasn't ideal."

These claims don’t quite stack up. Earlier on Saturday, the Mercedes had been rehearsing the tow between them all the way to the second chicane. On Russell’s first Q3 run Antonelli dived out of the way well before the braking area for the first chicane. George then had no tow for the rest of the lap. On the second run, Verstappen did cause Russell to check up before the Parabolica – it’s there in the data and the onboard footage – but although that prompted Antonelli to dive out of the way almost immediately on the front straight, George still had the benefit of Max making a hole in the air ahead.

"I think everybody did a very good job and we’ve been rewarded for it," 
Pierre Gasly 

So, while Russell clearly paid the price for being discombobulated by Max’s spoiler tactics in terms of his confidence under braking for Turn 1 (and then being fractionally too aggressive on the throttle at the exit, requiring a brief correction), the benefits of having a slipsteam from Max later on in the lap are clear.

Gasly got a cleaner exit from the opening chicane, carried more speed through the second, had a higher apex speed at both Lesmos, and had a quicker overall trajectory through the Parabolica. Enjoying a tow from Hamilton (who in turn had a tow from Leclerc, who was in the slipstream of Arvid Lindblad) enabled him to ameliorate losses arising from Mercedes’ straightline speed advantage over the slightly draggier Alpine.

So, it was a combination of being in the right place at the right time, thanks to on-point teamwork, and then pressing that advantage home. Teammate Franco Colapinto could have joined him at the sharp end but he lost a little too much ground while warming his tyres on the back straight during his out-lap, so he was fractionally too distant to enjoy an optimal tow.

“We knew that there was a bit more on the table in the practice sessions and then I think it was a very good execution from the team, you know, always putting me in a great position on track, managing the gap as best we could,” explained Gasly.

“So, I think my last lap, managed to target, you know, slightly over 2.5 seconds behind Lewis when he was going to be fast and sort of, like, drag me with him. So, I think it was perfect execution.

“It’s not down to, obviously, one simple parameter. I think everybody did a very good job and we’ve been rewarded for it.”

Pierre Gasly, Alpine

Photo by: Bryn Lennon / Formula 1 via Getty Images