Pierre Gasly Secures First Career Pole Position at Monza

Pierre Gasly has waited nine long years for this. When it finally came, it arrived in the most poetic place possible.

On the same strip of tarmac where he stunned the sport with his maiden Formula 1 victory in 2020, the Frenchman delivered another Monza classic on Saturday: his first career pole position.

Gasly’s Monza magic, part two

With two minutes left in Q3, the session felt settled. The remaining 10 drivers sat in the garages, engines silent, tyres cooling, Russell on provisional pole with a 1:21.846 and Gasly only third on the timesheets.

Then the final rush began.

Cars poured back onto the circuit for one last throw at the Temple of Speed. Russell crossed the line and improved again, tightening his grip on pole. But Gasly had timed it to perfection. He was the last man on track, the last lap of the session, the last chance.

He nailed it.

Gasly stopped the clock at 1:21.786, snatching pole by six thousandths of a second and detonating the Alpine garage. The radio crackled with the release of years of frustration.

“Let's go! I've been waiting for that one!” he screamed as he crossed the line, a roar as raw as it was overdue.

When he climbed out of the car in parc fermé, fist punching the Monza air, Charles Leclerc walked over from fourth place to offer a handshake. Respect from a Ferrari driver on Ferrari’s home ground is no small gesture.

“It was amazing. Thank you everyone. It was an incredible quali,” Gasly said moments later. “From the first lap in Q1, I felt very good in the car. Trying to chip a little bit away every single session and then, yeah, in the end, it felt like a very good lap.

“But I'm so happy. It's been nine years trying to chase and get the opportunity to get a pole position. Win my first race in Monza, get my first pole position on this track I think is something special.”

Special barely covers it.

Russell denied, chess and fractions

George Russell will line up alongside him on Sunday, a frustrated but sporting second. His day started with a quiet game of chess with Gasly before qualifying. It ended with the Frenchman outplaying him again, this time at 350 km/h.

“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,” Russell said with a rueful laugh. “So huge congrats to him.”

The margin between them was microscopic. The meaning for Gasly, anything but.

Behind them, the grid tells its own story of penalties and opportunity. McLaren’s Oscar Piastri qualified third on raw pace but drops to sixth after a grid penalty for impeding. That shuffles the order and hands others a lifeline.

Championship leader Kimi Antonelli, in the Mercedes, could not capitalise. He qualified only seventh and will start from the pit lane after an engine penalty, turning his Sunday into a damage-limitation exercise rather than a charge from the front.

Piastri’s Alpine teammate Franco Colapinto inherits seventh, with McLaren’s Lando Norris — winner of the last two races — right behind him. Norris will not mind the traffic ahead; he has made a habit recently of turning compromised starting spots into serious points.

Pole after heartbreak

Gasly’s pole comes against a turbulent backdrop. Just 24 hours earlier, he had his Monaco podium stripped away three months after the race.

He had originally finished third in the principality, only to be hit with two 10-second penalties for speeding in the pit lane moments after the podium ceremony. Those sanctions dropped him to seventh and promoted Red Bull Racing’s Isack Hadjar to third.

Alpine refused to let it rest. They requested a review and initially won, with Gasly reinstated to third place. Then Red Bull Racing and McLaren countered with their own petition — and this time, they prevailed. The penalties stood. The podium vanished again.

For many drivers, that kind of whiplash would linger. At Monza, Gasly turned it into fuel.

A career that keeps looping back to Monza

Gasly’s relationship with this circuit now borders on the cinematic. His lone Formula 1 victory came here in 2020, driving for AlphaTauri, the team then rebadged from Toro Rosso and now known as Racing Bulls.

That win remains one of the defining shocks of the hybrid era. His pole on Saturday, by contrast, felt like the product of persistence rather than chaos.

Since 2023, Gasly has been the spearhead of Alpine’s French project, committing his future to the team with a contract extension through 2028. The partnership has not always been smooth, but it has already delivered big days: podiums at the 2023 Dutch Grand Prix and the 2024 São Paulo Grand Prix added to his earlier rostrums in Brazil 2019 and Azerbaijan 2021.

Five podiums in total. One win. And now, at last, one pole.

His F1 story began back in 2017 at the Malaysian Grand Prix, thrown into the deep end as Daniil Kvyat’s replacement at Toro Rosso. Since then he has been promoted, demoted, written off, and rebuilt. On Saturday at Monza, he stood at the front of the grid on merit, with the stopwatch as his witness.

The statistics say it is just a starting position. The noise around the Autodromo says it is something more. On Sunday, with Russell staring at his gearbox and a hungry pack behind, the question hangs over the Temple of Speed:

Can Pierre Gasly turn Monza into his track all over again?