Gasly ends France's twenty-nine-year wait for pole position

A lap that changed everything

Nobody saw it coming. For most of qualifying at Monza, George Russell looked set for pole, with the Mercedes driver moving to the top after the first Q3 runs. But Pierre Gasly saved his final attempt for last, tucked in behind a train of cars, and made the most of it: a tow from Lewis Hamilton down the straights, a yellow flag waved early in the lap after a near-miss involving Oscar Piastri — who picked up a grid penalty as a result — and an Alpine that looked built for the occasion. The result was a 1:21.786 lap that dropped both Mercedes, the McLarens, the Ferraris and Max Verstappen's Red Bull behind the blue car.

The ghost of Jean Alesi

To find the last time a French driver started on pole in Formula 1, you had to go back to 1997 — and to Monza again. Jean Alesi, then driving for Benetton, had topped qualifying for the Italian Grand Prix before finishing second behind David Coulthard the following day. Twenty-nine years on, it's on that same "Temple of Speed" that Gasly erases a statistic that had begun to weigh on French motorsport. Based in Milan, just minutes from the circuit, the Alpine driver has a particular connection to this track: it's where he took his only Formula 1 win, in 2020, in the heavy silence of a race run without spectators during the pandemic. This time, the grandstands will be full, and pole is shaping up to be a very different memory.

Alpine finds its footing

Beyond the individual performance, this pole also tells the story of a team pulling itself out of a rough patch before the summer break, amid underwhelming results and persistent rumours about its future. Since the Dutch Grand Prix two weeks earlier, Alpine has recovered some competitiveness, confirmed at Monza by Franco Colapinto's seventh place on the grid. For the Enstone-based team, heir to Renault, it's even the first pole since Fernando Alonso's in Hungary in 2009 — a welcome sporting headline, for once, for an outfit that has spent recent months making news for the wrong reasons.

Now comes the job of converting it on Sunday, on a track where the home Scuderia and the tifosi will weigh on every corner. Pole has never guaranteed a win, and Monza has a habit of springing surprises from the very first braking zone. But for Gasly, who had been chasing this result since his Toro Rosso debut in 2017, the achievement may already stand on its own: putting the French flag back at the head of the grid, if only for one session.