190 Races: Pierre Gasly Takes His First F1 Pole at Monza

🏁 How Gasly Stole Pole at the Temple of Speed

The warning signs were there, and almost nobody read them. Gasly topped Q1. He was fourth in Q2, two tenths off an Antonelli-led session. In a weekend where Mercedes had looked untouchable — Russell led both FP2 and FP3 — an Alpine near the front looked like a slipstream artefact rather than a threat.

It was not an artefact. It was the plan. Monza in 2026 is a tow circuit like no other, and Alpine treated the slipstream as something to be engineered rather than hoped for. On the final Q3 run Gasly towed team-mate Franco Colapinto down the straights while hunting a tow of his own from Lewis Hamilton, and got the spacing right. He found 0.215s over his own first Q3 effort.

At the front, the order was still churning. Russell had provisional pole after a tow from team-mate Kimi Antonelli, then improved again to a 1:21.846. McLaren's answer never came: Oscar Piastri locked up at Turn 1 at the start of his final run, wrecking his own lap and taking Lando Norris's tow with it. Norris crossed the line without improving and dropped to ninth. Moments later Gasly's lap landed, and the Alpine was on pole.

Ferrari, who came to Monza with a Monza-specific floor and a new ADUO engine, were denied at their home race: Charles Leclerc fourth, Lewis Hamilton fifth. Both had scraped into Q3 in the first place — Leclerc by 0.008s, Hamilton by a single thousandth over Gabriel Bortoleto.

📊 Italian GP 2026 Qualifying: The Q3 Classification

Championship leader Kimi Antonelli qualified seventh but starts from the back of the grid: he took a fifth Mercedes power unit of the season, a penalty confirmed before the weekend. Alex Albon and Liam Lawson are also reported to be taking power-unit penalties. With Antonelli demoted, everyone behind him on this list moves up a place for Sunday.

Note the spread. The entire Q3 top ten is covered by half a second, and the top seven by three tenths — which is exactly what happens when a low-drag circuit, active aero and a well-timed tow collapse the field together.

⏳ 190 Races: One of the Longest Waits in F1 History

This is the number that makes the story. Before Monza, Gasly had entered 190 Grands Prix since his debut at the 2017 Malaysian Grand Prix without once qualifying on pole. In all that time his best starting slot was second, at the 2021 Qatar Grand Prix. He had one win, six podiums, and a nine-year drought at the very front of a grid.

Measured against Formula 1's other famous late bloomers, only Sergio Pérez has waited longer for a maiden pole:

1. Sergio Pérez 216 2022 Saudi Arabian GP
2. Pierre Gasly 190 2026 Italian GP
3. Carlos Sainz 150 2022 British GP
4. Mark Webber 131 2009 German GP
5. Jarno Trulli 118 2004 Monaco GP
6. Nick Heidfeld 90 2005 European GP
7. Valtteri Bottas 80 2017 Bahrain GP
8. Jenson Button 70 2004 San Marino GP
9. Felipe Massa 66 2006 Turkish GP
10. Giancarlo Fisichella 34 1998 Austrian GP

Race entries before a first pole position. Bar length is proportional to the wait.

There is a neatness to where it finally happened. Gasly's only Grand Prix victory, in six seasons of trying, came at Monza in 2020 with AlphaTauri. The one circuit that had ever given him a headline gave him the second one too.

🇫🇷 The Records That Fell: Alpine, Enstone and France

Gasly's personal drought was only part of it. Alpine had never taken a pole position. Not once in 252 race entries since the Renault works team was rebranded for 2021 — a stretch that includes a last-place constructors' finish in 2025.

Widen the lens to the Enstone factory that builds the car and the number gets heavier still. The team has raced as Benetton, Renault, Lotus and Alpine; its last pole under any of those names was Fernando Alonso's, at the 2009 Hungarian Grand Prix. Across the whole Lotus F1 era from 2012 to 2015, the team did not put a car on pole a single time. Seventeen years of Saturdays, ended by a tow down the main straight at Monza.

And then the national record, which is the most striking of the three. The last French driver to start a Grand Prix from pole position was Jean Alesi, for Benetton, at the 1997 Italian Grand Prix. Also at Monza. Between Alesi's lap and Gasly's, France produced Olivier Panis, Sébastien Bourdais, Jules Bianchi, Romain Grosjean, Jean-Éric Vergne and Esteban Ocon — and not one of them ever qualified fastest. Twenty-nine years, one circuit, two French poles.

For a team sitting sixth in the constructors' standings on 63 points, three behind Racing Bulls, it is a wildly disproportionate reward for a good Saturday. The championship table will not change much. The record books already have.

💔 Twenty-Four Hours After Monaco

What sharpens all of this is the timing. On Friday, September 4 — the day before this lap — the FIA's International Court of Appeal reinstated two five-second penalties Gasly had received at the Monaco Grand Prix, stripping him of a podium he had already been given back once. He dropped from third to seventh in the revised Monaco classification and lost nine points.

The case was a mess of measurement. Gasly was penalised for pit-lane speeding; Alpine's Right of Review had the penalties rescinded after it emerged that a pit-lane distance measurement used to calculate speed was in error. McLaren and Red Bull appealed, arguing that changing the benchmark retrospectively was unfair to teams that had set their limiters to the original figures, and that rescinding penalties only for drivers who had not yet served them created a two-tier outcome. The court, hearing the case in Paris on August 25, did not rule that Alpine's measurements were wrong — only that with Monaco's circuit already being dismantled, the team could not prove them correct beyond doubt. Alpine said it felt "unjustly punished." Isack Hadjar inherited the final podium place.

So Gasly arrived at Monza having lost a podium in a courtroom, and having handed his car to reserve driver Paul Aron for FP1 on Friday. He left Saturday on pole for the first time in his life. Formula 1 rarely settles its scores that quickly.

🔮 What It Means for Sunday

Pole at Monza is not the fortress it is elsewhere. The run to Turn 1 is long, the tow is enormous, and the driver leading into the first braking zone is often not the one who started there — which is the whole reason Mercedes was comfortable sending its championship leader to the back. Gasly will start ahead of a Mercedes, two Ferraris, a McLaren and a Red Bull, in a car that is sixth-fastest on merit over a season. Holding position into Turn 1 is a genuine question.

Behind him, the race has two separate plots. Russell needs points on Hamilton and Antonelli in a three-way fight for second in the championship, where he and Hamilton are dead level on 183. And Antonelli, 59 points clear at the top, has to carve through the field at a circuit his own engineers picked precisely because it can be carved through — at his home race, in front of a crowd that would happily have adopted him.

The 2026 Italian Grand Prix starts at Monza on Sunday, September 6. Live timing and results as they land are on our Race Hub, the self-updating standings are on the championship page, and the rest of the season is on the 2026 calendar. Whatever happens on Sunday, one line in the record book is already written: after 190 races, Pierre Gasly finally has a pole position.