Oscar Piastri Snatches Dramatic Imola Pole

Oscar Piastri will start tomorrow’s Made in Italy e dell’Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix from pole position. On his final run, McLaren’s Australian driver demoted Red Bull’s Dutchman Max Verstappen by just 34 thousandths of a second: 1’14”670 for the Drivers’ championship leader, 1’14”704 for the reigning world champion. This was Piastri’s third career pole after those in Shanghai and Sakhir earlier this season. McLaren now has a total of 168 pole positions to its name, ten of them set here at Imola’s Enzo e Dino Ferrari circuit.

Sharing the second row will be George Russell in the Mercedes (1’14”807) and Lando Norris (1’14”962) in the other McLaren. These four drivers were the only ones to get under the 1’15” barrier.

The Pirelli Pole Position Award was presented to Piastri by Gianni Morandi. The singer, an iconic figure in Italian culture, has sold more than 50 million records worldwide. His song, “In ginocchio da te” (on my knees in front of you) featured in the soundtrack of the South Korean film “Parasite” which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival as well as four Oscars at the 92nd edition of the Academy Awards. Morandi’s career also features numerous appearances as an actor in films and TV series, as well as hosting television programmes, including the Sanremo Italian Song Festival, which he won in 1987 singing “Si puo dare di piu” (you can give more) with Enrico Ruggeri and Umberto Tozzi.

There was far more variety than usual in terms of Saturday tyre use. The Hard made its first appearance of the weekend in FP3, the Aston Martin pair of Alonso and Stroll completing some runs with them and they will therefore only have one set each available for the race. They also used a set of Softs. Norris also did a scrubbing-in lap on a set of C4s. The Alpine, Haas and Sauber drivers only used the C6, with the other drivers splitting runs between the Soft and Medium.

For once, summing up qualifying in terms of colours, tyre usage was not monochromatic. The red C6 was the dominant hue, but there were several splashes of yellow. Aston Martin took advantage of having more sets of Mediums than the rest by doing three runs on this compound – two in Q2 and one in Q3. Russell set the third fastest time on his only set of C5s, thus sacrificing the possibility of using them as a new set on which to start the race, in favour of seeing how effective they were over a flying lap.

Oscar Piastri – Pole

“It’s always a great feeling to be on Pole. It was a really good session, tougher with the Red Flags, but I am very happy with the job we’ve done. The tyres have been trickier today, but the team did a fantastic job to get the car into a nice window. I’m excited for tomorrow.”

Max Verstappen – P2

“First of all, the most important thing is that Yuki is okay, so that is good, especially after a crash like that happens. Today, to get P2 it was overall a good result and I think we improved a lot from yesterday. The car was a lot nicer to drive and we did some good work overnight and made positive developments. I am pretty happy with the balance of the car and we put it in a much better window and saw it really come alive. The tyres overheated a bit more than we would like; it was the first time with this tyre and they were a bit too soft for us which impacted our performance a bit. As we went faster, the more they overheated so we couldn’t optimise the performance of the car as much as we would have liked. However, it was a good start and I am pleased to be starting on the front row tomorrow. The race will be a different story as McLaren’s advantage is in the race on the long runs and they are good at keeping the tyres under control. We will see where we are with the pace but we will just focus on ourselves. We will aim to extract the most that we can out of the car and hopefully come away with a good result.”

George Russell – P3

“I am happy with P3 today. The car felt really strong out there and I know I could have done even better if I did not make a small mistake on my first lap of Q3. The team made a great call by choosing the Medium tyre for our second and final effort. Everything just came together on the lap, and I was able to put the tyres in the right window. There may have been a little more time out there, but I don’t think enough to challenge the two drivers ahead of us.

“This circuit is one of the narrowest tracks on the calendar and it will be really tricky to overtake tomorrow. Fighting with the McLarens ahead will not be easy but we showed solid pace on our long runs in practice. If we’re able to perform in a similar manner in tomorrow’s race, then there is every possibility we can fight for the podium.”

Mario Isola – Pirelli Director of Motorsport

“This qualifying session needs to be analysed carefully in terms of tyre behaviour, as it produced many interesting insights. Everyone was keen to see how the C6 would perform in qualifying, comparing it to the C5. From the initial data and listening to the immediate comments from the teams and drivers, we can say that the performance difference between the two softest compounds in the 2025 range is relatively small, which is what was predicted. What we saw today, on a track that didn’t evolve much compared to the first two hours of free practice, was that it wasn’t easy for the drivers to extract the full potential from the C6. Keep in mind that this compound had never been run on the 2025 cars and during the end-of-season test in Abu Dhabi, only eight of today’s 20 drivers tried it. So it’s likely that they need to get to understand it better in order to get the most out of it. This meant that some drivers preferred to go with the C5, a compound they know well, given that it was already the qualifying tyre for the previous two races in Jeddah and Miami. They chose to sacrifice a bit of grip in exchange for the lap time advantage that comes from the predictability of a tyre with which they have more experience and more data.

“As for strategy, the one-stop is still the most viable choice, especially on a track where overtaking is rather complicated, in part because there is only one DRS zone and also because this is the longest pit lane of the season in terms of time lost during a pit stop. Clearly, the combination of Medium and Hard, with a stop between laps 17 and 23, is the most likely. As an alternative, some drivers might prefer to go for a longer first stint, starting on the Hard, in the hope of an eventual Safety Car, in which case the switch to Medium would be between laps 37 and 43. A two-stop strategy is not out of the question in terms of total race time, but the factors just mentioned mean it is at a disadvantage. For anyone attempting this, the best combinations would be Medium-Hard-Hard.”

FORMULA 2

The American Jak Crawford (DAMS Lucas Oil) won the Sprint race, taking the chequered flag ahead of two British drivers, Arvid Lindblad (Campos Racing), second, and Luke Browning (Hitech TGR), third.

As for the tyres, managing degradation was key. On a track where, even in F2, overtaking is complicated, those who managed to maintain a reasonable level of grip for the final stages were able to make up places. The front right tyre showed some signs of graining, while the rears suffered from overheating: also important was managing the performance balance between the two axles in the various stages of the race.

FORMULA 3

A one-two finish for the MP Motorsport team in the first race, with the German Tim Tramnitz winning ahead of Spanish team-mate Bruno del Pino. Onto the third rung of the podium stepped the Bulgarian Nikola Tsolov (Campos Racing). The race featured a battle at the front of the field between the two MP Motorsport drivers, with Tramnitz passing pole-sitter Del Pino, in the braking zone for Turn 1 on lap 3, after which he kept the lead to the chequered flag. A long Safety Car period from laps 5 to 9 meant the drivers were able to get to the finish without suffering too much degradation, except for right at the end.