Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli took a scintillating pole position at the Belgian Grand Prix, leaving team-mate and title rival George Russell trailing in fourth, more than 0.5 seconds adrift.<\/p>\n
The Italian, who leads the championship from Russell by 25 points, beat Red Bull’s Max Verstappen by 0.317secs, even though the four-time champion had the help of a tow from team-mate Isack Hadjar.<\/p>\n
McLaren’s Lando Norris was an impressive third, 0.440secs back, despite bailing on his final lap, but the world champion has a 10-place grid penalty for exceeding his allowance of engine parts.<\/p>\n
Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton were fifth and sixth, ahead of McLaren’s Oscar Piastri and the upgraded Racing Bull of British rookie Arvid Lindblad.<\/p>\n
Antonelli has looked the man to beat since topping Friday practice and he delivered on his potential with his sixth pole position in 10 races so far this year.<\/p>\n
On the slowing down lap, he sent his best wishes to his father Marco, who is celebrating his 61st birthday on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Antonelli said: “Q1, I felt a bit lost because the wind picked up and the balance was a bit more on the edge but the session came to us. I changed a little bit the front wing flap for Q2. Q3 was good because we did a decent first lap and second lap I found a lot of time. It was a good lap.”<\/p>\n
Russell said: “The lap felt good. But we have just been dealing with an issue with the straight-line speed ever since Silverstone.<\/p>\n
“We thought we had found the problem, it wasn’t the problem and then we thought it was a driving style and it wasn’t the solution.<\/p>\n
“But I feel after looking at the data, I feel positive with the job I did. If you just take the corners, I did a very good job.<\/p>\n
“Battling against Kimi is very tough in a fair fight. When we are in this situation, it’s impossible. The team are working so hard to try and pinpoint what it is. It can be a million things.”<\/p>\n
Red Bull employed Hadjar to help Verstappen with a slipstream on the long flat-out section to the final chicane as the Frenchman has a 30-place grid penalty for taking a new engine, which puts him over the limit for the year.<\/p>\n
Verstappen said the tow gained him 0.3secs in lap time.<\/p>\n
He added: “It was definitely helping me otherwise I would not be standing here, it would be P6 or something.<\/p>\n
“Isack, knowing he had a penalty and would be starting at the back, he helped me. I will be looking in my mirrors tomorrow. But we are happy to be on the front row with how we executed it as a team.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli took a scintillating pole position at the Belgian Grand Prix, leaving team-mate and title rival…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":698711,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-698710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698710\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/698711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}