Hamilton beats Perez in F1 qualifying thriller at Imola

Lewis Hamilton put Mercedes on pole position for the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix at Imola, but was nearly beaten by Sergio Perez’s Red Bull.

Max Verstappen had to settle for third place as his new team-mate outqualified him at only the second attempt, while Valtteri Bottas was only eighth in the second Mercedes.

Hamilton couldn’t improve on his initial 1m14.411s Q3 effort, but it held up for pole despite Perez closing to within 0.035s of him.

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Verstappen was 0.091s away from Hamilton after the first runs, and only found another 0.004s on his next attempt having run wide at Tamburello – allowing Perez to get between them.

Lando Norris looked set to star for McLaren as he held fourth after the opening Q3 laps then jumped into a provisional second place only for the lap to be deleted for a track limits infringement, demoting him to seventh behind team-mate Daniel Ricciardo.

Charles Leclerc and Pierre Gasly starred for home teams Ferrari and AlphaTauri to qualify fourth and fifth, helped by Bottas’s poor laps leaving him only eighth.

Esteban Ocon was ninth in the best Alpine, while Lance Stroll had both his Q3 runs deleted over track limits so starts 10th.

Qualifying was interrupted by a long red flag when Yuki Tsunoda crashed his AlphaTauri on the exit of the Variante Alta, spinning backwards into the barriers and doing substantial damage.

Tsunoda was unhurt, but will start last on a weekend when he was tipped to star given his Bahrain form and extensive pre-season Imola mileage in older-spec cars.

Also out in Q1 were the two Alfa Romeos and the two Haases, with Nikita Mazepin and Antonio Giovinazzi getting caught up in a spat along the way as they ended up racing into Tamburello on their final flying laps after Mazepin followed an instruction from his team to push on with starting the lap quickly as the clock counted down.

Three illustrious names were eliminated in Q2 – Carlos Sainz Jr missing out on Q3 in his first race in Italy as a Ferrari driver by 0.061s, Sebastian Vettel managing only 13th for Aston Martin and Fernando Alonso slowest in the session in his Alpine. Alonso had also been within a tenth and a half of a Q1 exit.

Williams couldn’t quite manage the Q3 heroics George Russell predicted, but did show its predicted stronger form at Imola. Russell and Nicholas Latifi took 12th and 14th.

Qualifying Results