Antonio Giovinazzi continued his incredible sudden run of form, with a brilliant sprint qualifying at the Italian Grand Prix, whereas team-mate Robert Kubica had a Saturday to forget.
The Italian driver who is fighting for his Formula 1 career, will start Sunday’s race from seventh on the grid, after finishing eighth in Saturday’s sprint. Giovinazzi had an excellent start at the Autodromo Nazionale di Monza after starting tenth, and quickly found himself in eighth after making his way past Sergio Pérez and with Pierre Gasly crashing out ahead.
The Italian’s aggressive start proved crucial, as from then on the Alfa Romeo Racing ORLEN driver had a relatively relaxed drive to the flag. Giovinazzi inherits a seventh place start for Sunday’s race as sprint winner Valtteri Bottas will start from the back of the grid after taking an engine penalty.
Giovinazzi is very happy with how Saturday went and is confident of repeating his performance on Sunday.
“I am really happy about today’s result, especially in front of our home fans, and I’m looking forward to tomorrow. We knew we had to be aggressive at the start and we did it, making up two places. We’ve given ourselves a good position to start tomorrow, now we have to finish the job and hopefully gain even a little more.
“Tomorrow will be a very different race, with a lot of fuel, stops and strategy coming into play: but we are confident. Our pace looked good earlier today and we have good straight-line speed to help us defend. We can go out there and do our own race.”
“I had a lot of oversteer in the right-hand corners” – Robert Kubica
On the other side of the Alfa Romeo garage, it was a very difficult afternoon for Robert Kubica. The Polish driver was span round on the opening lap by rookie Yuki Tsunoda, and found himself stuck in the gravel.
Miraculously Kubica found his way back on track, where all he could do was bring his damaged car home. Kubica will line-up in seventeenth place for the race on Sunday, where he is hoping to have a bit more luck on the opening lap, than he did on Saturday.
“The race didn’t start well for me: I don’t know what happened exactly, but I didn’t manage to pull off cleanly from the grid and lost a lot of ground. Paradoxically, that gave me a good opportunity to see what was going on ahead of me and I could place myself really well into the first chicane, where I gained a couple of places. Then I did a bit of a rally-style move into the second chicane, passing in the middle of two other cars.
“Unfortunately, I was then hidden by Tsunoda and I got stuck in the gravel. I was nearly switching the engine off, but then I told myself to try and apply some of my rally skills to come of out the gravel: don’t ask me how but I managed! For the rest of the race I had a lot of oversteer in the right-hand corners and I couldn’t really make up many places: I only understood why when I got off the car – the rear of the floor got badly damaged in the crash and that caused all the balance issues.”
