Antonelli beats the Ferraris to pole in British GP 2026 F1 qualifying
Mercedes' Formula 1 world championship leader Kimi Antonelli stayed clear of the Ferraris to take pole for the British Grand Prix.
Though Lewis Hamilton had managed to upstage Antonelli in sprint qualifying on Friday, this time Ferrari went into the final runs of Q3 two tenths of a second off the two Mercedes ahead.
Antonelli raised the bar with his final lap, and though Charles Leclerc and Hamilton improved too they had to settle for second and third - 0.175s and 0.347s respectively off pole.
George Russell fell back to fourth, unable to improve on his last lap.
He had earlier escaped a Q1 scare in which he went off at Luffield and tapped the barrier.
Isack Hadjar outqualified team-mate Max Verstappen and earned fifth for Red Bull, with Verstappen behind Lando Norris's McLaren in seventh.
Oscar Piastri's McLaren and the two Racing Bulls (Arvid Lindblad a full half-second faster than Liam Lawson) completed the top 10.
While Q3 followed the current trend of being filled by the 'big four' teams and Racing Bulls, Audi's Gabriel Bortoleto came agonisingly close to changing that with a lap just 0.032s off the top 10 and a stunning six tenths clear of the rest of the midfield behind him.
Pierre Gasly was next up in 12th, but his Alpine team-mate Franco Colapinto didn't make it beyond Q1 thanks to a spin into Becketts.
That left Colapinto 19th behind Valtteri Bottas, who inflicted a rare qualifying defeat on Cadillac team-mate Sergio Perez.
Perez had a lap deleted for track limits and then reinstated again, all of which made zero difference to him being 20th on the grid.
The yellow flag for Colapinto's spin forced a gutted Esteban Ocon into a throttle lift that he estimated cost him 0.25s and left his Haas an eliminated 17th, while the dirt the incident brought onto the circuit meant a delayed start to Q2.
There was an intra-team qualifying upset at Aston Martin as Lance Stroll beat Fernando Alonso for only the second time this year.
But far more upsetting for everyone involved was the car's atrocious pace - a staggering 1.6s off the best Cadillac time and one second behind Perez ahead.
