Why last-gasp Russell pole lap was so surprising

George Russell surprised himself with a Canadian Grand Prix pole position lap that turned a qualifying nightmare into a "rush of adrenaline within the space of 10 seconds we all live for".

Russell was only eighth and fifth in the first two segments of qualifying in Montreal, abandoned his first run in Q3, and was briefly down to sixth while closing out his very final lap on a push-cool-push strategy at the very end.

It looked like an extreme manifestation of something that had been threatened even when Russell claimed sprint pole and victory: that Mercedes team-mate and Formula 1 championship leader Kimi Antonelli might actually be the faster of the two here yet again, and that Russell wasn't all that comfortable.

"I just had no grip at the beginning of the lap," said Russell of his abandoned opening run in Q3. "The car was just out of sync, out of balance. I didn't have the confidence.

"On a circuit like this where you're dancing with the walls, it's really difficult to get that flow. You need a huge amount of commitment to find that last couple of tenths."

Russell felt that car changes by the team had made it harder to consistently get the tyres working well enough to hit their peak on each push lap.

And going onto his final lap he admitted he was "not massively" confident - but he knew he needed a big lap partly because he was acutely aware he was struggling but he had also clocked Antonelli going fastest on the big trackside screens around the lap.

"I never had it hooked up until that last lap in Q3," Russell admitted. But he did when it counted, as Russell felt he "just managed to redial my driving for that last lap and put it together".

The second push lap on the tyre seemed to give him more of the feeling that he wanted, although that did not result in a massive gain in the first sector. He was still half a tenth slower than Antonelli there but perhaps it was more of a psychological factor - a better feeling behind the wheel that meant the lap kept building from there with some gains under braking and in corner minimum speed.

Russell was a full 0.16s quicker than Antonelli in sector two on their best laps, and Antonelli's final sector was not an improvement on what he had done before. What he left on the table there was enough to let Russell sneak in and steal pole by 0.068s.

In the end that perhaps all supports the notion that Antonelli did have a higher peak on the day after all. But he didn't put it all together, whereas Russell clawed it all back enough when it counted to nip ahead - critically aided by the extra push lap he bought himself on the final run by abandoning his first attempt, when others including Antonelli only had time for a conventional outlap/push lap combination.

Antonelli certainly lamented how "it was very difficult to get the tyres in the right window, especially for lap one". On his final lap he also described a "little missed downshift into Turn 6, which threw me off a little bit".

Still, Russell addressing his own unease through qualifying was already proof that he was on the back foot. And the combination of factors at play only underlines how Russell's final improvement "came out of nowhere".

This, rather than any broader implication for the championship fight or Russell regaining some much-needed momentum, seemed to genuinely be what was sweetest of all for him.

"It's just such a special feeling because there are times when you expect to be on pole and every lap you do is the quickest," said Russell.

"But the times when you are fighting for it and you're never up there and then it comes together on that final lap to be the one, it's the best feeling in the world."