Italian Grand Prix Tag

Felipe Massa set the quickest time of final practice for the Italian Grand Prix as heavy rain led to a much-abbreviated session featuring just 16 minutes of running. The rain moved into the Monza area overnight and ahead of this morning’s session the downpours intensified to the degree that five minutes before the scheduled start at 11am local time, and following a test of the conditions by the safety car, Race Control reported that the session would be delayed indefinitely. Two further tests were undertaken and after the second theRead More

Mercedes again topped the practice timesheets at Monza, but after Lewis Hamilton went quickest in the first practice, the afternoon session saw team-mate Valtteri Bottas take top spot. The Finn set a best time of 1:21.406s on the supersoft compound tyres to edge out Hamilton by just fibve hundredths of a second. Afetr finishing the morning session 1.1s behind FP1 pacesetter Hamilton, Sebastian Vettel moved Ferrari closer to the Silver Arrows with a best of lap of 1:21.546 that left him just a tenth of a second behind Bottas. Team-mateRead More

Lewis Hamilton led a Mercedes 1-2 in first practice ahead of Sunday’s Italian Grand Prix with the three-time champion finishing a second clear of championship leader Sebastian Vettel who finished third behind Valtteri Bottas. Hamilton set a best lap of 1:21.537s on the supersoft compound Pirelli tyres to finish 0.435 seconds ahead of Bottas, with Vettel 1.115s off the pace. With the session starting under heavily overcast skies, drivers quickly set about their preparations and after half and hour Bottas was in charge on soft tyres, with the Finn inRead More

By Joey Barnes, Editor-in-Chief In only five months, the McLaren F1 team and CEO Jost Capito have officially split up. Formerly the head of Volkswagen’s motorsport efforts, Capito left to join the Woking-based team and worked alongside bosses Eric Boullier and Jonathan Neale – coming onboard at last year’s Italian Grand Prix. However, with former chairman Ron Dennis out and McLaren bringing in a new executive director in Zak Brown, the team elected to part ways with Capito. “Regrettably, we have not been able to find common ground with JostRead More

By Adam Tate, Associate Editor After incredibly lengthy negotiations, the contract to extend the Italian Grand Prix at Monza through 2019 has finally been signed. It came after months of rumor and speculation on the future of the race. It came after Imola challenged to move the race. It came after Bernie Ecclestone and Angelo Sticchi Damiani butted heads several times. News of the new contract being agreed to broke during the Italian Grand Prix weekend back at the beginning of September, but officials insisted there were still small details toRead More

Nico Rosberg took his first Italian Grand Prix win and his seventh victory of the season with a controlled drive to the flag after pole position man and title leader Lewis Hamilton’s race was compromised by a poor start. In qualifying Hamilton had comprehensively outpaced his team-mate, sealing pole for the Monza race ahead of Rosberg by a margin of almost half a a second. The expectation was that with such a sizeable pace advantage, at lights out for the race the championship leader would simply drive away from hisRead More

By Adam Tate, Associate Editor Monza’s place in Formula 1 as the home of the Italian Grand Prix looks to be secure after event organizers and Bernie Ecclestone came to an agreement during negotiations for a new race contract. The circuit is F1’s most historic track, having first held the Italian Grand Prix in 1922 and has been on the calendar for every season of the championship, bar 1980 when it briefly lost the race to Imola. Ecclestone had been upping the pressure on Angelo Sticchi and the ACI (Automobile ClubRead More

Lewis Hamilton scored his seventh pole position of the 2016 and his fifth at the Italian GP with a dominant performance at Monza where he beat team-mate and title rival Nico Rosberg by almost half second. Sebastian Vettel qualified third for Ferrari ahead of team-mate Kimi Raikkonen. The first casualty of Q1 was Manor’s Esteban Ocon. With eight minutes gone in Q1, the Frenchman, who made his race debut at last weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix, suffered a technical problem that forced him to pull over at Turn 1. He exitedRead More

Lewis Hamilton beat Nico Rosberg to the top of the final practice timesheets in Monza, with the championship leader finishing almost four tenths of a second clear of his Mercedes team-mate. Rosberg was the first of the Mercedes pairing to show his hand in qualifying trim during the session, posting a time of 1:22.401 with 20 minutes left on the clock. His spell at the top of the order didn’t last long, however, as Hamilton was across the line moments later with a time of 1:22.008. It would remain theRead More

After being narrowly shaded by Nico Rosberg in the opening practice session for the Italian Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton upped the pace in the afternoon session to eclipse his Mercedes team-mate by just under 0.2s. While Mercedes dominated in FP1, finishing well ahead of Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen, the gap was closed by some margin in the afternoon as the team’s set their fastest times on supersoft-shod qualifying runs. Compared with their rivals Mercedes looked to be having a harder time getting the best out of this weekend’s softest compound andRead More