Italian GP: Is Oscar Piastri the Dark Horse at Monza?

Friday’s free practice day at the Italian Grand Prix was marked by the first appearance of Andrea Kimi Antonelli with Mercedes on an F1 race weekend and the debut of Franco Colapinto as an official Williams driver.

But in addition to this, the teams completed two sessions with good qualifying and long runs. McLaren, Red Bull, Mercedes and Ferrari are once again the four big names at the front of the field this weekend. These four teams have reflected their setup and performance differences on the 11 corners of the fast Monza circuit.

Lewis Hamilton topped the timesheets in FP2. However, he was just 0.003 seconds ahead of Lando Norris. Norris’s McLaren team-mate Oscar Piastri was fourth, +0.120s off Hamilton, but set the best Sector 1 and Sector 2 times.

Piastri set a poor Sector 3 compared to Norris and Hamilton, where the Mercedes driver was the reference, with Norris revealing after the session that his team-mate had made a “big mistake” on his flying lap and could have been up to five tenths clear with a cleaner run.

But Piastri’s Sector 1 was outstanding and marks him as a definite contender this weekend after a disappointing weekend at Zandvoort.

After changing his power unit for Belgium, Max Verstappen is at an engine life disadvantage to the McLaren and Mercedes drivers who have new engines this weekend – and without penalties!

Therefore, Red Bull ran with its engine clearly at low revs on Friday at Monza.

Verstappen and Sergio Perez had the worst top speeds of the whole grid, when we are used to see them with better numbers than their rivals in this area, except last weekend at Zandvoort where McLaren managed to reduce their drag problems at high speeds after the latest upgrade package.

However, as we have seen above in the Sector 2 lap times chart, Verstappen is in the mix.

Red Bull lost a lot of time to McLaren in both Sectors 1 and 3 (more than three tenths in both). This is obviously a sign that we won’t see the real potential of the RB20 until qualifying.

The big question that Friday leaves us with is where Ferrari really stands.

After introducing seven performance upgrades for this weekend, the Italian team’s one-lap pace looks very promising ahead of the fight for pole position.

However, in terms of race pace, Ferrari seems to have suffered from more degradation or graining than McLaren and the rest of the rivals.

It is true that we don’t know the engine map used or the level of fuel used, but the race simulation seems poor compared to McLaren, Mercedes and Red Bull.

Are we facing the same situation as at Zandvoort? In this case it was the other way around.

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The SF-24 was quite slow in qualifying, with Carlos Sainz being knocked out in Q2, albeit after some interrupted practice running.

In the race at Zandvoort, the car was incredibly competitive. Now at Monza, it looks like a similar situation but in reverse.

We will have to wait for qualifying and the race to confirm these initial findings for the weekend.

On the other hand, Mercedes has been running with different fuel levels and/or engine maps with Hamilton and George Russell, so it is difficult to really get a clear picture of their performance in the long run.

McLaren was clearly a good benchmark with Red Bull also in the fight.

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