RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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F1 Correspondent in Zandvoort Published 21 August 2026, 16:32 BST Updated 5 minutes ago Mercedes' George Russell took his first pole position for four races in qualifying for the sprint race at the Dutch Grand Prix.
The Briton, trailing Mercedes team-mate Kimi Antonelli by 59 points in the championship, was 0.041 seconds quicker than McLaren's Lando Norris in second.
Antonelli could manage only fifth, behind Ferrari's Charles Leclerc and the second McLaren of Oscar Piastri.
Red Bull's Max Verstappen was sixth, ahead of Ferrari's Lewis Hamilton, who is second in the championship, 50 points behind Antonelli.
Russell's pole was the perfect start to the second part of the season for him, having lost ground to Antonelli in the three races before the summer break after his victory in Austria at the end of June.
The Briton said: "It has been a tough end to the first part of the year so I am really happy to be back.
"The lap felt really good. It is always difficult in sprint qualifying because we have just a lap to put it together, but it all came together nicely."
Russell was 0.227secs quicker than Antonelli and has an opportunity in Saturday's shorter sprint race - which runs to about a third of the distance of a grand prix - to cut back into the Italian's points advantage.
Behind the leading drivers from the top teams, Pierre Gasly was a strong eighth in an Alpine running the team's first major aerodynamic upgrade for some time, ahead of Audi's Gabriel Bortoleto and Racing Bulls' Arvid Lindblad.
Liam Lawson, subbing at Red Bull for Isack Hadjar after the Frenchman broke his wrist boxing, was 11th.
Much attention before the session was focused on Aston Martin, who are running a redesigned Honda engine.
The team's performance had been encouraging in practice earlier on Friday, when the engine seemed to be giving the expected performance uplift of about 0.3-0.5secs a lap.
But its performance was impossible to divine in qualifying because the straight-line mode - which opens the front and rear wings to reduce drag - was not working on Fernando Alonso's car.
The veteran Spaniard - who also lost one lap when he locked his tyres into the first corner, which he said was caused by an engine issue - was last.
"A little bit of everything in qualifying," said Alonso, who is yet to make a decision on his future in F1 beyond the end of this year.
"Free practice was more or less OK, but we had problems with the engine driveability. It was pushing on the braking so it was difficult to stop the car.
"And the apparently the SLM [straight line mode] did not work for me so I could not open the rear wing. A combination of both made the laps very tricky."
His team-mate Lance Stroll could manage only 19th place.
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