Prema Racing’s Nyck de Vries grabbed a second Formula 2 pole position of the season ahead of his fellow McLaren Formula 1 junior and championship contender Lando Norris.
A thrilling battle for pole position involving de Vries, Norris and F2 championship leader George Russell ended up being contested in a final lap shootout.
Russell had led the timesheets at the halfway mark in the 30-minute session, after recording a 1m46.865s time.
However, a poor line through the 90-degree right-hander Turn 2 on the first lap of his second run opened the door for his rivals. With session best times in the first and third sectors, de Vries vaulted to provisional pole by 0.363s.
While both Russell and de Vries completed a cool down lap before their final attempts, F1-bound Norris would only complete one timed lap on his final run in the closing moments of the session.
After Norris’s first run had left him eighth on the timesheet, his Carlin team opted to make a rear-ride height change which delayed his final run.
Norris’s final lap, therefore, coincided with Russell’s and de Vries’s last attempts.
Russell improved by a fraction and ended up in third place, with Norris able to vault to second as a result of three personal best sectors.
Despite setting a new session-best time through the first sector, a mistake in the middle of the lap meant that de Vries did not improve – his previous 1m46.476s was still enough to secure pole position, with Norris 0.220s adrift.
Behind the top three, Nicholas Latifi ended up fourth. He recorded the session’s fastest time through the second sector of the lap, but lost time in the technical third sector. A huge oversteer snap at the final corner cost him extra time.
His DAMS team-mate Alexander Albon was another late session improver, as he climbed as high as second place before being demoted to an eventual fifth.
Luca Ghiotto jumped up to sixth place with his last lap of qualifying, demoting the Monza feature race winner Tadasuke Makino to seventh place for Russian Time.
On home soil, Makino’s team-mate Artem Markelov could only manage 19th place as he was over two seconds behind the pacesetting de Vries.
Sergio Sette Camara was outqualified by his team-mate Norris for the first time since the Austrian round in June. Camara finished in eighth place.
The session was briefly red flagged after seven minutes when Trident’s Arjun Maini spun and stalled at Turn 14. He will start last as a result of having not posted a representative time.
