Kimi Antonelli Leads by Fifty-Nine Points and Will Take a Grid Penalty at His Own Home Race

First practice for the Italian Grand Prix begins at 12:30 on Friday afternoon at Monza, with a second hour-long session at 16:00. Final practice and qualifying follow at the same times on Saturday, and the race, 53 laps, starts at 15:00 on Sunday.

Kimi Antonelli arrives with a 59-point lead in the drivers' championship after the Dutch Grand Prix. George Russell is second and Lewis Hamilton third.

The lead is not the story here. Antonelli has taken an engine-related grid penalty for Sunday, which is a particular kind of luck: he is Italian, this is the Italian Grand Prix, and no Italian driver has won it since Michele Alboreto in 1985. Forty-one years is a long time for a country that has a home team at this circuit.

Monza rewards low drag above everything else. Teams run the thinnest rear wings of their season here, which costs them through the two chicanes and the Parabolica and pays on the three long straights. A car set up that way is hard to pass in a straight line, because the pursuer is running the same skinny wing and has no extra top speed to deploy.

That makes grid position matter more at Monza than at almost any circuit on the calendar, and it makes a penalty applied on Sunday morning harder to recover from than one taken somewhere with a wider performance spread.

The slipstream complicates the picture. Cars towing each other down the main straight can find several tenths, which has historically produced qualifying sessions where nobody wants to leave the pit lane first, and races where a midfield car finishes well above its true pace.

Friday's two sessions are the first read on how much wing each team has chosen to keep. That, rather than the lap times, is the thing worth watching.