From chess to battle for pole, Gasly has Russell covered at Monza

A quarter of an hour before the qualifying session which delivered the biggest surprise pole position in Formula 1 for years, Alpine's Pierre Gasly was playing online chess with Mercedes driver George Russell and winning.

"I must say before the quali, I felt pretty confident," the Frenchman said, "because I was picking piece by piece after piece."

"For a fun story," Gasly said, "Ben told me, 'OK, well, you're getting George here, but he's going to get you in a few minutes.'"

Gasly said he reacted with a swear word but he was smiling as he recalled the moment.

"Turned out that it worked out well. So yeah, it's been fun," he added.

Russell, who lines up second to Gasly, was laughing about it. "He beat me there," the Briton said, "and I thought, 'Well, I think I'll beat you in qualifying,' and here we are, he's ahead of me again."

No-one - especially not Gasly nor his Alpine team - would have predicted the 30-year-old would end up on pole in Monza on Saturday, even though his only win in F1 came at this exact track six years ago.

That victory, in the middle of F1's bizarre, spectator-less pandemic season, owed a lot to luck - a remarkable race that ended up with Gasly, then driving for Red Bull's Toro Rosso team, taking a restart from third place and Lance Stroll going off ahead of him on the first lap to gift him the lead once Lewis Hamilton had served a penalty.