Russell secures pole for Dutch GP sprint qualifying

George Russell clinched pole position in qualifying for the sprint race at the Dutch Grand Prix on Friday, taking his first pole for four races.

Russell is third in the drivers' championship and goes into the weekend trailing Mercedes team-mate Kimi Antonelli by 59 points; Lewis Hamilton is second, 50 points behind Antonelli. Russell's pole was described in the report as a 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."

In the sprint qualifying session Russell was 0.041 seconds quicker than McLaren's Lando Norris, who will start second. Ferrari's Charles Leclerc and McLaren's Oscar Piastri were both ahead of Mercedes' Kimi Antonelli, who could manage only fifth; Russell was 0.227secs quicker than Antonelli. Red Bull's Max Verstappen qualified sixth, ahead of Ferrari's Lewis Hamilton.

Pierre Gasly ran Alpine to a strong eighth, the team fielding what was described as its first major aerodynamic upgrade for some time. Audi's Gabriel Bortoleto was ninth and Racing Bulls' Arvid Lindblad tenth. Liam Lawson, subbing at Red Bull for Isack Hadjar after the Frenchman broke his wrist boxing, qualified 11th.

Aston Martin had brought a redesigned Honda engine and the team's practice running earlier on Friday had appeared encouraging, with the engine seemingly giving an expected performance uplift of about 0.3-0.5secs a lap. In qualifying the straight-line mode — which opens the front and rear wings to reduce drag — did not work on Fernando Alonso's car, and Alonso lost one lap when he locked his tyres into the first corner, which he said was caused by an engine issue. Alonso was last and his team-mate Lance Stroll could only manage 19th. "A little bit of everything in qualifying," said Alonso. "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."

Russell will start Saturday's shorter sprint race on pole; the sprint runs to about a third of the distance of a grand prix and gives him an opportunity to cut back into the Italian's points advantage.