The car is worth 5.4 places, the driver 3.2 and pole 2: why our simulator does not believe Gasly at Monza
F1 Legend Sim · Staff · 5 September 2026 · 6 min read
Pierre Gasly has taken the first pole of his career, at Monza, and our simulator gives him a 0% chance of winning across 400 races, with an average finish of P12.4. A number like that is worth opening up before publishing it, so we ran the same race 300 times per scenario, changing one single thing at a time, to find out what the grid slot is worth, what the car is worth and what the driver is worth.
What the model says about Sunday
The full preview, with all twenty two, is on the Italian GP page. These are the top seven, over 400 races run from Saturday’s real starting grid:
| Driver | Starts | Wins | Podium | Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| George Russell | P2 | 22.8% | 58% | P3.7 |
| Oscar Piastri | P6 | 16.3% | 49% | P4.2 |
| Charles Leclerc | P3 | 15.8% | 43.8% | P4.2 |
| Lewis Hamilton | P4 | 13.5% | 42.3% | P4.3 |
| Kimi Antonelli | P20 | 10.8% | 35.3% | P4.7 |
| Lando Norris | P8 | 10.5% | 38.8% | P4.6 |
| Max Verstappen | P5 | 10.5% | 32.5% | P4.9 |
The favourite is George Russell, starting second, and fifth on the list is Kimi Antonelli, who lines up P20 after an engine change. The man on pole is nowhere to be seen: the model ranks him 9th among its favourites, with a 40.5% chance of finishing in the points.
A pole worth two places
To find out how much of that zero is the grid slot, the cleanest thing is to take the slot away. We run exactly the same race, with the same seeds, moving Gasly from the first box to the last one and promoting the other twenty one. That is the only difference between the two batches.
| Scenario | Starts | Average | In the points | Podium |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gasly, his own car, from pole | P1 | P12.3 | 37.7% | 0% |
| Gasly, his own car, from last | P22 | P14.3 | 20.7% | 0% |
| Gasly, the best car, from pole | P1 | P6.9 | 96% | 7.7% |
| Russell, his own car, from second | P2 | P3.7 | 97.3% | 56.7% |
| Russell, the Alpine, from second | P2 | P8.5 | 90.7% | 0.7% |
300 races per scenario, all at Monza and on the same set of seeds. Retirements count as 20th in the average finish.
Twenty one grid slots cost him 2 places at the flag. That is the real size of pole here, and it has nothing to do with Gasly: it is the circuit. The engine works out what starting up front is worth from how easy overtaking is at each venue, and out of the 42 circuits it knows, Monza is the one where the grid slot weighs least. At Monaco or the Hungaroring the same calculation is worth more than three times as much.
The car outweighs the driver, and both outweigh the grid slot
The other three rows come from swapping seats: Gasly into the Mercedes and Russell into the Alpine, each from his own starting box and with nobody else touched. The swap matters. If we hand Gasly the best car without giving his own to anyone, the grid ends up with three cars from one team and one from another, and then we are not measuring the car, we are running a different race.
In the best car and from pole, Gasly goes from P12.3 to P6.9, and from scoring one race in three to scoring in 96% of them. That is 5.4 places, and that is what the car is worth. The driver comes from comparing that row with Russell’s, who runs the same car from the box next door: P6.9 against P3.7, so 3.2 places.
And the sum closes from the other side. Put in the Alpine, Russell drops from P3.7 to P8.5 and his podium chance collapses from 56.7% to 0.7%. It costs him 4.8 places, the same order as what Gasly gains going the other way, which is what you expect when the measurement is built properly.
This is the point to answer the obvious objection, the one anybody raises first: if the Alpine is the fifth car on the grid, with the eight cars of the top four teams ahead of it, Gasly ought to be around ninth or tenth, not twelfth. That is right, and the model agrees. That same Alpine, with Russell in it, finishes P8.5. What drags it from there down to P12.3 is not the car, it is what our database thinks of the driver, which places Gasly in the bottom third of the 2026 grid. If this preview is badly wrong about something, my suspicion is that it is wrong there before it is wrong about pole.
Ranked from largest to smallest, our engine decides the race by the car (5.4 places), then the driver (3.2) and last of all the grid slot (2). With that hierarchy, a driver our database does not rate among the best, in the fifth car on the grid, does not win Monza even from pole. The zero is not an opinion about Gasly, it is that sum. It is the same conclusion, measured somewhere else, as our piece on how much the car weighs.
Where we think we are wrong
Now the measurement that points the other way, because we have published it. Monza has held 38 qualifying sessions since 1988 and the man on pole won 47% of the time, reached the podium 68% of the time and finished P5.4 on average. Our engine, at that same circuit, converts pole 17% of the time. It undervalues starting up front, that is measured, and it undervalues it exactly where it gives the slot the least weight. The detail is in what is pole position worth?.
It is also worth saying what that 47% does not say. Almost all of those poles were taken by the best car of the year, so it is not a fair yardstick for this one, which was taken by the fifth. What does hold is the direction of the error: the engine computes pace and sorts, and it has no slipstream, no DRS trains, no opening lap with eight cars arriving together at the first chicane. At Monza that is not scenery.
My call, and it goes as opinion rather than data: the points are a reasonable target for Gasly, and the podium needs something to happen rather than the model to be broken. The 0% win chance looks defensible to me. The 40.5% chance of scoring looks low.
The mirror, twenty boxes further back
The same hierarchy explains the opposite case. Antonelli starts P20 on a new engine and the model ranks him fifth for win probability, with a 35.3% podium chance and an average finish of P4.7. He has the best car on the grid and the slot is worth two places, so the penalty costs him far less than it looks. We wrote that up yesterday, with the nine times a championship leader really has lined up on the last row since 1950: Antonelli starts from the back at Monza.
So the number to watch on Sunday is not Gasly’s opening lap, it is which lap Antonelli shows up in the top ten. If he gets there early, the model was right about Monza. If he gets stuck behind a train of midfield cars, the race was right instead.