The all-important pole vault of 2023 additionally appears to be like to be the toughest to set off RaceFans

Considering they spent the first five race weekends of the 2023 season battling to pose any serious threat to Red Bull’s supremacy, it was perhaps a little surprising how both Ferrari and Aston Martin arrived in Monaco full of confidence in their potential to fight.

Ferrari’s Frederic Vasseur and Aston Martin’s Mike Krack were uninterested in playing a cautious lead role in the team heading to Monte Carlo. Instead, the two highlighted this weekend as one where the tight and twisty street circuit could give them the best chance to take on Red Bull.

Considering what both teams showed during the first weekend’s training day, they had reason to feel confident.

At the end of two hours of running, a margin in between Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc at the top of the time sheets had just 0.065 seconds – a physical difference of almost exactly three meters on the timeline. Ahead of the most important qualifying of the season, where pole position offers the best chance of winning any race on the calendar, this is a margin with which Red Bull cannot feel comfortable.

For the first part of the lap the Ferrari looked like it was in better shape. Leclerc brought more speed to Sainte Devote, but also got better traction than Red Bull, meaning that by the time the pair reached the top of the hill at Casino Square, Leclerc was actually a tenth of a second ahead of the world champion.

However, where Verstappen made the difference on a lap was a particularly slow sequence in the middle sector, from the Mirabeau Hotel to the Portier exit and into the tunnel. In the last sector of the lap, both Leclerc and his teammate Carlos Sainz Jnr he gained more than half a tenth on Verstappen, but it wasn’t enough for either of them to finish ahead of Red Bull. But despite a strong track performance, Leclerc wasn’t entirely happy with his SF-23.

“It was a bit of a difficult day because the car is not doing exactly what it should,” Leclerc explained after the session. “So we need to take a good look at my car’s set-up and then work on it to make sure I have the right feel tomorrow.”

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Ferrari had one priority on Friday: qualifying. Wanting to squeeze as much lap time out of his car as possible, Sainz obliged what he described as “a small miscalculation” and crashed into the barriers at the exit of the pool, leaving the mechanics of his Ferrari as busy fixing the car as data analysts will be poring over telemetry.

But while the Ferrari pair were on a similar level to each other, Sergio Perez he was more than half a second – and six places – behind his Red Bull teammate. As the only viable challenger to Verstappen in the championship, Perez knows he’s in for a tough rest of the weekend if he can’t match his teammate’s pace quickly.

“Going to qualifying will be a real challenge,” admitted Perez. “It’s going to be an interesting session.

“We have to make sure we get on the tires and put them in the window at the right time to get a perfect lap here.”

But Red Bull and Ferrari are not the only ones looking to fight for pole position tomorrow. Only a tenth of a second slower than a Ferrari, Fernando Alonso he is also determined to be the main character in Saturday’s qualifying matchup.

Aston Martin has usually been strongest on Sundays in 2023, but that won’t help Alonso at the track where overtaking is most difficult. That’s why Aston Martin needs to have its best Saturday of the season so far to throw itself into competition – and Alonso is confident they can do just that.

“In both sessions the car felt good and easy to drive, which helps at this track,” he said. “Some race weekends we will be faster than our rivals and others it may be different, but I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s qualifying session.”

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Asked if he felt he had a shot at pole position, Alonso said he felt “everything is up for grabs”.

“We should be one of the candidates, yes,” he predicted.

But despite all the attention given to their upgrades for this weekend, Mercedes doesn’t seem to have its rivals within reach of Monaco’s streets. Lewis Hamilton he was sixth fastest, but almost half a second slower than top-ranked Verstappen, while teammate George Russell was outside the top ten in both sessions.

When asked who Mercedes would be looking to fight for the rest of the weekend, Russell had to admit he was “not too sure”.

“We hope with Aston and Ferrari – that’s what we’re aiming for,” said Russell. Saturday, but they are nowhere to be found on Sunday. But if they can do it this Saturday, they’ll probably be with us this Sunday.”

With such a tight midfield with just 0.767s between tenths Lando Norris in fifth place and his teammate Oscar Piastri in 18th place, the fight to survive the first two cuts in Q1 and Q2 is likely to be as fierce and brutal as the battle for the front of the pack is likely to be. But unlike the two junior categories that join Formula 1 this weekend, qualifying is not divided into two groups, with all 20 drivers reliant on each other.

As you can see in practice, traffic will be a big problem for drivers in the initial stages of qualifying. Especially as the fastest laps in qualifying showed that drivers can push tires for many laps and still improve if they control the temperature properly. This can lead to tricky moments where drivers suddenly find themselves with a fast car appearing in their mirrors and have nowhere to give way. If Saturday ends without one driver being sent off the grid for obstructing a rival, then all 20 drivers and their engineers did a really good job.

And as last year’s qualifying in Monaco showed, every lap in flight counts when the threat of a surprise red flag remains constant. With hundredths or even thousandths of a second you can tell if a driver will start from pole position, playing it safe is not an option. And with five likely riders battling for first place, there’s a high risk of drama in the final minutes of qualifying.

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Monaco Grand Prix 2023

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