Antonelli damage leaves Russell sprint pole clear

Kimi Antonelli said a trip through the gravel on his first SQ1 lap at Zandvoort punched holes in his Mercedes floor and cost around 25 points of downforce, leaving him fifth for the Dutch Grand Prix sprint instead of joining team-mate George Russell in the fight for pole.

The championship leader lost the rear at the penultimate corner on his opening timed effort after carrying, in his words, "a little bit too much entry speed" into the turn. He ran through the gravel and returned to the pits for checks, then still recovered to reach the final phase of sprint qualifying, ending the session 0.227s slower than Russell.

Antonelli said the real damage from the mistake stayed with him for the rest of the session. "I had a couple of holes in the floor," he told Sky Sports. When he got back to the garage, he said the team initially told him it was a loss of "25 points" before trying to repair the floor as much as possible. "Definitely the damage was still there," he said. "I was struggling a lot at low speed. It is what it is."

He also accepted responsibility for the error. "I lost the rear and went through the gravel. That was pretty much it," Antonelli said, adding that the incident made it harder to attack afterward. "Obviously also it was not easy to build the confidence back, but still decently close, and we'll have another go tomorrow."

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff put the loss slightly lower, saying the car gave up "20 points" because of "a hole in the floor," but he made the same point about the cost of even a small error in such a tight session. Wolff said Antonelli "made a little bit of a mistake," pushing too hard on corner entry, and added: "The gaps are so tiny" that the time disappears quickly.

That leaves Antonelli trying to limit the damage from fifth in the sprint, with overtaking at the front expected to be difficult and Mercedes planning a fuller reset once parc ferme opens after the short race. "We'll try to do the best race we can," he said. "Obviously, it's very close at the front, so it's not going to be easy to overtake, but we'll try to do the best we can, even with the damage. Then from qualifying, we're going to tidy the car up and go again."