Kimi Antonelli will start from the fifth position this season, after being the fastest in qualifying at Silverstone. The main rivals of the Italian Mercedes driver were the Ferrari drivers, not his teammate George Russell, who finished fourth. Kimi Antonelli (1st): "I was a little nervous because I don't like being at the front, but I managed to complete a very careful lap. To be honest, everything went quite well. The wind was challenging, with very strong and unpredictable gusts, but we qualified well and I am happy with the pole position."
We didn't change the car setup at all. It was all about the brake balance, the differential settings, and the driving, you understand? We did everything right, we found the right setup, and that helped me in qualifying. Of course, my rivals will try to make my life difficult in tomorrow's race, so it won't be easy. Two Ferrari cars are starting behind me, and of course, they will influence each other during the race. They are capable of good pace, but our pace during the sprint was quite confident.
I hope we can maintain this level tomorrow, so hopefully we will have a good race." George Russell (4th): "I don't know what caused the crash in the first part of qualifying – I've been racing on this track for 12 years, and I've never locked up the brakes in this corner before. But we made some changes to the setup, probably we made it too extreme, but everything happened in a strange way.
We also don't know why we've been struggling with straight-line speed since the beginning of the weekend. We were losing speed compared to some other cars with Mercedes engines – our maximum speed was 6 km/h lower in the last sector, and 3 km/h lower in the middle sector, and that alone means a loss of two tenths of a second per lap. We don't know yet what caused it, but the team is trying to figure it out.
This morning we thought we had found the cause, but then it turned out that it wasn't. That doesn't make things any easier, but if we can at least eliminate the speed deficit on the straights, we'll see what happens."