San Francisco Frontiers - Antonelli 'mad' about crash in Azerbaijan qualifying

The 20-year-old Italian, who missed most of Friday’s practice sessions after suffering a hydraulics failure, blamed himself for making a mistake as track conditions changed and delivered unexpected extra grip.

Antonelli clipped the wall on Turn 1 in Q1 and picked up a puncture, his first mistake since crashing in final practice in Australia.

He wanted to continue but race engineer Pete Bonnington overruled him, telling him it was a "fairly big job" and to come into the pits.

"The grip was coming up very quickly, lap by lap," said Antonelli.

"Obviously, I turned in and then suddenly I had a lot more front end than the lap before and I touched the wall.

"It’s a mistake from my side. Very unnecessary and I'm mad about it and we'll try to do better tomorrow.

"The car has been very strong all this weekend and George (Russell) has been doing incredibly well, but we'll try our best to recover as many places as possible."

His Mercedes team-mate George Russell took pole position, the 12th of his career and fifth this year, by more than eight-tenths of a second ahead of Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc to boost his faint hopes of reducing Antonelli's 81-point lead in the title race.

Antonelli ended up qualifying 16th on the grid with many drivers forecasting that he will finish second behind Russell in the race.

He vowed to overcome his poor grid position as he did at his home Italian Grand Prix where he won from 19th on the grid after taking power-unit penalties.

"Kimi is starting well down again," said Russell. "But he has shown that he can be at the back and end up on the top step a few times so... we’ll see what we have to do."

L.Ramos--SFF