Kimi Antonelli walked out of Monaco’s final practice with the kind of statement lap that matters here: one clean, committed run on softs, threaded through traffic and risk, then left on the board while everyone else scrambled. In a session that repeatedly threatened to turn into the usual red-flag lottery, the championship leader did what leaders do around the Principality — he got his lap in early, and made the rest chase a ghost.
The headline time, a 1:12.720, didn’t just put him top. It put clear air between his Mercedes and the two Ferraris that had owned Friday. Charles Leclerc ended up closest at 1:13.047, with Lewis Hamilton a blink behind on 1:13.051, but both were left with that familiar Monaco frustration: you can be quick in the sectors, yet still never actually stitch the lap together when it matters.
FP3 began in deceptively calm fashion under blue skies, Ferrari picking up where it had left off. Hamilton was first out, Leclerc soon after, and they immediately started swapping bragging rights as the times tumbled. Early laps are rarely representative at Monaco, but the intent was obvious — Ferrari wanted to set the tone again and keep everyone else reacting.
McLaren, meanwhile, simply needed a normal hour. Lando Norris was among the early runners after a late night for the team, which had broken curfew to solve the electrical issue that stopped him in FP2. The fix was extensive enough — wiring harness and an ESME pack change — that a clean practice became as valuable as outright pace.
Then Monaco started doing Monaco things. Valtteri Bottas reported “burning” in his front-right brake and limped back to the pits, joking grimly that he’d “try not to use the brakes”. Not long after, Sergio Perez was on the radio with the word every team dreads: “fire”, this time on his left brake, as he too nursed the car home. Lance Stroll was called in after brushing the wall, while Aston Martin’s pit wall had a familiar extra set of eyes with Adrian Newey back at the track, taking in the morning’s scrappiness.
As the session settled, the order tightened. George Russell briefly muscled his way to the top with a 1:13.902, Norris popped up into second, and Max Verstappen hovered in the mix — until Leclerc reasserted Ferrari’s position about 20 minutes in. It had the feel of a typical Monaco prelude: plenty of teams flashing one good sector, nobody showing their whole hand, and everyone waiting for the soft-tyre runs to decide the narrative.
That’s where Mercedes flipped it. Antonelli and Leclerc went back and forth for the benchmark through the middle portion of the hour, the Mercedes edging ahead by a couple of tenths at halfway. The margins weren’t huge, but the trend was: Ferrari’s grip on the weekend was no longer comfortable.
There were reminders, too, of how thin the line is here. Franco Colapinto spun his Alpine at the hairpin and backed into the barrier — not a massive impact, but enough to damage the rear wing and break his rhythm. Russell had his own moment out of Rascasse, arriving in a hurry as he got caught behind Carlos Sainz and having to negotiate the wall that always seems to drift closer when you’re on a lap.
With around 20 minutes left, the session became what it always becomes: qualifying rehearsal. Fresh soft Pirellis, minimal fuel, and a brief window where everyone tries to find a gap on a circuit with no gaps. Antonelli delivered the lap that mattered — purple, purple, then a final sector that was “only” good enough to keep the run together for a 1:12.760. Russell, intriguingly, backed out of his attempt, while Leclerc’s run turned into a typical Monaco compromise: deep into the Nouvelle chicane, then forced to hit the brakes behind traffic — Sainz and Gabriel Bortoleto — at exactly the wrong time.
And then the red flag arrived right on cue. Oliver Bearman tagged the outside barrier at Massenet, spinning as he came around Russell, who was off-line and slow. Bearman ran wide onto the dusty edge of the circuit and lost it, apologising over the radio and blaming “bottoming” — a very modern Monaco problem on a very old-school street track.
Four minutes remained when the session resumed. Enough for one last swing at it, in theory — though Monaco’s out-lap queues and traffic games turn “one last chance” into something closer to a gamble. Cadillac, stationed at the very end of the pit lane, was first to roll the dice. Leclerc, for his part, reported his brakes were “horrendous”, hardly the kind of message you want to hear before the most unforgiving qualifying session of the season.
Nobody improved. Antonelli’s lap stood, the key detail being that he’d already banked it before the chaos. Leclerc and Hamilton held second and third, Russell slotted into fourth, and Verstappen rounded out the top five ahead of Oscar Piastri. Bortoleto’s seventh underlined how tight the midfield is becoming on a lap where confidence is everything, while Isack Hadjar, Norris and Nico Hulkenberg completed the top ten.
Monaco qualifying always distorts reality — a brake temperature, a traffic pinch, one brush of understeer, and the weekend changes shape. But FP3 still offered a clear warning to Ferrari: Friday’s advantage isn’t protection when the championship leader has a Mercedes that can light up a set of softs and put the lap in the bank before the red flags fall.
