Italian Grand Prix: George Russell leads Charles Leclerc in Friday practice at Monza

It is unlikely that Ferrari was taking full advantage of its new engine on its first day of racing, and Antonelli made a different analysis of his rivals’ pace.

The Italian, who leads Hamilton and Russell by 59 points in the world championship, will start the race from the back due to a grid penalty for using more engine parts than allowed.

He said: “Ferrari definitely took a step forward with the new engine and now the speeds are the same. We know how good their car is in the corners and it’s sure to be a close fight for pole tomorrow.”

Hamilton, 0.337 seconds slower than his teammate, also complained about the car’s balance.

“It was really difficult to take the car around,” he said. “It wasn’t easy to drive in P2 for some reason. We made a couple of changes but it shouldn’t have been bad. We’ll look and see if we can improve the car for tomorrow.”

“The engine is an improvement, and I’m really grateful to the guys at the factory for working on it, but our (power) deployment schedule is different than the others, our competitors. It seems like maybe they have less drag on the straights.”

At Ferrari, it’s Hamilton’s turn to choose whether to start before or after his teammate during qualifying and he said: “Tow is everything here, so we’ll probably go for the tow.”

The slipstream is expected to have a powerful effect on the lap time, and there are some expectations of a potentially controversial session as drivers look for it on other cars.

Mercedes has chosen this race for Antonelli to serve his suspension, even though the decision will probably deprive him of the chance to get his first home win, because they hope the long straights will give him a good chance of recovering a good result.

Antonelli was the fastest in the sim races towards the end of the season.

He said: “It’s amazing to be here and the support has been incredible. “Today is a bit of a different day to usual, a lot more focused on long runs, a bit strange, but we have a lot of data and we’re looking forward to the next few days.

“It’s a track where you can do a lot of different things, it was interesting in the long run to race behind other cars and see what they did differently, where they were deployed compared to us.”

Norris has won the last two grands prix from pole, but McLaren hoped this would be a more challenging track for their car and so far it is proving that.

“Much more complicated than the last few Fridays,” Norris said. “We are fighting for pace much more than the last few weekends. We will see what we can change overnight, but we are not in as good a position as the last few weekends.”

“It’s a bit all over the place, there’s not a single corner where we’re faster than anyone in front of us. We’re losing a bit on the straights compared to Mercedes, which is to be expected, but also the high-speed (corners) are where we lose most of our lap time, which is normally where we’re fast.”

Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, who has yet to win a race this year, was 0.818 seconds off the pace with the ninth-fastest time, behind the Racing Bulls of Arvid Lindblad and Haas of Oliver Bearman.

The racing sessions, which can provide a clearer picture of outright pace, were inconclusive, with Mercedes using hard compound tyres, Ferrari using soft and Verstappen using medium.

On hard tyres, Mercedes was decisively quickest, Antonelli only 0.038 seconds on average quicker than Russell, with the McLarens of Norris and Oscar Piastri around 0.5 seconds behind.

Hamilton and Leclerc on soft tires were less than 0.2 seconds behind the Mercedes. Verstappen, in the mediums, was about 0.3 seconds behind Antonelli.

That suggests that, at least on Friday, Mercedes and Ferrari are the main contenders so far this weekend.

Bearman benefited from the new Ferrari engine, unlike his teammate Esteban Ocon, as well as an upgrade from the Haas.

Meanwhile, F1 has announced it will host a three-day fan event ahead of next season in Milan from February 18-20.

Successor to the F1 Live event at the O2 Arena in London in 2025, and with the same name, it will feature the 11 teams and their drivers, as well as music and entertainment.