Campos Racing’s Théophile Naël took his second consecutive pole position of the 2026 Formula 3 season in a split qualifying session in Monaco ahead of Brando Badoer and Freddie Slater. Feeder Series spoke to Naël about his approach to the session and how his prior street circuit experience contributed to his result today.

By Tori Turner

Naël first emerged as a contender for pole position during Friday’s free practice, which he topped by 0.059 seconds ahead of Slater. The two drivers, who were both allocated to the second qualifying group, battled for pole, but in the end it was Naël who set the fastest lap overall.

The Campos driver is no stranger to qualifying on top at street circuits. He already took pole in F3’s season opener at the parklike Melbourne Grand Prix Circuit, while before that, he also topped qualifying at the 2025 Macau Grand Prix, which he went on to win after a well-timed double overtake on a safety car restart.

“Macau helped me bring the confidence here in Monaco,” Naël told Feeder Series in the post-qualifying media session. “The two tracks are really difficult in terms of bringing the pace into the quali. Macau helped with my confidence and I came here this morning with the same mentality as in Macau before the qualifying, so I think it paid off again.”

As per usual in Monaco, qualifying was split into two groups, with each session containing 15 drivers and lasting 16 minutes. In a ballot held earlier this weekend, the even-numbered cars were assigned to group A, which goes first, whilst the odd-numbered cars took to the track afterwards in group B.

Both sessions began with drivers completing several warm-up laps to build heat into their tyres. In group A, Ugo Ugochukwu set the first flying lap of the session after gaining optimal track position by heading out early. The entire field bettered the Campos driver’s first time, a 1:31.081, by several seconds on their next laps, with Noah Strømsted topping the times at the midpoint with a 1:26.349 despite a slide at Rascasse.

After Taito Kato displaced Strømsted for first, Ugochukwu briefly retook provisional pole before Badoer shot up to first from 10th with a strong 1:25.287. The Italian’s time was unbeaten before the final runs as Tuukka Taponen and Bruno Del Pino slotted in behind him.

Late in the session, Badoer came across a slow Fionn McLaughlin, who had damaged his front wing by hitting the barriers at the exit of Turn 7. In the meantime, Taponen and then Ugochukwu returned to the top – the latter despite touching the barriers at Rascasse – but Badoer had more in store. On his final lap, he delivered a 1:24.612, 0.351s quicker than Ugochukwu’s time, which guaranteed him at least a front-row start for Sunday’s feature race.

In the second session, Naël headed out first onto the track, but the flying laps did not begin until almost six minutes of the session had passed.

“The key is to bring [the car] up to speed step by step,” Naël said of the approach to the extra build laps. “We knew that in quali, we would have only three pushes maximum or four, so a really short quali. We have to deliver everything and try to stay on track as well.”

Naël had a long way to go with his first lap – a 1:25.729, more than a second off Badoer’s benchmark – as Alessandro Giusti and Pedro Clerot slotted into second and third respectively. Maciej Gładysz initially topped the times on the second runs, but Slater, the last driver to leave the pit lane, snatched first away from the ART Grand Prix driver with a 1:24.986 with 5:34 left in the session. 

Naël behind set a purple first sector and a personal best second sector, but he fell short in the final sector and even relinquished second to his Campos teammate Ernesto Rivera, who was returning from injury after missing round one.

After another cool-down period, drivers began their penultimate set of runs with four minutes left on the clock. Slater risked it all by carrying extra speed into Turn 7, and the resulting understeer pitched his car into the wall. He escaped with only minor damage to his front wing, which led him to abandon his lap but not his participation in the session as a whole.

“I knew for my first time here that it was very important to be on it straight away,” Slater said. “At the end of the day, you take the full risk and you saw that. You leave no margin out there. You try and drive as close as you can to the walls, and every millimetre counts. At the end of the day, the one that maximises that the most is normally the one on pole, so it’s pretty clear what you have to do.”

Naël also brushed the wall on his penultimate lap but did not obtain any visible damage to his car, and he still managed to retake provisional pole with a 1:24.522, better than Badoer’s best. A Group B driver was thus guaranteed pole, and Naël came one step closer to sealing it for himself after fellow Frenchman Giusti, who was set to improve on his third-place time, had to slow down upon hitting traffic.

Slater put in a brave last-ditch attempt to try to best Naël’s previous lap, but he wobbled throughout his run and came close to ending up in the wall several times. Still, his last effort was better than his previous ones, denying Rivera by just 0.005s Naël then bettered his own best lap by 0.051s, topping the combined times with a 1:24.471.

Naël’s pole position secured the inside spots on each row of the grid for group B’s drivers on Sunday. Group A had led the way in 2024 and 2025, with Gabriele Minì the only other driver to take pole from the second qualifying group back when the current F3 first went to Monaco in 2023. 

Naël, Badoer, Slater and Ugochukwu will occupy the first four spots for Sunday’s feature race, with Red Bull junior Rivera putting all three Campos drivers in the top five with an impressive result on his F3 debut.

Taponen, who scored a podium finish during last year’s sprint race, managed sixth. Giusti ended up seventh in the final classification, with Del Pino eighth, Clerot ninth and Strømsted rounding out the top 10. Hiyu Yamakoshi and Gerrard Xie, sixth in groups A and B respectively, will line up on the front row for Saturday’s reverse-grid sprint race, while Gładysz missed out on a front row by just two thousandths of a second despite setting a faster time than all bar the top two from group A.

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency