Italian GP Team Radio 2026: Every Message From Practice
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Italian GP Team Radio: Every Message From Monza Practice
Sixteen radio messages came out of Friday at Monza, including the call that red-flagged FP1 and Max Verstappen describing a car that would not turn or stop.
That is not the driver. It is Colton Herta's engineer, 19 minutes into first practice at Monza, telling him to park it. The team saw the problem on the telemetry before Herta could do much about it, which is how a hydraulic failure usually gets caught. Seconds later his Cadillac was stationary at Turn 6, the virtual safety car was out, and by 10:49:36 the session was under a red flag.
Sixteen team radio messages came out of Friday at Monza across both practice sessions. That is a small number, and it is normal for a Friday, but several of them explain things the timing screen only hinted at. Here is all of it, with what the data says about each.
Every message from both sessions, placed against the session clock.
Every FP1 radio message
Seven messages, six of them with usable audio transcribed.
Herta's engineer: "We need to stop the car"
Luke Browning: "I got blocked by Hamilton."
Carlos Sainz: "There's still a bit of overbalance"
Ayumu Iwasa: "Whoa, what's he doing?" (the clip is broken across speakers, so the wording is approximate)
Ayumu Iwasa: "That's so bad"
Yuki Tsunoda: "Well, then what is he doing, then?"
Fernando Alonso's message came through with audio but no usable transcript.
Two things stand out. The call to stop is the red flag itself, and it lines up exactly with race control: the virtual safety car went out at 10:47:51, marshals were sent to Turn 6, and the red flag followed at 10:49:36. The Cadillac was stuck in gear, which is what turned a routine recovery into a stopped session. Herta completed five laps all morning.
Luke Browning's is the one worth pausing on. A rookie in his FP1 outing for Williams, reporting that he was blocked by a seven-time world champion. Hamilton lost four laps to track limits that session, more than anyone, and Browning lost four of his own. Traffic at Monza is the defining problem of a Friday: everyone wants the same clear lap on the same piece of road, and the tow is worth enough that nobody wants to be the car in front.
Every FP2 radio message
Nine messages, eight with transcripts. This is where the session gets interesting.
Lando Norris: "what the hell is this guy doing? It's dangerous"
Max Verstappen: "it's like driving on ice. And the brakes aren't working"
Max Verstappen: "the car starts jumping a lot more now... on the front axle"
Kimi Antonelli: "what an idiot, what an absolute idiot"
From Ocon's radio: "I just struggle to position the car in a straight line. It's moving left to right a lot." (the archive labels this the engineer, which looks like a mis-attribution given the words)
Gabriel Bortoleto: "Hey, is everything okay with my engine?"
George Russell: "Just keep an eye on the front suspension. I've got a bit of a weird vibration under braking."
Pierre Gasly's message had audio but no usable transcript.
Norris, Stroll and the word "dangerous"
Norris's message arrived at 16:14 local time. Race control had noted a Turn 1 incident involving cars 18 and 1, Stroll and Norris, at 16:12:24, and confirmed shortly after that it would be investigated after the session for impeding.
Stroll had come out of the pit lane and drifted across the racing line as Norris arrived at the fastest point on the circuit. Norris took to the run-off to avoid him. At Monza the approach to the first chicane is the highest closing speed anywhere on the calendar, which is why a car in the wrong place there is treated differently from one at a slow corner.
The word Norris used was "dangerous", and it is a word the stewards read too. As of Friday evening the verdict had not been published.
Antonelli's "what an absolute idiot" came four minutes later, at 16:18. He did not name anyone, and no incident involving him was noted by race control, so it is not clear who he meant. On a circuit where the whole field is hunting a tow in a one hour window, there is rarely a shortage of candidates.
Verstappen's radio explains his lap time
This is the part where the radio and the data say the same thing, and it is the most useful thing on the timesheet.
Verstappen finished FP2 ninth, 0.818s off Russell. On the radio he reported no grip, brakes that were not working, and a car jumping on the front axle. He described it as "like driving on ice".
Now put that next to the telemetry. We measured the minimum speed every fast driver carried through each corner, and Verstappen was the slowest of the seven quickest drivers at Lesmo 1 (196 km/h), Lesmo 2 (178) and Ascari (182). Not by much at any one corner, but at every single one. That is exactly what a car with no aerodynamic load and no front-end confidence looks like in numbers.
Red Bull agree. Technical director Pierre Wache said afterwards that "clearly we have a balance issue on the car, that is the main thing", and pointed out that it does not help when Verstappen misses FP1 and climbs in for FP2, because the team has less of his feedback than usual. Ayumu Iwasa drove his car in the morning, one of four rookies who ran in FP1.
So the sequence reads: rookie in the car for an hour, driver gets in with a balance problem, complains it will not turn or stop, and posts a lap that is slowest of the front group in precisely the corners where load matters. The full corner-by-corner numbers are in the Monza telemetry analysis.
The fastest man on track was worried about his suspension
Russell topped the session with a 1:22.559. At 17:01 he told his engineer to "keep an eye on the front suspension", reporting "a bit of a weird vibration under braking".
That is a normal thing for a driver to flag on a Friday and not necessarily a problem. It is worth knowing because of where it happened. Monza asks more of the brakes than almost anywhere: the first chicane alone takes a car from about 322 km/h down to 72, a drop of roughly 251 km/h, and there are six braking events in 5.8km. A vibration under braking at this circuit is not a small note.
Bortoleto's question about his engine belongs in the same category. Fridays are when things get checked.
A note on the transcripts
These come from our own archive, and they are automatically transcribed from the broadcast audio rather than typed by hand.
That means they are good but not perfect. Radio is compressed, drivers talk over engine noise, and both sides of a conversation sometimes run together in one clip. Speaker attribution can be wrong too, which matters more than a garbled word: the opening line of this article is a case where the archive correctly marks the engineer as the speaker and it would have been easy to credit the driver instead. Two of Friday's sixteen messages had audio with no usable text at all. Where a phrase was garbled we have left it out rather than guess, which is why some quotes above are shorter than the clip.
One example of why that matters: a fragment of one Verstappen message transcribes as the car having "blown up", which did not happen. He completed 30 laps. He was describing a lack of downforce, and the team changed his front wing. Quoting that fragment as written would have invented a mechanical failure out of a transcription error.
Listen to it yourself
The messages above are in the Team Radio Archive, our searchable collection of over 39,000 F1 radio messages from 2018 onward, with colour-coded transcripts you can read alongside the audio.
You can browse the full Italian Grand Prix radio for 2026, or search the whole archive by driver, team, season or phrase. If you want to know how the system works, from the encrypted pit-to-car link to why you only ever hear a fraction of it, that is in how F1 team radio works.
Follow the radio live during the session
The archive is what you read afterwards. During a session, the interesting version is hearing it as it happens.
The Formula Dream app carries live driver radio as it is broadcast, inside a live Dashboard that runs through every session: every car on the circuit map, and a timing tower with lap times, gaps and intervals, tyre compound and age, plus flag and safety car alerts as race control calls them. When a driver comes on the radio complaining about balance, you can look straight at what his sector times just did. You also get every FIA document of the weekend as it is published, which is where investigations like the Stroll one actually appear before anyone reports them.
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"We need to stop the car", from his engineer rather than from Herta himself. The Cadillac stopped at Turn 6 in FP1 and the session went to a red flag at 10:49:36 after a virtual safety car period. The car was stuck in gear, and Herta completed only five laps.
What did Lando Norris say about Lance Stroll?
Norris called the move "dangerous" on his radio after Stroll drifted across the racing line at the approach to Turn 1, forcing Norris into the run-off. Race control noted the incident at 16:12:24 and confirmed it would be investigated after the session for impeding.
What was wrong with Max Verstappen's car in FP2?
He reported a lack of grip, brakes that were not working and a car jumping on the front axle, describing it as like driving on ice. Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache confirmed a balance issue with the car. Verstappen finished ninth, 0.818s off the pace.
How many team radio messages were there in Italian GP practice?
Sixteen across both sessions: seven in FP1 and nine in FP2. Fourteen of them had usable transcripts, and two had audio only.
Where can I read F1 team radio transcripts?
In the Team Radio Archive, which holds over 39,000 messages from 2018 onward with searchable, colour-coded transcripts alongside the audio, including every session of the 2026 Italian Grand Prix.
George Russell topped FP2 at Monza with a 1:22.559, and Mercedes backed it up with the best long-run pace in the field. Full results, race pace and telemetry.
