After holding off a challenge from Ferrari to win the sprint race in Shanghai earlier on Saturday, Australian GP winner Russell again seemed near-unbeatable. Then he stopped on track in qualifying and limped back to the pits with technical problems.
Russell's team got the car going again with seconds to spare and he still set a time good enough for second on the grid, 0.222 of a second off Antonelli, who kept up Mercedes' run of qualifying dominance after F1's sweeping changes to the cars for 2026.
The Ferraris of Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc will start third and fourth, with McLaren drivers Oscar Piastri fifth and Lando Norris sixth.
The fast starts of the Ferraris could threaten Mercedes off the line, as they did last week in Australia and in Saturday's sprint race.
At age 19 and 201 days Antonelli becomes the youngest driver to take pole position for a full Grand Prix race, though he was also on pole aged 18 for a sprint race last year in Miami.
The Italian whizkid dethroned Sebastian Vettel who was 21 years 73 when he got pole in Monza in 2008 for Toro Rosso.
It was a pretty clean session, so I'm really happy," said Antonelli.
"I saw he (Russell) had the issue and tried to keep my focus to stay calm and deliver a good lap."
Four-time world champion Max Verstappen of Red Bull had to be content with eighth place on the grid, after missing the points in the sprint with ninth place.
Russell won the first race of the season in Australia last weekend, and he followed up by taking the 19-lap sprint in China.
As last week in Australia, the Ferraris were fast off the line and Russell and Lewis Hamilton swapped the lead several times on the first few laps. But Russell began to pull away after the early laps with Hamilton fading as the constant battles took a toll on his tires. Charles Leclerc was second with his teammate Hamilton third.
Norris was fourth for McLaren and Antonelli fifth after serving a penalty for an early collision with Red Bull's Isack Hadjar, with Piastri sixth.
"Definitely damage limitation," said Russell of his last-gasp qualifying effort that followed.
"Q2, the front wing broke, we were wrapping our heads around that. Then obviously went out in Q3, car stopped on track, car wasn't restarting, couldn't change gear.
"Starting the last lap I had no battery, no tyre temp, no nothing. But the team have done a really great job to get us into this position, it could have been much worse."
Russell is one of the F1 new era's biggest cheerleaders and said Saturday's sprint battle felt "like go-kart racing in the past ... I don't ever remember Formula 1 being like that, where you can have three or four cars all fighting for the same position truly on track."
The radical changes feature a 50-50 split between internal combustion and electric power. Drivers have struggled to handle the trade-off between using power and conserving it, and some have struggled with extra power coming in unexpectedly.
Verstappen is no fan of the changes.
"Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong," Verstappen said after the sprint race. "We just need to get our stuff together."
