Kimi Antonelli celebrates after winning the 2026 Chinese Grand Prix. Photo: Liauzh / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
Kimi Antonelli did not clinch the Formula 1 title in Austin, and the reason is a little awkward for everyone chasing him: George Russell wasn’t slow enough. The Circuit of the Americas math needed Russell to finish ninth or lower. He finished eighth, which is four points instead of two, so Antonelli leaves Texas 365 to 242 clear with 125 still available. That is a 123-point lead and a title that is two points short of being finished. The three-things scenario was missing exactly one thing, and it was Russell’s weekend.
Even that was a struggle. Russell took a five-second penalty for his lap-one incident with Oscar Piastri, serving it in the pits, and then spent roughly 30 laps stuck behind Piastri’s older tyres. A driver with a penalty, traffic and a McLaren in his mirrors still collected enough points to keep the championship alive. If you’re writing the Mercedes irony, it writes itself, and it’s also the first thing to remember when Mexico comes around.
The one-stop was the contrarian call
The race was decided on a bet about the hard tyre. Pirelli’s own preview pointed to the C2 hard favouring long stints and a likely one-stop race, and the field largely read that as an invitation to do the opposite. Verstappen, Hamilton, Leclerc and Piastri all stopped around lap 14, Norris a lap later, with most of the top ten starting on softs. Mercedes started Antonelli on mediums and kept him out until the end of lap 24, then bolted on hards and rejoined fourth.
The key detail is that Antonelli didn’t need to manage a crisis to get there. He started from pole and led by almost three seconds by lap 10, so the extended stint wasn’t a rescue mission from traffic. It was a team choosing to give a clear-air leader the longer tyre story. Leclerc led for a stretch, then made a second stop, and Antonelli retook the lead with about 20 laps to go before winning by 13.078 seconds. Mercedes’ Andrew Shovlin said the team “held our nerve,” which is the polite way of saying the pit wall watched half the field take the textbook undercut and chose not to.
That’s what makes this a hard result to dismiss as a pole-sitter’s afternoon. Starting first only gets you the choice. Antonelli’s car had to survive the extra laps on the mediums, and the stop at lap 24 had to leave him far enough clear that fresh hards could do the rest. Everyone else’s two-stop plan then had to beat that, and none of them did.
Everyone else had a story
Ferrari’s was the cruelest. Leclerc passed Verstappen for second with a late hard-tyre stop, and Hamilton finished fourth, just 1.030 seconds behind Verstappen’s third place. Fred Vasseur said the second Virtual Safety Car, called for Valtteri Bottas’s stopped Cadillac, cost them a possible double podium. Hamilton chasing a one-second gap with one VSC fewer is a theory we’ll never test, but it’s the kind of margin that keeps a team principal awake.
Red Bull’s was worse than third suggests. Verstappen ran a two-stop, and Laurent Mekies said the car hit debris around lap eight, leaving balance problems and extra tyre degradation. Verstappen called the car “undriveable” and said the big question was why the tyres didn’t work. That’s a damaged car and a mystery rolled into one podium finish. Isack Hadjar took sixth after a pit-lane system issue and throttle response complaints, and was told to let Verstappen through. Aston Martin, for the record, had its own pit-lane start to deal with.
McLaren’s was a hangover. Norris ran the hards late and faded from the podium to fifth, and Piastri was seventh after McLaren asked the pair to swap so Norris could chase Russell. Andrea Stella said the grid position had made a podium “virtually unattainable.” The tyres, in other words, agreed with him.
What the numbers say now
The title is a formality unless something goes badly wrong, and Mexico, Round 19 on Oct. 30 to Nov. 1, is the first place it can be done. There are no sprint weekends left, so each round is worth 25 at most, and a 123-point lead means Antonelli needs a Russell win paired with a very poor day to stay unconfirmed after Mexico. The longer-range math on Russell was always grim, and Austin only made it grimmer.
The real fight is now second place, and it’s gloriously messy. Russell has 242, Hamilton 241, Verstappen 236 and Leclerc 233, so four drivers are inside nine points. Norris is next on 211. In the constructors’ standings Mercedes has 607 and Ferrari 474, while Red Bull and McLaren are level on 355 for third.
So the question for Mexico isn’t whether Antonelli wins the title. It’s whether Mercedes lets Russell race him freely for it, or treats the weekend as a coronation lap. A team with a 123-point cushion and a teammate in the middle of a four-way scrap for second has more to think about than it lets on.
Lead image credit: Kimi Antonelli celebrates after winning the 2026 Chinese Grand Prix. Photo: Liauzh / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
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