“Kimi Antonelli is a Formula 1 World Champion. Thanks to his talent, the car, and the fact that he isn’t racing for Ferrari.” – La Gazetta dello Sport
And welcome to Part 2 of my DRR double-header and after the calm and rational nature of MotoGP trying to run a Grand Prix in Qatar as the United States prepare for World War III, I tried to unwind by watching F1’s Mexican Grand Prix, which is normally a superb cure for insomnia.
…Oh I got this one very wrong. Alright, let’s unearth this bag of chaos. Let’s talk about it while slamming my head into some cocaine to take the edge off of it.
Super-Mega-Ultra Honse
It all started so well. Charles Leclerc looked like the fastest man on Friday and set for pole position. But in Q3 he botched his final qualifying lap. But it’s all good, it cleared the way for Lewis Hamilton to become the oldest polesitter in F1 history. Remember, he turns 41 in January. He did it by just nine thousandths of a second over George Russell in second and Leclerc third, with Max Verstappen starting in P5 after taking a one-place grid penalty for crashing into Liam Lawson during practice. It’s as dumb as it sounds.
Mexico race starts are always something I dread. It’s 830m to Turn 1, the longest run of its kind on the calendar. Chances are, you’re going three wide into a 90 degree right-hander the first part of a chicane sequence. It’s asking for trouble. This year was… actually relatively fine. Third is the spot you ideally want to be in on that run as it sets you up with the extra slipstream until your battery stops helping you at 345kph. And it was Leclerc who tried to go around the outside of Hamilton into Turn 1. Lewis gives enough space for Turns 2 and 3 for them to come out 1-2 with Lewis ahead.
Charles gets to Turn 4 and tries an outside lunge again and… both cars go wide at the corner. Lewis goes wide and slightly off, Leclerc goes way outside and cuts the corner, coming back on with the lead, and he keeps it. Verstappen has now split the Ferrari’s after passing Lewis at Turn 6 and is now second.
Charles doesn’t want to give up the track position, so he takes a five-second time penalty for leaving the track and gaining a lasting advantage. The drivers were warned going into this one that on the opening lap, cars would be deemed to be both “attacking” and “defending” and any time gained via cutting the track had to be returned or you’d be risking a penalty. Charles, would rather have kept the track position.
Now, a lot’s been said about this incident. I think it’s actually pretty straight-forward. Both men are fighting for the win, given track position is everything at Mexico, and both men tried to play hero-ball by going too deep into Turn 4 and paying the price. I don’t think either man was making the corner, and no I don’t think Charles is the reason Lewis goes wide. Charles has to cop a penalty for not giving back the position, but I can understand the reasoning why given this is a track-position race and giving up the lead in this scenario is the F1 version of baseball’s “suicide squeeze”.
The race strategy for Ferrari afterwards was also poor. Leclerc actually has superb pace, pushing his inherited lead out to five seconds by the Mid 20’s lap-wise. He’s almost got enough where he can pit and come out in front of Max anyway… but he comes in earlier than planned on Lap 27, and Red Bull has enough of a gap where they can react and come in on the same lap to take the easy overtake in the pits.
Again, this is a track position race, and by now it’s clear that the Soft tyre is the race tyre of choice again. The medium doesn’t give you enough back in terms of raw pace for the durability trade off, and that is still way better than whatever the C3 Hard tyre’s been doing this year. The move here was clearly to box Hamilton just behind the front two. Force Red Bull into making a decision on the undercut to either box him to react, or try and beat Lewis on a tyre delta race later. Boxing Charles that early was folding your hand. And Kimi Antonelli proved that the soft tyre was easily capable of the 43 laps he was on them for. This only became more frustrating when Valtteri Bottas’ suspension came down with a mild case of explosions and put him into the Turn 1 barrier, forcing a Red Flag, so everyone got to change tyres again anyway, and used softs were the play.
The immediate aftermath of the weekend was grim. Hamilton threw his scooter to the ground in frustration during the Red Flag on camera and talked about how the team has “big problems”. He even suggested that Leclerc, his own teammate, be punished more harshly for leaving the track on radio (Stewards are handing the race to Charles, he said so again when Nico Rosberg interviewed him after the race), likely a throwback to last year when Lewis got dinged for the same offence (Even if Lewis also running wide was the mitigation that reduced the penalty, assuming Charles DID make the corner, where was he going to go besides straight into Lewis’ sidepod?). On any level, the masks are off now, there is a serious problem within Maranello and there is no sense of control or leadership in the team.
I had fans message me telling me that Charles Leclerc races his teammate harder than everyone else. Don’t buy it. The man spent the entire 26 laps after the restart holding off Lando Norris with hard but fair defense with a flat-spot that went down to the canvas, hanging on for dear life to P4. Post race, Charles’ tyre looked like a goddamn crater. I just think both he and Lewis are guilty of a mentality of knowing that your car isn’t good enough to contend consistently, so you take unnecessary amounts of risk to try to bridge that gap to try and get outlier results.
Leclerc did it in qualifying, both of them were guilty of it on the opening lap. And it’s becoming more than obvious that Lewis is trying to run the entire team. It’s not hard to see why he took all the flowers for winning six Championships at Mercedes and John Elkann (President of Ferrari), isn’t spending £50m+ a year for Lewis to sit back and enjoy a retirement swansong. He’s roughly equal in speed to Charles, and that’s the problem, neither of them are good enough to lead this team outright, and Ferrari has softened their stance on #1 and #2 drivers since the days of Sebastian Vettel and Kimi Raikkonen in the mid-2010’s. As Max Verstappen said, they’re two #1’s and they’re both going for what likely was the win. Shit is going to happen.
I feel like Fred Vasseur is too nice and too passive to intervene in key moments like this, and his car development hasn’t worked – You’ve developed a car down on power in a power-unit regulation set and have two wins on the year, one of them a gift from Kimi at Silverstone.
Charles signed a new extension to take him into the 2030’s. Lewis allegedly has two driver-option years left on his deal. Something has to give in Maranello, because I’m not convinced this is sustainable. And if it isn’t, it’s embarrassing that a team that talented is heading into Year 19 without a major Championship. Speaking of which…
Oh Yeah, We Have A Historic Champion, How About It?
It was just another day at the office for Kimi, really. Not the best qualifying, but took his chances well, and was actually unlucky in a sense that his one pitstop for the race was a lap before Valtteri’s huge shunt that brought out the Red Flag. But he still took a comfortable third, just a couple of seconds off the win, and that was more than enough to become F1’s youngest ever World Champion at 20 years and 68 days. Which, given the way the sport’s regulations are nowadays, may never be beaten.
Rolling the clock back here, it’s wild that the Masterplan with Kimi worked out at every step of the way. From the time he was seen as a karting prodigy with the support his dad Marco was giving him alongside Toto Wolff as early as Age 12, to a ridiculous season in FREC so strong that no-one who knew of Kimi’s talent even gave a shit about his one year in F2 after skipping F3. And even then, he had some spectacular performances, like the win in the pouring Silverstone rain, or the brilliant Eau Rouge pass on Franco Colapinto.
True story: The first video I ever edited for Autosport was a social clip of two of the best F1 journalists in the game – The Race’s Jonathan Noble and The Athletic’s Alex Kalinauckas, absolutely gushing about Kimi’s FP1 debut at Monza, where he infamously crashed 10 minutes in. They were blown away by his level of confidence to just attack the track as quickly as he did. I didn’t buy it. I was wrong!
It’s easy to say now, but Toto Wolff took a big swing on Kimi to put him in a Mercedes at just 18 years of age. He had Lewis Hamilton, the greatest ever in his camp already, and George Russell, who had ticked every box already since joining. He lowballed Lewis into leaving for Ferrari, because he knew damn well that if he didn’t put Kimi in the car right then and there, someone else would have taken that chance. It was already well known that James Vowles wanted him badly at Williams for instance. It’s Yu-Gi-Oh when Kaiba sacrifices his Egyptian God Card to beat Ishizu with his Blue-Eyes White Dragon instead. It feels ridiculous to let Lewis walk for Kimi…until it works.
In hindsight, last year felt like a car that Kimi just didn’t like. He absolutely was second best to Russell, but there were a couple of weekends like Canada and Brazil where you could start to see that true potential blossoming. I’m not sure that he had this big a leap in skill in his second season, I think it’s more likely that he liked not having a ground effect car more, but even so, it’s an astonishing change of fortune.
Antonelli has been immense this season. There’s been races where he never at any point looked like losing. It felt like a premium version of Jenson Button’s 2009 or Alex Palou’s IndyCar campaign from just this year. Absolutely ripping the shit out of the field early on (2nd in Australia, then wins in China, Japan, Miami, Canada and Monaco), and then mitigating the gap and pushing it out gently over time as a very competitive chasing back all trip over each other. There were a couple of rough days, the battery failure from second in Barcelona and the wheel cap falling off a Silverstone. But I remember his fighting spirit when he was determined to fight on, even for just a single point in 10th place. That’s when I knew he was going to win it all. Actually built different.
Yes, he’s had the best car, but said Mercedes isn’t winning every track matchup. McLaren had a couple of specialist rounds go in their favour. Red Bull has definitely raised their game in the final third again, with Max Verstappen now starting to match the sophomore’s brilliance. But Kimi’s only been off the podium once since that tough Silverstone race. Throw in seven pole positions this year and it’s hard not to call him the complete package. I still think he has a little composure problem when he’ll seemingly make off-colour errors, like in China and in Austria, but on the whole, the upside is immense.
And for the first time in 73 years, Italy has a World Champion again. It’s almost hard to believe a country steeped in such racing history has had to wait so long. And it’s a hell of a Plan B for them given let’s be real here, the country wants a car in red to take glory. But the next chapter of this sport is likely going to have to go through this man. And if you want an iconic shot – Kimi being hoisted on the shoulders of Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton on the top of the podium. 11 World Championships and 180 wins between them. Could be looking at nearly 40 years of generational talent on that podium by the time it’s all said and done.
Congratulations Kimi, I can’t wait to see what happens next…
Another Rather Large Lightning Round
…Especially because Max Verstappen IS on a heater right now and 2027 could be very interesting. This was his sixth win in Mexico (Now his most prolific track), his ninth podium or better in his last 10 starts (Three of them wins), and now the eleventh place on the grid he’s won a Grand Prix from (P1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 14 and 17). A Verstappen vs Antonelli matchup could feed families. A brilliant, opportunist win with an excellent strategy from the wall via Hannah Schmitz.
Sebastian Vettel’s tribute to Kimi Antonelli finally taking his mantle of youngest World Champion was beautifully done. Vettel’s sort of become the emotional heart of the sport and it’s really been endearing to see.
Amazing I’m only just getting to Esteban Ocon now, but he was benched mid-weekend in shocking circumstances. Ayao Komatsu has kept very tight lipped about it, only saying it was nothing to do with the illness that affected the paddock early in the weekend with Checo and Antonelli.
Ocon would later reveal after the fact that he did have a falling out with Komatsu on Friday evening after FP2, allegedly over a change of running plan. But I can assure, it isn’t a good sign when your statement has to clarify that no, you didn’t throw hands with your boss.
Toyota WEC Driver Ryo Hirakawa stepped up on short notice and did an excellent job of bringing the car home without trouble, and had solid pace for someone who had never done a full race at that level, and on short notice. Even passed both Williams late on. And with Oscar Piastri, Pierre Gasly and Franco Colapinto all taking penalties after the flag, it got Ryo a point in his F1 debut. Outstanding.
But it now leaves the team in limbo heading into Brazil. Hirakawa can’t stand in again as he’s heading to Monza to compete for the Drivers Title of the World Endurance Championship. Has Ocon been sat permanently? Does Jack Doohan come in as simulator/reserve driver, or do Haas give Rafael Camara the seat early and give him a headstart? Rafa’s already going to be in Brazil, taking part in FP1 for Ferrari, so some conversations may need to be had with Uncle Fred.
I like Esteban Ocon, and I think he’s still good enough to be on the F1 grid. But to be released early from your second F1 team in three years suggests that it’s not just the team… maybe you’re the problem.
Feel bad that Oscar Piastri dropped out of the points with that 10-second penalty for his collision with Arvid Lindblad towards the end of that race. Annoyingly, I think the application of the rulebook was correct here. Piastri tries to go around the outside of Lindblad at Turn 1, but he doesn’t get enough of his car alongside at the apex to demand space. Lindblad has the right to the corner and use all of the track, and Piastri gets blamed for not giving Lindblad room, even though he’s already on the edge of track limits. There’s little more Oscar can do. But sadly, these are the racing rules that almost the entire grid voted for back in 2024, and yes, apparently Turkey’s do vote for Thanksgiving.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – Nico Rosberg is very, very good at playing the media game. From his YouTube channel blowing up immediately after retiring to working with Sky Sports F1. He’s a battering ram. He asks the uncomfortable questions that people don’t want to answer and we Brits LOVE awkward tension. Why do you think we love the fucking Traitors so much? It’s the blessing of knowing he has nothing to lose. He’s a former World Champion and the only time he wasn’t welcome in a paddock was when he was unvaccinated. The print media can’t run his line of questioning for fear of losing access, a killer in this journalistic climate. So Rosberg can go straight for the juggular and he represents what we, the frustrated fan, want to ask. It’s the best thing Sky have done to an otherwise pretty milquetoast presenting core in years. (Bernie Collins is great by the way.)
Liam Lawson’s seat being under any kind of speculation at all is completely ridiculous. Easily the best midfielder in F1 right now and he’s just taken a really solid Racing Bulls car from the pitlane to seventh. He has double the points of anyone below him in the standings, an average finish of nine, and has 15 points finishes this season. Are you sure Nikola Tsolov’s better than that?
Both Aston Martin’s dead within seven laps due to abnormal pressures in their power units. Man.
Also, at what point does a serious conversation need to be had with Cadillac and their build quality? Their brakes have had issues since Austria, and a suspension failure at 210mph is terrifying. Very glad Valtteri Bottas was okay.
Mercedes copped a 5,000 euro fine to protect George Russell from the media pen post race, after his car started de-rating straight off the start. See, a fine for missing a media event. Are the biking journos watching?
The Verdict: 7/10 (Good) – I genuinely don’t know how to score this one. This was a rare Mexico chaos race. It was stagnant at times, but we got strategic intrigue, and then a full blown mad restart due to the Red Flag and then the Top 3 covered by two seconds at the flag. I can’t call that dull by any means. We’ll give it a 7 and call it a day. See you in Brazil, I need a lie down.
