F1's next great force: Antonelli makes history in Monaco with gut punch to Russell

Something very special in F1 history is happening. Yes, the Mercedes W17 is terrific, and we will expound upon team-mate George Russell’s problems in a moment. But make no mistake, Kimi Antonelli, whose crushing victory around Monaco’s streets was the 19-year-old’s fifth consecutive win in 2026, is something very special indeed.

He didn’t just win Monaco, he took it apart and ran away. This wasn’t one of those control-the-pack Monaco drives, ensuring there were no gaps for anyone to try an undercut. No, this was an old-fashioned trouncing of everyone; he just disappeared up the road in a dazzling display of superiority, though his task was for sure eased by the instant retirement of Max Verstappen’s Red Bull, which had qualified within four-hundredths of him.

By the fourth lap, Antonelli – his Mercedes not as good over the kerbs as the Ferraris and which took more finessing over the two days of practice, but superb under braking and traction – was flicking through the chicane and on the power as the Ferraris of Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc were only just bobbing over the crest out of the tunnel. His engineer Pete Bonnington would occasionally break the airwaves with a note of caution – “a bit more management on the front axle through Turn 12, tyre temps still a bit high there,” or a reminder to watch the brake temperatures as he lapped tailenders – but it was all under control as he took the field apart.

He stabilised the gap from around lap 9, and then using the gap to stabilise his temperatures even allowed Hamilton to nibble into his lead a little for the next eight laps. But coming through the traffic – there’d been a gaggle of lap 1 pitters – had lost the chasing Ferrari some tyre temperature and increased that of Hamilton’s Carbon Industrie brake discs and from there Antonelli was gone, 15sec clear by the time Hamilton pitted for his new tyres. Once Leclerc followed suit seven laps later, Antonelli was able to stop and rejoin on his fresh rubber without even losing the lead.

A late safety car wiped out a lead which had built up to half a minute and brought some jeopardy in the Mercedes pits; he wasn’t initially called in before the pit entry, but there was time to do it on the next lap and, controlling the restart perfectly, he began pulling away all over again. That lead was cancelled by a safety car – Lance Stroll had gone off at Rascasse on a crumbling track surface – and a subsequent red flag when Leclerc crashed out at the same place on the restart.

Finally, a standing start for an eight-lap sprint to the chequered flag: Antonelli straight into the lead, opening up a big gap yet again, a celebratory little power slide out of Rascasse for the final time, nothing to disturb his beautiful afternoon beneath a cloudless sky, his name etched into the trophy for a drive that will surely be talked about in the same breath as those of the legends around here. Hamilton, a distant second, Hadjar in his PU-troubled Red Bull the podium beneficiary of Leclerc’s crash. Verstappen’s instant PU problem off the line was decisive, the McLarens weren’t quick enough to have qualified ahead of Hadjar and, like Russell, that defined their races, even before Lando Norris’ retirement.

Antonelli’s was a drive of astonishing control and precision, delivered with apparent ease and built upon a hotly contested pole lap where his braking into the chicane was truly spectacular, buying him 0.2sec over everyone right there.

But this special history is being made on the other side of the garage to Russell, whose form is disintegrating.

It is snowballing for George, in the big season picture, just as in here at Monaco, where he was in fifth place stuck behind the struggling Red Bull of Isack Hadjar, dropping Russell 20sec to the front (a big part in why he was lapped by his team-mate after 53 laps). Subsequently, through no fault of his own, he was the victim of the pitwall not reacting quickly enough to the Stroll safety car. Because Antonelli had not been called in on time but on the next lap, it meant Russell being stacked behind the sister car in the pits, losing him the position he’d just taken off Hadjar at the first stop.

A pitlane speeding penalty (one of seven drivers to be caught out), not taken in the confusion of the stacked stop (a left-hand crew error), meaning a drive-through in a bunched-up field after a late restart. Leaving him 14th on a day when he otherwise might have been a lapped third. He’s 68 points behind and 5-1 down to a new phenomenon of a team-mate in what he believed was finally going to be his year. After the gut punches of Suzuka qualifying and retirement from the lead in Montreal, this was surely the biggest of them all. Psychologically, it’s devastating.

There’s a logic to reason away how this was circumstantial. But the trigger for the exaggerated penalties of fortune was not circumstantial, but performance. He was off the pace for the second time in three races, unable here to get the tyres into their window in practice or qualifying, and on a track where the walls mean you need full confidence, that’s a catastrophic loss of lap time, compounding upon itself.

Four-tenths slower than his pole-setting team-mate put him on the third row and thereby made him totally vulnerable to the cascading punishments outlined above. A chain reaction of blows as he falls down the hill, each one harder than the last. He can do no right against a team-mate who can’t get it wrong.

Where did Russell’s butterfly flap its wings? He’s claiming a driving style mismatch to the ’26 cars. “There’s something in my driving style that’s not helping the car at the moment but is playing into his hands perfectly well,” he said after qualifying. “The difference in how we’re driving has such an impact upon the tyres.”

Sure, Antonelli isn’t perturbed when the initial bite into the turn isn’t there, when the front tyres are not aggressively biting into the surface, the way Russell prefers, but that’s not all of it. He’s been fast everywhere apart from here and Miami. It’s about confidence and around a track where that translates even more powerfully than usual into qualifying lap time, that entry phase where he’s not feeling the tyres grip is self-perpetuating; it brings caution, which this weekend meant a front tyre not coming fully up to temperature for the start of the lap – and over-temperature rears by the end of the following lap. It’s a delicate high-wire and Antonelli is walking it like it’s a mile wide. For Russell, there were barriers everywhere, real metal ones and those trickier ones in his head.