Antonelli Spanish GP win: two seconds of VSC luck costs Norris at F1’s new Madring

By Jack Shaw · Madring, Madrid · Published: 08:15 BST

• Kimi Antonelli won Formula 1’s first race at Madrid’s Madring — his eighth grand prix victory — after a virtual safety car wrecked the race of polesitter Lando Norris.
• Norris led by 6.2 seconds at the start of lap 14 and had passed the pit entry roughly two seconds before the VSC was called for Lance Stroll‘s stricken Aston Martin. Almost the whole field took a cheap stop; Norris changed tyres under green and finished third.
• Max Verstappen was second and George Russell fifth, while Lewis Hamilton retired with a brake failure and afterwards conceded his title hopes are gone.

The Antonelli Spanish GP win came with an apology attached. Lando Norris had controlled F1’s inaugural race at the Madring from pole and was six seconds clear when Lance Stroll’s Aston Martin stopped at Turn 20 on lap 13. Norris had just gone past the pit entry. Two seconds later the virtual safety car came out, the rest of the field pitted for next to nothing, and a near-certain victory became third place.

Antonelli Spanish GP win: how two seconds decided the Madring debut

Stroll parked with a brake problem and race director Rui Marques had little option but to neutralise the track while marshals moved the car. That handed almost everyone a discounted pit stop. Norris, unable to reach the pit lane before the window opened and shut around him, took his tyres under green-flag running and rejoined behind Antonelli and Verstappen.

Verstappen’s own race carried an asterisk: he passed Antonelli on the opening lap but was ordered by Red Bull to hand back two positions, a call team principal Laurent Mekies has since defended. Hamilton’s ended early — the Ferrari driver said he was “lucky to make it round” to the garage after his brake pedal went long inside the first few laps. For the full chronological timeline of the weekend, follow the rolling coverage at ReadMotorsport, and see how Norris took pole by 0.011s on Saturday.

The expert angle: the luckiest win of Antonelli’s career may be the one that seals the title

Mercedes have now been beaten to pole in four races running, and it has not cost them a thing. That is the real story of this championship: not raw pace, but a driver who does not make mistakes and a car that keeps finishing.

Antonelli did not dress it up. “Today we didn’t deserve to win,” he said. Norris was blunter on the cooldown lap: “We were too quick, that’s all it was.” He is right in the cruellest sense — three or four seconds slower in that opening stint on mediums and he would have been in the pit lane when it mattered. He later called himself “insanely unlucky”. His rivals are already conceding: Hamilton says there is no stopping Antonelli, while Russell, out-scored by his team-mate for a fifth consecutive race, rates his own chances “exceptionally unlikely” — “I don’t think I am in the fight.”

The weekend’s other verdict was on the Madring itself, where overtaking proved close to impossible exactly as Charles Leclerc warned on Friday it would. Fernando Alonso said F1 “cannot continue this way”; pundit Alexander Wurz likened the circuit to a “concrete channel”; Nico Rosberg pointed at the venue’s ambassador: “Carlos Sainz was the ambassador. So we need to criticise Carlos Sainz.”

Wrap-up

A brand-new circuit, 45 years after Madrid last staged a race, and the abiding memory is a two-second gap between a car and a pit entry. Should F1 change how the virtual safety car works — or is that simply racing? For where this title fight stood before the weekend, read Kimi Antonelli: 66 points clear and hailed a ‘phenomenon’ before F1’s Madrid debut.