Sports — Noozify Original — October 27, 2026

Antonelli's Austin Win Puts the F1 Title One Race Away

By Adam Cannizzaro

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Kimi Antonelli drove away from the field at the Circuit of the Americas on Sunday, won the United States Grand Prix by 13 seconds, and still left Austin without the championship he came for. The 20-year-old Mercedes driver started from pole, led all 56 laps, and beat Charles Leclerc's Ferrari and Max Verstappen's Red Bull for his ninth win of the season. To clinch the title in Texas, he needed his teammate George Russell to finish ninth or lower and Lewis Hamilton fifth or lower. Russell was eighth and Hamilton fourth, so the party waits a week.

It will not wait much longer than that. After 18 of 23 rounds, Antonelli has 365 points to Russell's 242 and Hamilton's 241, with five races and 125 points left. Verstappen and Leclerc can no longer catch him. In Mexico City next Sunday, a finish in the top nine seals it whatever anyone else does, and so does any result in which neither Russell nor Hamilton wins. If it happens, he will be the youngest world champion in the sport's history and the first Italian since Alberto Ascari in 1953. Toto Wolff, the Mercedes team principal, called Sunday "the race of a champion who isn't the champion yet."

By the standard of recent seasons, that is a rout. We pulled the standings with five races left in every season since 2010, when Formula 1 moved to 25 points for a win, using the open Jolpica F1 database. Antonelli's 123-point lead is the third-largest of the era, one point behind Sebastian Vettel's 124 in 2011 and well short of Max Verstappen's 209 in 2023. In 10 of the 16 seasons before this one, the leader at this stage was ahead by fewer than 60 points. Three of those leaders went on to lose the title, Mark Webber in 2010, Fernando Alonso in 2012, and Oscar Piastri last year, and none of them was more than 14 points clear. No driver who led by more than 20 points with five races left has failed to win the championship.

The race itself was decided at the first corner and on the pit wall. Verstappen, starting second, got away slowly, lost the place to Leclerc on the run up the hill to Turn 1, and took it back before the lap was over. Behind them, Russell and Oscar Piastri banged wheels, and Russell picked up a five-second penalty for leaving the track and gaining an advantage. Antonelli was already gone. Mercedes ran him on a single pit stop, trading his medium tires for hards at the end of lap 24, while Ferrari and Red Bull stopped twice. Wolff said afterward that the team trusted its numbers on the one-stop, and the numbers were right. Antonelli's only wobble came while lapping Carlos Sainz at Turn 12, when he locked a wheel and kept the lead anyway. With seven laps left, Leclerc passed Verstappen at the same corner for second. There was no safety car, only two brief virtual ones, the second for Valtteri Bottas's Cadillac, which stopped beside the track on lap 48.

"The car felt perfect today," Antonelli told the AP. He is still too young to drink the podium champagne under Texas law, a detail the wire service could not resist. Verstappen, who had won the two previous races, was blunter. "Not a good race for us," he said. In the cool-down room, Leclerc turned to the winner and asked, "So probably Mexico, then?"

This is the first season of Formula 1's new rules, and Austin showed both sides of them. The 2026 cars are lighter, narrower, and split their power roughly half and half between the engine and the electric motor, with wings that change shape on the straights. Antonelli, whose team has mastered the package best, credited "all this time putting so much work into bringing this new package." Three drivers started at the back for using more engine parts than the rules allow for a season, which is the other side of a formula still finding its footing. Bobby Epstein, the circuit's chairman, said before the weekend that the early driver complaints about the new cars had not hurt ticket sales and that the track was on course for a record year. The official attendance had not been released by Sunday night.

What television flattens about the Circuit of the Americas is the hill. The circuit rises about 133 feet over its 3.4 miles, and most of that climb comes on the run from the grid up to Turn 1, a blind left-hander at the top. From the grandstands, fans watch 20 cars funnel up that slope into a corner the drivers cannot see, which is where Verstappen lost second place on Sunday. The place is enormous, 20 turns laid out across ranchland southeast of the city, and it is a permanent track built for racing, not a set of city streets closed off for a weekend.

Austin has had the race since the circuit opened in 2012, and it will keep it. Formula 1 extended the contract through 2034 a year ago, by which point the track will have hosted the United States Grand Prix longer than Watkins Glen ever did. The economic claims around the weekend are large and come from the people selling it. Visit Austin's chief executive told a local station the race would bring in about $1 billion, and Formula 1 says the first decade added $7 billion to Austin and Texas. Whatever the true figure, the hotels do not argue. One manager said the four days of the race are about 7 percent of her year, and teams of several hundred people arrive more than a week early. Maroon 5 played Friday night and Post Malone on Saturday, which is the other thing Austin figured out early: a lot of the crowd comes for the weekend and tolerates the cars.

The next stop is Mexico City on November 1st, where the thin air at 7,300 feet does strange things to engines and brakes. Antonelli needs ninth. No driver this young has ever been this close to the title, and the fact that it has happened in the first year of a rulebook written to shuffle the order says something about Mercedes, and something about the kid.