United States GP 2026: Antonelli won with one stop and the title stayed two points away

Kimi Antonelli won in Austin from pole, with a single stop and 13.078 seconds ahead of Charles Leclerc. He led 49 of the 56 laps and only gave up the lead while making his one stop. It is his ninth Grand Prix win of the year, the tenth counting the Silverstone Sprint. Max Verstappen was third and Lewis Hamilton fourth. The thesis of this paper is simple: Antonelli won because his hard-tyre stint got faster as it went on, while the two-stoppers had to recover from behind. And it still wasn't enough for the title: he fell two points short.

Qualifying

Antonelli took pole with a 1:34.035, 0.179s ahead of Verstappen. Isack Hadjar completed a Red Bull 2-3, 0.215s back, and Leclerc was fourth (+0.232). Lando Norris set a 1:34.379 on his final lap that would have put him sixth, but it was deleted for track limits at Turn 19 and he started eighth. Arvid Lindblad qualified ninth but started 14th after an engine change; Franco Colapinto and Gabriel Bortoleto also carried grid penalties and started 20th and 21st. The full session gaps are in the qualifying view.

Corners and straights

To see where each car gained time, we measured how long each one took to cover every corner on all of its clean race laps (between 47 and 49 per driver): from 100 metres before to 100 metres after the apex, without overlapping the neighbouring corner's zone. That captures braking, the apex and the exit. Those zones add up to 61% of the lap; the rest is straights. We grouped the corners by how fast they were taken: slow (1, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 20, below 110 km/h), medium (6, 7, 8, 9, 16 and 19) and fast (2 to 5, 10, 17 and 18, above 215 km/h).

Comparing raw averages is misleading, because everyone ran different tyres on laps with different fuel. On hards and over the same laps (40 to 56), Leclerc was 0.92s per lap faster than Antonelli, but his hards were 2 to 17 laps old and Antonelli's 16 to 32. So we estimated each time with a model that separates the driver's effect from the tyre compound, tyre age and the fuel being burned.

Seconds per lap against Antonelli, corrected for compound, tyre age and fuel; a negative value means faster than him. The columns add up, give or take rounding: slow, medium and fast give the corner total, and corners plus straights give the lap. The margin is the standard error of the lap.

Corrected for tyres, Leclerc, Hamilton, Verstappen and Antonelli had the same pace: less than a tenth per lap apart, within the margin of error. What changes is where each of them found it. Ferrari was half a second per lap faster in the corners, almost all of it in the slow and medium ones, and half a second slower on the straights; Antonelli made up for it the other way round. Norris and Russell were fast on the straight and slow in the corners. The same model gives how fast each tyre wore: every lap of use cost the soft 0.081s, the medium 0.074 and the hard 0.057, while the fuel took off 0.052s per lap. With the same pace, strategy decided the race: by our pit-loss estimate, Leclerc's two stops cost him 41.3s and Antonelli's single stop 21.5s, about 20 seconds that explain most of the 13-second winning margin. The corner-by-corner comparison is in the race telemetry.

The race in four acts

Act 1, laps 1 to 24. Antonelli started on mediums and stayed ahead; Verstappen followed 2.1-2.9s behind for the first 13 laps. There was a VSC on lap 2 to clear debris from the track. Verstappen pitted on lap 13 (softs to softs), Hamilton on lap 14 and Leclerc on lap 15 (softs to mediums), and Norris on lap 16, mediums to hards, to run to the end on one stop. George Russell served at his stop a 5-second penalty for leaving the track and gaining an advantage at Turn 13.

Act 2, laps 24 to 31: the only stop. Antonelli pitted on lap 24, mediums to hards, and rejoined 8.2s behind Verstappen, who was on his second set of softs. Verstappen led for seven laps, but his tyres were fading: he lost 71.9 thousandths per lap in that stint. Antonelli cut the gap from 8.2 to 1.5s, and when Verstappen pitted a second time, on lap 31, he rejoined 18.8s behind. Antonelli never lost the lead again.

Act 3, laps 32 to 50: Norris on 40 laps of hards. After the second stops of Hamilton (lap 38) and Leclerc (39), Norris ran second, on old hards, from lap 40 to lap 46. On lap 47 Verstappen and Leclerc passed him, and on lap 49 Leclerc passed Verstappen, who had been dealing with engine-braking issues since mid-race according to his team on the radio, and took second place. McLaren then suggested Norris pit for a possible flat spot, and he replied: "I don't have a flat spot". He stayed out.

Act 4, laps 51 to 56. Valtteri Bottas stopped at the side of the track and brought out the second VSC (laps 51 to 53). On lap 51 Hamilton passed Norris, who finished fifth on 40-lap-old hards. Antonelli restarted cleanly and won by 13.078s. "It was the result we needed," he said; his engineer called it a "perfectly executed race". The lap-by-lap evolution is in the race analysis.

The pace numbers

Median clean lap of each team's best driver, excluding lap 1, the VSC laps (2 and 51 to 53) and in/out-laps, with a 107% cut-off:

Mercedes' median is Antonelli's, on one stop; McLaren's is Norris's, also on one. The fastest lap of the race was Leclerc's 1:37.976, on three-lap-old hards.

The difference was in how the hards aged. Over his 32 laps on hards, Antonelli got 12.3 thousandths per lap faster as the car burned fuel: the tyre barely degraded. Norris, with 40 laps on the same compound, lost 33.4 thousandths per lap, and that left him defenceless at the end. The corners where time was won and lost are in the telemetry.

McLaren's call

Norris was the other driver who tried a single stop, but on hards from lap 17: he had to stretch them for 40 laps. "Our best chance is to make the one-stop work. If it's not going to, it doesn't matter, we'll just bail off it late," his engineer told him while he was second. When they offered him a stop, Norris chose to stay out: "Hamilton likely will come through anyway; as long as we can get to the end, we still beat Gasly". He was second and finished fifth. The stop alternatives can be simulated in the Strategy Room.

Ferrari, on two stops

For a change, Ferrari got the strategy right. Two weeks after Singapore, where Hamilton lost the podium by staying out under the VSC, both cars ran the same plan: softs to mediums and mediums to hards, with Hamilton stopping a lap before Leclerc both times (laps 14 and 38 against 15 and 39). Their final stint, on fresh hards, was the fastest of the front-runners: Leclerc's median was 1:38.604 and Hamilton's 1:38.758, against Antonelli's 1:39.820 and Norris's 1:40.186 on their hards. That took Leclerc from fourth on the grid to second, with the fastest lap, and Hamilton from fifth to fourth: both passed Norris at the end, and Leclerc also passed Verstappen. Ferrari scored 30 points, one more than Mercedes: no team scored more in Austin.

Colapinto's race

Franco Colapinto started 20th because of his engine penalty and went out on hards to stretch the first stint. He gained places as the cars ahead pitted and ran as high as 14th between laps 22 and 24. On lap 25 he made contact with Lindblad at Turn 1; Race Control noted the incident and closed it with no investigation. According to the Argentine press, the hit tore off part of his sidepod, and the pace shows it: his laps went from around 1:42.5 to between 1:44 and 1:46. He pitted on lap 30 for softs and, after 35 laps, the team told him on the radio to box and retire. "Sorry. Not what I'd expect," he replied.

Context: the championship

Antonelli reached 365 points, 123 more than Russell (242). Behind them are Hamilton (241), Verstappen (236), Leclerc (233) and Norris (211). Five races remain with no Sprints, so 125 points are at stake. In Austin he needed to win with Russell ninth or lower and Hamilton fifth or lower: Russell was eighth and Hamilton fourth, and his lead ended two points short of what he needed.

In Mexico, after which 100 points will remain, Antonelli will be champion except in two cases: if Russell wins and he finishes tenth or lower, or if Hamilton wins and he scores no points. A tie on points goes to the driver with more wins, and Antonelli already has nine.

Mercedes had introduced a new front wing in Singapore; it brought nothing new to Austin, while Ferrari and Racing Bulls brought four parts each. Oliver Bearman retired with damage after a 10-second penalty for hitting Pierre Gasly, and Bottas stopped late on. Gasly scored Alpine's only point, in tenth.

The hypotheses, in short

One: with a car that didn't degrade its hards, the single stop was the winning strategy, and Mercedes called it on the right lap.

Two: the same plan without that pace isn't enough; Norris tried it on 40 laps of hards and lost three places in the last ten.

Three: corrected for tyres, Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull had the same pace, with opposite profiles in corners and on straights; the one stop fewer was the difference.

What this data does NOT say