Monaco Grand Prix Review

Winner

Kimi Antonelli won the Monaco Grand Prix.

Full classification

What happened

Lance Stroll put his Aston Martin into the barrier at the final corner with roughly twenty laps still to run, and the marshals had barely finished clearing the debris before Charles Leclerc crashed in almost the same spot moments after the restart. The second shunt was serious enough to stop the race outright: a red flag while officials checked whether the barrier and track surface could safely take another few dozen laps of Monaco's narrow ribbon of asphalt.

None of that touched the man out front. Kimi Antonelli had taken pole, led every lap he was asked to lead, and crossed the line 6.271 seconds clear of Lewis Hamilton to complete a lights-to-flag pole-fastest lap-win Grand Slam that made him the youngest driver ever to win the Monaco Grand Prix. Five wins in six races is not a form curve, it is a statement, and nothing that happened behind him changed the arithmetic at the front.

The grid had its own small chaos before any of that. Gabriel Bortoleto's Audi stalled at the pit exit and forced him to start from the pit lane, while Liam Lawson reported a technical problem before the lights went out that his team resolved just in time. Neither incident mattered much to the result — Lawson finished a solid sixth — but they set the tone for an afternoon where very little went to plan for anyone not named Antonelli.

Max Verstappen never got past lap one. He retired with what was described as a power unit problem, the first real reliability scare for Red Bull's switch to Ford power under the 2026 regulations. Whether that is a one-off gremlin or an early warning sign is not something the result itself can tell you, and Red Bull was not offering theories afterward.

Carlos Sainz had the messiest restart of anyone. He collected Nico Hulkenberg and then Franco Colapinto in the space of what cannot have been more than a lap or two, and retired with collision damage from an incident the stewards never fully unpacked in public. You do not often see a driver involved in two separate collisions at one restart and walk away with only a DNF to show for it, but that is roughly what happened to Sainz.

The stewards were busy most of the afternoon. Hamilton, George Russell, Pierre Gasly, Colapinto and Oscar Piastri all picked up five-second penalties for speeding in the pit lane, an unusually crowded penalty sheet for one race. Sergio Perez fared worse: a drive-through for being out of position at the original start, then a post-race ten-second penalty for being out of position again at the standing restart, this time because stewards ruled his front-right wheel sat outside the marked grid box. That second penalty dropped him from tenth to fifteenth and cost Cadillac what would have been its first championship point, a rough way to lose a milestone.

Gasly's afternoon deserves its own telling, because it did not end on race day. His two five-second penalties initially knocked him off the podium, until Alpine lodged a right-of-review petition on 12 June. The stewards sided with them: according to the-race.com's reporting on the case, the original penalties had used an incorrect distance between the pit lane's timing loops, and the corrected calculation put Gasly back into third. McLaren and Red Bull both signalled intentions to appeal the reversal; Mercedes explored its own legal options before quietly withdrawing them. Relitigating a race five days after the flag is an awkward look, but a stewards' explanation built on a measurement error rather than a judgment call makes it hard to argue Gasly did not earn the result back.

Further down the order, Fernando Alonso brought his Aston Martin home tenth, and that single point was the team's first of the season — hardly the kind of headline Monaco usually produces, but a real one for a team that had gone five races empty-handed. Esteban Ocon, Alex Albon and Arvid Lindblad rounded out the point-scorers. Simply reaching the flag counted for more than it usually does: Lando Norris retired on lap 43 with a battery failure, Oliver Bearman was called in on lap 27 with brake problems, and Valtteri Bottas lasted only 15 laps before his own brakes gave out — on top of the crash retirements for Stroll, Leclerc and Sainz.

As of this writing, McLaren and Red Bull's appeal against the Gasly reversal has not been resolved, which means the official record of who actually stood on the Monaco podium is, technically, still open to one more change.