Miami Grand Prix Review

Winner

Kimi Antonelli won the Miami Grand Prix.

Full classification

What happened

Max Verstappen never made it cleanly through Turn 1. Locking up alongside pole-sitter Kimi Antonelli and Charles Leclerc, the Red Bull driver clipped the Ferrari, spun a full rotation, and dropped out of the leading pack before the field had even settled into lap one. Leclerc, suddenly clear of the wreckage, grabbed the lead — and for a few laps it looked like Miami might belong to Ferrari rather than Mercedes. A few corners later, Lewis Hamilton and Franco Colapinto touched at Turn 11 in the same opening scramble, according to Formula1.com's race report; neither carried visible damage into the laps that followed, which is the only reason that particular moment didn't end up mattering to anyone but the two drivers involved.

It didn't. Antonelli reclaimed the front and, by the flag, had done something no one in Formula 1's history had managed: turned his first three career pole positions into his first three career wins in the same three races. Drivers have strung together three poles before — Schumacher did it in 1994. Drivers have won their opening three races before — Damon Hill in 1993, Mika Häkkinen across 1997 and 1998. Nobody had combined both streaks at once, according to Motorsport.com's breakdown of the record, until a 19-year-old from Bologna won by 3.264 seconds over Lando Norris on a Sunday in Miami Gardens.

That gap flatters the margin. Norris spent long stretches of the middle laps actually leading, before an undercut around the second pit window put Mercedes back on top for good; he never got close enough afterward to make a move stick, and by the flag he was left arguing with himself about whether an earlier stop would have changed anything. Oscar Piastri, 27 seconds further back in third, spent his own closing laps fending off a fading Leclerc rather than chasing the podium ahead of him. George Russell brought the second Mercedes home fourth, which meant his own teammate had just put 20 points between them in the championship — a gap Formula1.com's own coverage of the round framed as the biggest story of Antonelli's season so far, bigger even than the record he set doing it.

The race's real violence happened much earlier and much further down the order. On lap 6, Isack Hadjar clipped the wall approaching the Turns 14–15 chicane, broke his suspension, and speared into the barrier — a mistake angry enough that he punched his own steering wheel getting out, according to GPFans' report from the scene. Seconds later and a few corners away, Liam Lawson dived down the inside of Pierre Gasly's Alpine, locked a front tyre, and clipped the Frenchman's car hard enough to flip it into a full somersault before it landed half-resting on the tyre barrier. Both drivers walked away unhurt; Lawson's own car took enough damage in the contact that his afternoon ended not long after. The safety car that followed ran for six laps, per GPFans, and erased whatever gap had built up before the race had even reached its first quarter.

You'd expect a race with two safety-car-worthy crashes inside the first six laps to feel chaotic, and largely it did — except for whatever actually happened to Nico Hulkenberg, whose Audi was done after seven laps without any of the reports pulled for this piece naming a cause. No contact, no failure described anywhere; his race is simply over, a loose thread nobody bothered to tie off while covering Hadjar and Gasly.

The other argument worth having is about Leclerc's second half. He'd been running as high as third when his Ferrari picked up front-wing damage in the Turn 1 mess, and rather than nurse the car home in a defensible position, he kept running wide at the exits of fast corners to hold his pace — often enough that the stewards handed him a post-race 20-second penalty for repeatedly leaving the track and gaining an advantage. That dropped him from sixth to eighth and handed Franco Colapinto the points he'd more or less already earned on track. Verstappen picked up a separate five-second penalty, for crossing the white line at pit exit, though it changed nothing about his final fifth. Twenty seconds for a driver who left the track more than once is on the lenient side as track-limits penalties go, but it's hard to argue Ferrari didn't have it coming after a start that let Verstappen's contact turn a possible podium run into damage limitation.

Eighteen cars were still circulating at the flag, two laps down at the back where Valtteri Bottas closed out a quiet Sunday for Cadillac. Nico Hulkenberg's Audi never did get an explanation attached to it in anything published on race day.