From the Apex · Trackside ·

Kimi Antonelli can wrap up the 2026 title in three races. Or five, if Qatar and Abu Dhabi go ahead.

Antonelli is 81 points clear with nine rounds to go. George Russell led after the first two races and has spent the twelve since defending second place.

  • Russell led the championship after rounds 1 and 2. Antonelli took it at Japan and has held it for twelve straight rounds, and now leads by 81 points.
  • Russell spent three rounds this season as the third-best driver in the standings, behind his 41-year-old former team-mate Lewis Hamilton.
  • If every remaining round runs, the earliest Antonelli can be champion is Mexico City on 2 November. If Qatar and Abu Dhabi do not, it is Singapore on 11 October.
  • Lando Norris won the races either side of the summer break and is still 106 points down, having lost a start and two races to reliability.

On 8 March, George Russell won the Australian Grand Prix and led the world championship. On 22 March he led it again. That is the complete list of days in 2026 on which George Russell has led the world championship.

Then his team-mate turned up. Kimi Antonelli, nineteen at the time and twenty now, took the lead at Suzuka on 5 April and has not given it back through twelve consecutive rounds. He leads by 81 points, and Mercedes have won 10 of the 14 races.

It was briefly a fight. Hamilton took his first win for Ferrari at Barcelona-Catalunya, Leclerc won Silverstone, and across three rounds the gap came down from 66 points to 25. Then Spa, then Hungary, and the summer break arrived with the gap wider than it had been before the comeback started.

The third-best Mercedes driver

Losing to Antonelli is not, on its own, embarrassing. He is the fastest thing in the sport this year, and he beat Russell 7-4 in qualifying and 8-3 in races across the first eleven rounds.

The part that has cost Russell is not the teenager. It is the older one. After Monaco, after Spa and after Hungary, the standings read Antonelli first, Hamilton second, Russell third. For three rounds this season, the second-best driver at Mercedes was a 41-year-old at Ferrari.

Mercedes have not been subtle about the order of things. At Zandvoort, Russell was asked to give up second place and did, and Toto Wolff defended the call publicly. On 15 September Wolff said of Russell that "you're taking a beating", adding that "the great ones, they recover". The day before, Russell had told ESPN it was "exceptionally unlikely that I'm in this fight".

The McLaren problem

The reigning champion won the last race before the summer break and the first one after it, Hungary and then Zandvoort, and for a fortnight it looked like a title charge. It was not. Lando Norris lost a start in China to an electrical fault, a gearbox in Canada and a wiring loom in Monaco, and at Madrid the virtual safety car ended before he reached the pit lane, which cost him the race he was leading by four and a half seconds. He is 106 points behind.

His team-mate has had the stranger year. Oscar Piastri is seventh on 120 points, 66 behind Norris, with no wins and no poles, and he did not start either of the first two races. McLaren's Andrea Stella says the problem is "purely technical", and describes Piastri as driving and thinking rather than driving on instinct.

There is an explanation going around for why Russell and Piastri have both had this kind of year, and it is more interesting than "they got slower". Mark Hughes, writing in The Race on 18 September, argues that both are drivers whose strength is the geometric ideal: turn in late, carry speed through the middle of the corner, take the exit as a consequence. The 2026 cars punish exactly that. They have less grip, which moves the point at which the approach stops paying, and the energy rules charge you twice for a compromised entry, because a bad one costs the battery deployment down the straight that follows.

Worth being straight about its standing: that is one named analyst, not a consensus, and Norris publicly disagrees, saying his own strength is adaptability. He would say that, being 66 points up on the team-mate in question. He may also be right.

The race that is not on the calendar yet

Round 16, on 4 October, is the Formula 1 Gulf Air Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia. The April rounds in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia were cancelled because of the regional war; Bahrain remains the race's financial promoter, so the name travelled to Sepang while the circuit did not.

Qatar on 29 November and Abu Dhabi on 6 December are still on the calendar, still sold out, and still undecided. Stefano Domenicali said in late July that a decision would not come before mid-September, with Europe as the fallback. There has been no announcement either way.

That matters beyond two race weekends. Antonelli has 81 points in hand, and the most Russell can still take off him is 233, because Singapore is a sprint and the rest are not. Work forward from there and the championship has a date on it.

So the FIA is not only deciding whether two grands prix happen. It is deciding, within about a fortnight either way, when the 2026 world championship stops being a competition. For a title that has not changed hands since April, the calendar is the most credible contender left.

axler8's take

Four drivers signed long deals over the summer — Verstappen and Norris to 2030, Sainz and Albon at Williams — and not one of them drives the car that has won 10 of the 14 races. Every signature is the same bet: that the car gets better before the contract ends.

Car owners make the identical call in smaller numbers. Keep the car and hope next year's version of your problem is milder, or switch now and eat the cost today. A driver answers it with a signature and finds out in April. For a car you own it is arithmetic, and our Cost to Switch tool does it: keep, switch or wait, and what each one costs you a month.

The next race is Baku, on Saturday 26 September, at 4:30 pm IST.