Kimi Antonelli Wins Italian Grand Prix as Ferrari Falters at Monza
The old place has seen some drives. Senna in the wet. Schumacher’s first Ferrari win. Vettel’s coming‑of‑age. On Sunday, Monza added another to the list.
From 19th on the grid, with a 30-place penalty hanging over him like a bad joke, Kimi Antonelli tore through the Italian Grand Prix and won his home race for the first time. A teenager in a Mercedes, rewriting the script in front of the Tifosi who had come expecting Ferrari red on the top step, not silver – and certainly not from that far back.
Antonelli’s charge from nowhere
This was supposed to be damage limitation. Mercedes had thrown a raft of power unit changes at Antonelli’s car, accepting the brutal grid drop on a weekend where the Italian should have been contending for pole. The talk in the paddock was about “minimising the loss”.
Antonelli clearly wasn’t listening.
From the lights, he attacked. Aggressive, but precise. By the time the race had settled into any sort of rhythm, he was already slicing into the midfield. He was 12th after just a couple of laps when Charles Leclerc’s heavy crash brought out the red flag and reset the pack.
The stoppage didn’t cool him. Once the race restarted, Antonelli went back to work. He picked off cars with a mix of straight‑line speed and late‑braking nerve, never looking like a man protecting a championship lead, but one chasing a childhood dream a few kilometres from home.
Soon he was in the points. Then he was in the mirrors of his team mate.
By Lap 18, Antonelli had dragged the No. 8 Mercedes right onto the tail of George Russell and launched his first proper move for the lead. It was bold, the kind of attempt that can define a season if it goes wrong. It didn’t. It announced that the intra‑team battle was very much on.
A mid‑race Virtual Safety Car threatened to tilt that fight. Mercedes split their strategies: Antonelli dived in for fresh medium tyres, Russell stayed out on used hards. On paper, it gave Russell track position and a chance to defend. On the asphalt, it exposed the gulf in pace.
Lap after lap, Antonelli closed. The home crowd sensed it. So did the pit wall. Toto Wolff later admitted that “nothing would have stopped him” – and it never looked like anything would. When the decisive moment came, Antonelli made it stick, then simply drove away.
He took the chequered flag not as a plucky charger, but as the class of the field. The win stretches his lead over Russell to 66 points in the championship, just nine shy of the equivalent of a three‑victory buffer. With that kind of margin, the title race now demands an answer from Russell, not a question of whether Antonelli can hold his nerve.
Ferrari’s home weekend unravels in a lap and a half
While one Italian flag waved for Antonelli, another hung heavy over Ferrari.
This was supposed to be the weekend. A home race, a fresh engine upgrade, and a car that, on paper, should have been in the mix. Lewis Hamilton spoke on Thursday of “strongly” believing in Ferrari’s chances of victory. Leclerc talked about making it a “very special weekend”.
The optimism didn’t survive long.
Qualifying already felt like a missed opportunity. Strategy left both drivers frustrated, the timing and traffic management not quite sharp enough. They ended the session fourth and fifth, which became third and fourth after Oscar Piastri’s penalty. Respectable, but not the front‑row lockout the fans had dreamt of.
Sunday was brutal.
From third on the grid, Leclerc launched well, Hamilton right behind. Into the second corner, the pair went wheel‑to‑wheel. Neither backed down. Hamilton ran wide into the gravel, showering dust and dropping down the order. “Charles pushed me off!” came the radio message from the seven-time World Champion, frustration cutting through the noise.
One lap later, Ferrari’s day got worse.
Leclerc, pushing hard, lost control of his SF‑26 and slammed into the barriers. His race ended in the wall, his “special weekend” reduced to a wreck and a red flag. He later explained that he had to come “off and on throttle” on the opening lap and would have to “look into” what triggered the loss of control. The nuance won’t ease the sting of crashing out at Monza in front of his own crowd.
Hamilton’s recovery drive never turned into a rescue act. He climbed back through the field, but sixth at the flag was a meagre return for a team that had arrived talking about victory. He called it “a bit devastating” and “tough to swallow”, and the early clash with Leclerc clearly still rankled. “I ended up P10 or something. There's not really much to say. We'll take it offline,” he said, leaving the real debrief for behind closed doors.
Ferrari came to Monza to ignite their season. They left with a damaged car, a bruised star, and a fanbase that watched someone else’s Italian hero stand on the top step.
Gasly’s pole that stunned the paddock
Saturday belonged to someone else entirely.
In a qualifying session where the slipstream always promised chaos, Pierre Gasly and Alpine delivered a shock that reverberated through the pit lane. Pole position. At Monza. In an Alpine.
It was no lottery lap. Gasly, armed with Mercedes power in the back of the blue car, topped Q1 and then delivered again when it mattered in Q3. His first ever Formula 1 pole, at the circuit where he scored his first – and so far only – Grand Prix victory six years ago.
“I’m so happy. It’s been nine years [in F1] trying to chase and get the opportunity to take pole position,” he said afterwards. “I won my first race in Monza, and to get my first pole position on this track… I think is something special around here.” It felt like a career circle closing in front of the old grandstands.
The fairytale was always going to be hard to extend over 53 laps against the might of Mercedes and the other frontrunners. Gasly led the opening lap and held his own among the leaders for a spell, but the Alpine simply didn’t have the race pace to cling on.
He slid back through the order, but not into obscurity. Seventh at the flag, 27 seconds behind Antonelli yet comfortably clear of the midfield scrap, still represented a serious statement from a team that has spent much of the season fighting for crumbs.
On the other side of the garage, Franco Colapinto turned his own cameo into points. He surged as high as third at the restart, only to run off at Lesmo 1 and tumble down the pack. Instead of folding, he fought back, hunting down Yuki Tsunoda’s Racing Bulls in the closing laps and snatching P9.
He ran out of time to catch Arvid Lindblad’s other Racing Bulls in eighth, but Alpine’s double‑points finish tightened the fight for fifth in the constructors’ standings. The gap to the Red Bull sister team now stands at 13 points. On a weekend when the headlines belonged to Antonelli, Alpine quietly turned their season’s narrative a shade brighter.
Junior series light up Monza
The show didn’t stop with Formula 1.
In Formula 2, Joshua Duerksen owned the weekend. The Invicta Racing driver won both the Sprint and the Feature Race, a dominant double that lifted him into rare territory. The Monza haul moved him to a record‑equalling eight F2 victories, underlining a stunning performance from the Paraguayan.
In the Feature, he led home team mate Rafael Camara, with Campos Racing’s Noel Leon completing the podium. Camara’s result tightened the title chase, trimming the gap to championship leader Nikola Tsolov and adding another layer of intrigue to the final stretch of the season.
Monza has a habit of revealing who is ready for the next step. On this evidence, it didn’t just showcase the future in F2. It may well have crowned it in Formula 1, too.
