Marco Rossi · F1 Correspondent
Max Verstappen kept his cool amid the chaos of Mexico City, but the real moment of history belonged to a driver who only finished third.
Max Verstappen won the Mexico City Grand Prix at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez on Sunday, in a race interrupted twice, by a red flag and a safety car. He had qualified fourth but started fifth because of a grid penalty. Lewis Hamilton crossed the line 0.799 seconds behind, while Andrea Kimi Antonelli finished third and wrapped up the drivers' title early with that result, becoming the youngest world champion in Formula 1 history.
Ferrari duel at Turn 4, penalty for Leclerc
Lewis Hamilton, who started from pole, got away well and held the lead through Turn 1. At Turn 4 his Ferrari teammate Charles Leclerc attacked him, both arrived too fast and ran off the track. Leclerc cut across the grass and took the lead that way. The stewards ruled that he had left the track and gained a lasting advantage and handed him a five-second penalty. The standard penalty would have been ten seconds, but they reduced it because Hamilton had also entered the corner too fast and left the track. Leclerc served the penalty at his pit stop on lap 27.
Max Verstappen calmly took advantage of the confusion and moved up to second. A few meters behind, according to foxsports.com.au, there was another incident: George Russell clipped Isack Hadjar on the opening lap, and the Red Bull driver spun and dropped to the back of the field. Russell was given a ten-second time penalty for it, which he served at his pit stop. For Red Bull it was an early setback for the second car. At the front, Leclerc stayed ahead until his stop on lap 27, which he made at the same time as Verstappen. After that, Verstappen led the drivers who had already stopped, but on track it was Antonelli who led around lap 40, by around ten seconds. Only after Antonelli's pit stop did Verstappen take over at the front.
Bottas' heavy crash stops the race
After around 43 laps, just past half distance, a heavy crash for Valtteri Bottas brought out the red flag. According to RacingNews365, the Cadillac driver had started from the back of the grid after an extensive change of power unit components. Under braking for Turn 1 at around 320 km/h, his car's left-front suspension failed, the car snapped away and hit the barrier rear-first. Bottas climbed out of the wreck unaided, and the team later said he had been released and was unhurt, but excused him from his post-race media duties.
At the standing restart that followed, Verstappen showed why he is one of the best starters in the field: he confidently defended the lead from Leclerc, Hamilton and Antonelli and refused to be rattled in the frantic first few hundred meters after the stoppage. For Red Bull it confirmed that the pace from qualifying, where the team had only managed fourth on the grid, was much easier to unlock in race trim than it had looked on Saturday.
Antonelli becomes youngest world champion at twenty
Before the weekend, Andrea Kimi Antonelli mathematically needed a top-nine finish to seal the title early. The fact that he managed it despite an illness that had forced him to miss media day makes the result more remarkable than the bare position suggests. With third place in the race, the Mercedes driver was crowned the youngest world champion in Formula 1 history at the age of twenty years, two months and seven days, beating the previous record held by Sebastian Vettel, who became world champion at 23 in 2010.
The scenes in the Mercedes garage after the checkered flag spoke for themselves. For a team that has repeatedly fought to regain its old dominance in recent years, a drivers' title with a driver from its own junior program is likely to mean more than just another trophy, it looks like the confirmation of a long-term project. Teammate George Russell adding points in sixth despite his time penalty, just 0.485 seconds behind fifth-placed Lando Norris, rounded off a successful afternoon for Mercedes, even if the race itself went to Verstappen.
Late safety car and a duel without a decision
Shortly before the end, another incident caused the final interruption of the afternoon: Arvid Lindblad, who was defending a solid seventh place, tangled with the attacking Oscar Piastri. On lap 59, Piastri lined up an overtake on the approach to Turn 1, and the two cars touched. Lindblad's car was briefly lifted into the air and hit the tire barrier, the first race-related retirement of his young career. The stewards summoned both drivers after the race, and a decision was still pending. Piastri was able to continue despite damage to his car and is therefore provisionally classified seventh.
After the final restart, the tension built behind Verstappen once more. Hamilton, whose pole was, according to crash.net, his first since 2023 and his first ever with Ferrari, now had to turn that success into a podium: he kept the leader under pressure all the way to the checkered flag but found no gap to make a move. Verstappen took his third win of the season, showing that despite a rather mixed qualifying, Red Bull remains one of the benchmarks on race pace. For Ferrari the afternoon was bittersweet: a historic pole and second place for Hamilton, but only fourth for Leclerc, who had led the race for a long time, after Antonelli went up the inside of him at Turn 1 on lap 48. With the remaining races of the season in mind, attention is now likely to shift for good from the drivers' standings, decided by Antonelli's title, to the constructors' championship. There, Mercedes leads Ferrari by 135 points on 639, while Red Bull (380) and McLaren (371) are separated by just nine points in the fight for third.
