Mexico City GP Race: Verstappen Edges Hamilton as Antonelli Takes Crown

While Liam Lawson made the afternoon’s most dramatic charge by hauling his Racing Bulls car up 13 places from 22nd on the grid to ninth, Max Verstappen won the Mexico City Grand Prix race by a razor-thin margin of 0.799 seconds over Lewis Hamilton at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez. Starting fifth, the Red Bull driver managed tyre wear and three Safety Car periods to claim the 73rd victory of his career in dry conditions with track temperatures touching 51°C.

Third place went to Andrea Kimi Antonelli, and with it, the 2026 drivers’ championship. Antonelli’s lead sits at 119 points on 380 points ahead of Verstappen, meaning with only 100 points left to play for over the remaining weekends, the Mercedes driver can no longer be caught. To my eye, it was a title secured in a race utterly defined by incidents, penalties and relentless interruptions, but his composure through 71 chaotic laps delivered exactly what was required.

Steward Interventions and First-Lap Scramble

The trouble began right on lap 1. Charles Leclerc braked late into a corner, which unsettled his Ferrari, forced team-mate Hamilton off the track, and sent Leclerc wide as well. There was no contact between the two red cars, but an incident was reported on lap 3 for leaving the track and gaining an advantage. A five-second time penalty was announced on lap 12 for Leclerc. I think the stewards were remarkably lenient there, especially given that drivers had been warned before the race that corner cutting would carry a ten-second sanction.

The penalties did not stop there. An incident involving George Russell was reported on lap 4, with a ten-second penalty handed out on lap 13 for causing a collision, eventually dropping him to sixth behind Lando Norris. Later, Sergio Pérez was handed a five-second penalty announced on lap 46 for speeding in the pit lane on his way to 17th. Nico Hülkenberg also found himself penalised; after an incident reported on lap 49, a ten-second penalty was announced on lap 51 for causing a collision, contributing to the Audi driver tumbling from tenth on the grid down to 16th at the flag.

Five cars failed to reach the chequered flag, with Fernando Alonso, Lance Stroll, Valtteri Bottas (lap 42), Oliver Bearman (lap 47) and Arvid Lindblad (lap 58) all retiring. The timing screens recorded 273 on-track position changes throughout the race, with Isack Hadjar racking up 28 of them alone as he tried and failed to salvage points from 19th on the grid, eventually crossing the line 12th.

Tyres, Timing, and Diverging Safety Car Calls

Tyre management and pit stop execution dictated the afternoon, with teams taking wildly different approaches across the three Safety Car interventions. Verstappen broke away from the front-running pack’s consensus by starting on mediums rather than the softs favoured by pole-sitter Hamilton and Antonelli. The only other driver in the top ten to gamble on starting mediums was Franco Colapinto, who converted that call into an eighth-place finish for Alpine, just ahead of Lawson and team-mate Pierre Gasly in tenth.

Verstappen ran those opening mediums until lap 27 before taking soft tyres on lap 28 and another used set of softs on lap 46, executing a two-stop Medium-Soft-Soft route shared by Colapinto and Gabriel Bortoleto. Red Bull split their garage entirely: Hadjar pitted on laps 7-8 during the early Safety Car period and ran a three-stop race, whereas Verstappen stayed out alongside Hamilton, Antonelli, Leclerc, Norris, and Russell.

Ferrari split their strategies as well, though the decisions produced very different outcomes:

• Hamilton took three stops (Soft, Medium, Soft, Soft), pitting on laps 28, 45, and 46.
• Leclerc ran a two-stop Soft-Medium-Soft plan, stopping on lap 31 and lap 50.
• Verstappen ran two stops (Medium, Soft, Soft), stopping on lap 27 and lap 46.
• Antonelli executed a two-stop Soft-Medium-Soft plan, stopping on lap 43 and lap 45.

Hamilton’s sequence became frantic when Valtteri Bottas’s incident brought out the Safety Car. Ferrari brought Hamilton in late, but keeping Leclerc out while leading proved deeply counterproductive. Leclerc stayed out under the Safety Car while running P1 and ended up finishing fourth, three places lower than where he had been running before his track-position gamble unravelled. In contrast, Antonelli executed the longest stint of the Grand Prix, stretching his opening soft tyres across 43 uninterrupted laps before taking a brief two-lap run on mediums and finishing on used softs.

The championship battle is decided, but the fight for minor honours resumes immediately at the Brazilian Grand Prix, round 20, on 8 November.

Timing data: Jolpica-F1, tyres and race control: OpenF1. Charts and results card by Slip Stream GP.

This report was written automatically with the help of AI (Google Gemini), from public timing data. Every number in the tables and charts comes straight from the data. Spotted a mistake? Tell me.

Published by

Pasindu Senavirathna

Data

Jolpica-F1, OpenF1, Wikidata and Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and MET Norway

Last updated

2 Nov 2026, 03:01