Scott Gulbransen
George Russell said the quiet part out loud in Canada. Watching his teammate cruise to a fourth straight win while his own Mercedes sat dead on track, he conceded the championship was now Kimi Antonelli’s to lose. Coming from a driver who outscored Antonelli by 169 points a year ago, that is a remarkable thing to admit in early June.
Yet, Russell isn’t wrong about the kid’s dominating start to the 2026 Formula 1 season.
Hard to Argue with Kimi Antonelli’s Dominating Start
The numbers explain why Russell seems to be resigned to his teammate’s fate. Antonelli won the Canadian Grand Prix while Russell retired on lap 30 with a power unit failure, a 25-0 swing that pushed the Italian’s lead to 43 points. He has now won four in a row and, at 19, in only his second full season, he has flipped a Mercedes pecking order that looked settled last year, when Russell was clearly the team’s lead driver.
What makes the Canada result sting for Russell is that he did nothing wrong. He and Antonelli had been trading the lead all afternoon, including a glancing touch at the final chicane, and Russell was genuinely racing for the win when his engine let go. Russell climbed out of the car, furious, and you could understand why. He told reporters he felt like “the gods don’t want me to be in this fight.”
Despite Fast Start, F1 Season Has a Long Way to Go for Antonelli
How big is Kimi Antonelli’s championship lead in 2026?
Here is the part that American fans new to the sport should hold on to, though. It is June. There are 17 race weekends left, three of them sprints, and 449 points still on the table. A 43-point gap sounds enormous, and right now it feels that way. But it is not insurmountable. Especially with drivers on the grid like Max Verstappen, Charles Leclerc, defending world champion Lando Norris and seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton.
If you want proof, you only have to look back one season. Last year, McLaren’s Oscar Piastri led his teammate Norris by 34 points and Max Verstappen by more than 100 with nine races to go. That championship did not end the way those numbers suggested it would. Leads evaporate quickly and reliability turns. The driver who looks unbeatable in June does not always lift the trophy in December.
The difference this time is that the threat to Kimi Antonelli is sitting in the same garage, in a car with the same power unit and battery. That is also the catch for Mercedes. Russell and Antonelli have been racing each other hard, wheel-to-wheel, lap after lap, and the team has so far let them. At some point, with a constructors’ title in play and Ferrari only two points behind, Mercedes will have to decide how long it can keep letting its two drivers take swings at each other.
For now, Kimi Antonelli has the speed, the momentum and the points. Russell has the history and the belief that this is far from over. Both of those things can be true at the same time, which is exactly what makes the back half of this season worth watching.
