Andrea Kimi Antonelli won the Miami Grand Prix on Sunday in 1:33:19.273 from pole position. Lando Norris finished 3.264 seconds behind in second; Oscar Piastri was 27.092 seconds back in third. [1] Antonelli is now nineteen years old, has won the first three races of the 2026 Formula 1 season from the first three pole positions of his career, and leads the World Drivers' Championship by twenty points over his Mercedes teammate George Russell. He is the first driver in Formula 1's seventy-six-year history to convert his first three poles into wins. [2] [3]

The race began under a delayed start. A morning thunderstorm parked over Hard Rock Stadium with lightning strikes directly above the circuit, and the FIA pushed the green flag earlier than originally scheduled to clear the cell. [4] The track was dry by lap one. Norris, who had won Saturday's sprint race after Antonelli took a track-limits penalty, started second on the grid and seized the lead through Turn One. Antonelli, on the soft compound, did not panic. Mercedes' pit-stop call came one lap before McLaren's. The undercut put Antonelli back in front, and the McLaren did not get close enough again. [5]

Penalty stewards re-shaped the rest of the order. Max Verstappen, who had qualified second, took a five-second penalty for an unsafe pit-exit release and finished fifth. Charles Leclerc — who qualified third — took a twenty-second penalty for repeated track-limits violations and dropped to eighth. [6] On the final lap, Leclerc spun unprompted at Turn Seventeen, the tyres gone before the chequered flag. The Ferrari left Miami without a podium for the third consecutive race.

What is happening at Mercedes is the kind of thing the paper has not seen in a decade. The team that lost Lewis Hamilton to Ferrari at the end of 2024 — and was widely written off through the 2025 season — has now produced a championship-leading driver at the third race of the year. Toto Wolff's line on Sunday — that Antonelli's "share price is going up" — is the team principal's joke. [7] The serious version is that the team's new aerodynamic philosophy, the W17 chassis, and a rookie driver who entered the season as Russell's understudy have rebuilt Mercedes from the ground up.

Antonelli's voice on the cool-down lap was steady. "The road is still long," he told the radio. He reused the line in the parc-fermé interview. The English is his second language, and he has the schoolboy's instinct to repeat what worked. The line worked. Sky Sports' commentary track caught it twice. [3] What does not need translation is the lap-time variance: Antonelli is the first to score one hundred points in the 2026 season, the first to win three on the trot, the first to convert his first three career poles into wins.

The historical comparison is to Sebastian Vettel in 2010 and Max Verstappen in 2022. Vettel started his championship runs at twenty-three. Verstappen, at twenty-five. Antonelli is doing it at nineteen, in his second full season, and against the same Verstappen-Leclerc-Norris field that has defined the modern era. The "Verstappen era" is, by Sunday's tape, in its closing chapters. The next era is in silver and rolls a Mercedes-built power unit, and it speaks Italian.

The McLaren team had the second-fastest car on Sunday, by their own admission. Norris was fifteen seconds slower over a thirty-three-lap stint than the Mercedes pit window allowed for. Piastri, who won here in 2025, was a further twenty-three seconds back at the flag. Andrea Stella, the McLaren team principal, told the BBC: the gap to Mercedes "is not where we expected to be after Bahrain." [4] Stella's understatement is the team principal's way of saying his cars cannot, today, beat Antonelli on a clean race weekend.

The grid leaves Miami for the European leg. Imola comes May 17. Monaco follows on May 24. The cars Antonelli is leading by twenty points — the McLarens of Norris and Piastri, the Red Bull of Verstappen, the Ferrari of Leclerc — will all be running upgrades against the European car-development cycle. Mercedes' pace at Miami was, by the lap-time data, the cleanest race-pace number on the grid. Whether Antonelli's car arrives at Imola the fastest, or whether one of the field's customary upgrade cycles closes the gap, will be the story of the next four weeks.

What is not in question is the championship leader. The youngest driver ever to lead a Formula 1 World Championship is nineteen years old. He is Italian, his father raced in F2, his Mercedes contract runs through 2029, and he stood on the Hard Rock Stadium podium on Sunday, the chequered flag draped behind him, and said the road was still long. The road is, in fact, getting shorter every Sunday afternoon.

-- AMARA OKONKWO, Lagos