Antonelli, 20, Becomes Formula One's Youngest World Champion
The Mercedes driver clinched the title with a third-place finish in Mexico City as Max Verstappen won the race for a sixth time.
Andrea Kimi Antonelli clinched the 2026 Formula One World Drivers' Championship at the Mexico City Grand Prix on Sunday, finishing third in a race won by Max Verstappen, who took his sixth career victory at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez. Antonelli, driving for Mercedes, needed only a ninth-place finish to lock up the title over teammate George Russell with four rounds still to run. He beat that mark by six places, according to Formula 1's own account of the race weekend and a separate report published by Mercedes-AMG's team site.
A record that stood for sixteen years
Antonelli sealed the title at 20 years and 68 days old, breaking the record Sebastian Vettel set in 2010 at 23 years and 134 days. It is also Mercedes' tenth drivers' championship and the first won by a graduate of the team's junior driver program. For Italy, it ends a 73-year wait for a champion: Antonelli is only the third Italian to win the title, after Alberto Ascari in 1953 and Giuseppe Farina in 1950. The FIA's final classification of the race lists Verstappen first, Lewis Hamilton second and Antonelli third, with Ferrari's Charles Leclerc and McLaren's Lando Norris rounding out the top five.
The race itself turned on a red flag triggered by a heavy crash involving Valtteri Bottas's Cadillac, which wiped out the long first-stint tyre advantage Antonelli had built running beyond 40 laps on the soft compound. He restarted fourth and passed Leclerc into Turn 1 on the second lap after the restart to secure the position he needed. Russell, who had started second, lost power on the run to the first corner and later took a ten-second penalty for contact with Isack Hadjar, dropping to sixth by the finish.
A record Vettel was happy to lose
"This is a moment that I will remember for the rest of my life," Antonelli said afterward, according to the Mercedes report. Team principal Toto Wolff called the result "extraordinary." Vettel, who had held the youngest-champion mark since 2010, had said before the race he felt no bitterness about losing it. "I'd be very happy for him. He's had an incredible year, and there's the old phrase that records are there to be broken," he told RacingNews365, adding that "whoever will win will deserve it." Italian media had tracked Antonelli's title run closely through the final weeks of the season, including a bout of illness that kept him away from the track in the days before Mexico City.
The championship caps a breakout season in which Antonelli, in only his second full year in Formula 1, out-scored a Mercedes lineup and a wider field that included four-time champion Verstappen and seven-time champion Hamilton. His win at the United States Grand Prix two weeks earlier had put him on the brink of the title before illness briefly clouded his preparation for Mexico.
What's next
The drivers' title is settled, but the season is not finished. Four races remain on the 23-round calendar, according to a schedule of this season's grands prix, with the finale set for Abu Dhabi on December 6. Mercedes still has the constructors' championship to pursue, while Ferrari and McLaren will look to close out the year on form after missing out on the drivers' crown. Attention now turns to how Antonelli carries the championship number into next season as the sport's youngest-ever reigning champion.
