MIAMI — The fifth edition of the Miami Grand Prix delivered its biggest spectacle yet, both from the environment surrounding Hard Rock Stadium to the action on track. Though weather threatened to put a damper on Formula One’s return, the skies stayed just clear enough for Kimi Antonelli to deliver another bit of magic.
With a start time three hours earlier than previously scheduled, the race still proved chaotic right from the start. Antonelli, despite yet another poor start off the line, rallied back after losing the lead on the opening lap to win from pole position. But early crashes from Pierre Gasly and Isack Hadjar led to shake-ups all over the grid, and with it, a fair number of unexpected winners and disappointed losers.
Without further ado, here are Sports Illustrated’s biggest winners and losers from the 2026 Miami Grand Prix, starting with the 19-year-old phenom himself.
Winners
Kimi Antonelli
Once again, Antonelli showed that the hot start to his second season in F1 is no fluke.
The Mercedes driver very well could have ended up in the other category of this list based on what happened on Saturday in the sprint race. Despite qualifying on pole, the starting issues that have plagued him all season reared themselves once again. He fell all the way to sixth and admitted he got “very frustrated” inside the car after the poor getaway.
And yet history had a strange way of repeating itself on Sunday. Antonelli, again on pole, didn’t launch off the line, while both Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc were able to cruise alongside him and get by him into Turn 1. But as he’s done multiple times this season, the 19-year-old simply didn’t panic.
The difference in Miami is that Antonelli faced some real pressure. After gaining the lead back with a well-executed undercut by Mercedes, Antonelli was followed closely by Lando Norris for much of the race and didn’t blink. That’s no small feat for a teenager in his second season going up against the defending world champion.
“I think I feel much more comfortable in the car, much more in control as well,” Antonelli said in the post-race press conference. “And I think we’re just going to keep trying our best. I’m going to try to maximize every time I go on track… I’m really proud of the team, of the job they’re doing, and I’m really enjoying the journey.”
Franco Colapinto
What a weekend for the Argentinian Alpine driver. Whether posing for photos with national hero Lionel Messi or notching a career-best finish was the real highlight, we may never know, but it was all positives for Colapinto on Sunday.
It was clear from the get-go on Friday in sprint qualifying that the upgrades for Alpine may have put them toward the top of the midfield in pace. But Colapinto’s career-best Grand Prix qualifying result (eighth) also saw him beat out teammate Gasly for the first time this season.
He then followed that up with a clean start on Sunday and a poised race without incident. With Leclerc’s penalty (more on that later) dropping him down two places, Colapinto was elevated to seventh place—yet another career-best result. Though Verstappen may have shown that the Red Bull could pull away from the midfield in the standings, Colapinto’s result will give Alpine hope to be best of the race with the team now fifth, even with Gasly’s early-race crash and exit in Miami.
Lando Norris (& McLaren)
Speaking of the reigning champ, there was an air of disappointment from the McLaren driver following Sunday’s result. And that’s perhaps a testament to just how far the team has come in his time since he first raced in F1 in 2019. There’s expectations for a team and driver who won two titles last season and want to stay at the top.
But this weekend should be considered a whopping success for both Norris and McLaren. Both drivers finished on the podium in the sprint, with Norris taking the win and Piastri in second. Then on Sunday, Norris ended the race as the runner-up and Piastri took third thanks to Leclerc’s late mistake.
The results helped McLaren solidify its third-place spot in the standings through four races. More importantly, the team now trails Ferrari by just 18 points.
“I think you’d have to feel silly if you don’t feel confident about the future when we improved so much this weekend,” Norris said. “I’m always that guy that looks at things on the slightly more glass-half-empty side, but this is a track that suits us and in the past has not suited the Mercedes quite so well. Yet they were still very fast, and we’re going to go to a track that Mercedes have probably been the best at over the last five, six years. So, we have to wait and see.”
Williams
A double points finish for Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz should have the team feeling like it has some momentum going into Montreal. The former was clearly frustrated after qualifying on Saturday, calling the performance “a joke.” But he got off to a remarkable start and took advantage of Gasly and Liam Lawson’s incident to climb into the points positions.
Sainz also overcame a mid-race spat with Verstappen to finish in 10th—a welcomed sign for a team that’s seemingly struggled to differentiate itself from Audi, and even at times Aston Martin and Cadillac this season. Albon said after the race he wanted “to wait and see” if the forward momentum was something to write home about, but Williams leaves the weekend as just one of six teams to score points out of the 11-team field.
Championship Competitiveness
Talk of F1’s 2026 regulations dominated the weekend in Miami and after the race, Piastri suggested there wasn’t much of a difference to the racing despite the small tweaks to the rules during the five weeks away.
“The races are basically exactly the same, and I think today was my first proper experience of overtaking people and then having to defend and stuff like that. It’s pretty crazy, to be honest,” he said. “At one point George was one second behind me and managed to overtake me by the end of that straight. And it’s just a bit random. The closing speeds are huge and trying to anticipate that as the defending driver is incredibly tough to do… I think the collaboration again from the FIA and F1 has been good, but there’s only so many things you can change with the hardware we have. So some changes in the future are, I think, still needed for sure. How quickly we can do it is the big question.”
That said, the racing action was without a doubt compelling. And in Miami, the competitive product was seemingly much better as well. Yes, there was yo-yo racing as drivers deployed their batteries in different ways, but there was no acceptance at any point that Antonelli was simply going to run away with the race. Russell also finished fourth and looked far less competitive than both McLaren cars all weekend. Though the early gap this season is already sizable, there’s still 18 more Grand Prix opportunities for the standings to tighten up. Miami should give fans hope of that being the case.
Losers
Charles Leclerc
After feeling like he came up short of where he hoped in both the sprint race and qualifying, the Ferrari driver’s Sunday turned into somewhat of a self-inflicted disaster. And that was all after he took the lead on the opening lap of the race.
Where did it start? With yet another brutal Ferrari pit stop, which has unfortunately come to define parts of Leclerc’s career with the Prancing Horse. The slow stop allowed Leclerc to be undercut by George Russell and kept him from keeping pace with Norris and Antonelli.
Even still, he climbed back into third, passing Russell and Verstappen until the final lap. He made a mistake and spun early in the lap and sustained significant damage. Though he managed to trundle around the track, he lost three positions—and after the race was assessed a 20-second time penalty for leaving the track multiple times without a justifiable reason.
“I’m pretty sure there was a puncture,” Leclerc said after the race. “There was probably some suspension damage as well as I couldn’t really turn to the right anymore.
“I’m very disappointed with myself, it’s all on me. I obviously need to look because with these cars, you always have a bit of a question mark of how much it deploys and considering it was the last lap, maybe there was a bit more out of that corner as you just need to finish it up with that amount of energy. But that’s not an excuse in any way. It’s all on me and it’s not acceptable.”
When he spoke to the media, he’d yet to be given the penalty. But what could have been a podium, or perhaps even better, saw him plummet all the way to eighth place, in what will be a weekend to forget.
Isack Hadjar
The Red Bull driver’s difficult first season alongside Verstappen continued on Sunday as he became the latest driver to fall victim to Miami’s tight Turns 14 and 15.
Hadjar had no one to blame but himself—and it was difficult to see him do so both in and out of the car after he crashed into the left wall. His frustration was visible and it’s not the first time F1 fans have seen him express a significant amount of emotion after an early exit. In his debut last season, it’s hard to forget seeing him crash during the formation lap.
But the rest of his rookie season was promising, which earned him the promotion to Red Bull. And yet that move has coincided with the team dropping much further into the midfield, resulting in just four points for Hadjar across six scoring opportunities so far this year.
Aston Martin & Cadillac
Time away from on-track sessions doesn’t heal all wounds, and the ones that still linger at the teams at the back of the grid are far from patched.
It’s again worth pointing out that this is just the fourth race for Cadillac, but any American fans hoping to see a major leap forward in the team’s first home race—and with a major upgrade package for the weekend—will leave a bit underwhelmed. Both cars remained reliable, finishing 16th and 18th in the Grand Prix, but progress remains slow.
“We made the most out of today and we have learned a lot this weekend,” Perez said in a release. “We need to take this package back to the factory to analyze everything and see which direction to take, but I feel that we are not too far away to make a couple of clicks here and there and move forward again… Overall things are going in the right direction.”
Over at Aston… where to begin? How about on Thursday when Lance Stroll suggested that he had more fun driving an F3 car during the five-week hiatus then he’s had in his F1 car this season. He then finished 17th in both the sprint and Grand Prix—and that’s been his best result of the season. Fernando Alonso also had his best result in Sunday’s Grand Prix, placing 15th.
George Russell
The preseason championship favorite is teetering dangerously close to falling out of the pack of contenders in the early goings.
What’s happened since the opener in Australia has been difficult to decipher. Since Russell claimed both pole position and the win, Antonelli has gotten the better of him in every Grand Prix qualifying and Grand Prix race since.
The worrying aspect of Miami is that Russell didn’t look nearly as competitive throughout the weekend. He was four-tenths of a second off of Antonelli in both sprint and Grand prix qualifying, which isn’t a good sign when it seems his biggest competition will be his teammate.
Audi (in particular, Nico Hülkenberg)
The good folks at Audi became firefighters throughout Saturday, as the cars of both Nico Hülkenberg (in the sprint) and Gabriel Bortoleto (in Grand Prix qualifying) burst into flames during various stages of the afternoon. Bortoleto was also disqualified from the sprint, making it a brutal start to the weekend.
Sunday wasn’t much better. Hülkenberg, despite starting 10th on the grid, was involved in an incident on the first lap of the race and forced to retire. Bortoleto rallied after qualifying in 21st to finish 12th, but Audi left without points for the third weekend in a row—and seemingly some significant technical issues to solve.
More F1 from Sports Illustrated
- F1 Standings After the 2026 Miami Grand Prix
- F1 Miami Grand Prix Results: Kimi Antonelli Beats Lando Norris in Gripping Battle
- Kimi Antonelli Rallies to Win Miami Grand Prix: How the Chaotic Race Unfolded
- F2 Miami Results: Gabriele Mini Wins and Colton Herta Scores Points in Crazy Feature Race
This article was originally published on www.si.com as F1 Miami Grand Prix Winners and Losers: Antonelli’s Rally, Leclerc’s Stumble.
