Verstappen takes the win
Max Verstappen won the Mexico City Grand Prix at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, ahead of Lewis Hamilton and Andrea Kimi Antonelli. Charles Leclerc finished fourth, Lando Norris fifth and George Russell sixth. Liam Lawson, Gabriel Bortoleto, Isack Hadjar and Ryo Hirakawa took the remaining points places from seventh to tenth.
The build-up gave little hint of a Verstappen win. [1] reported that he and Lawson each received a one-place grid penalty and a superlicence penalty point after a clash in Friday practice. Leclerc, meanwhile, topped both Friday sessions, [2] noting he was 0.103 seconds clear of Norris in the timed session. The same report said Hamilton stopped on track with a technical problem and did not complete his long-run simulation.
Hamilton still recovered to second and set the fastest lap of the race, a 79.268 s on lap 50. Verstappen’s win comes after he stood on the podium in each of the five rounds the pre-race data considered, with victories in Malaysia and Singapore among them. Antonelli, who won the United States Grand Prix a round earlier, added another podium. Mercedes arrived as the constructors’ leader on 607 points, ahead of Ferrari on 474.
How the race unfolded
The timing data records two safety car periods, deployed on laps 44 and 59, plus one virtual safety car and no red flags. Seventeen cars were classified. There were 67 pit stops in total, the quickest taking 21.9 s. The slowest is logged at 2315.8 s, which looks like a car sitting in the garage rather than a normal stop, so treat it with caution.
Strategy was broadly two-stop for the front runners, and many of them ended on a 26-lap stint on softs. Verstappen ran medium for 27 laps, then soft for 18, then soft for a final 26. Hamilton started on softs for 28 laps, moved to mediums for 16, then took a one-lap soft stint before the same 26-lap closing run. Antonelli stayed out longest on his opening soft stint at 43 laps, then ran two laps on mediums before the final soft stint. Leclerc ran soft for 27 laps and medium for 18, and Norris ran soft for 39 laps and medium for six.
The contrast shows in the choice of tyre at the start. Verstappen opened on mediums, while Hamilton, Antonelli, Leclerc and Norris all began on softs. The data does not say which stops fell under which neutralisation, so it would be a mistake to credit any one call for the result.
Penalties and the midfield
The stewards were busy. Leclerc received a five-second time penalty for leaving the track and gaining an advantage. Russell was given ten seconds for causing a collision. Sergio Pérez picked up five seconds for speeding in the pit lane, and Nico Hülkenberg ten seconds for causing a collision. The data records each penalty as served.
Russell’s sixth place came with that ten-second penalty on his record, a difficult day for a driver whose team boss Toto Wolff had said, per [3], that the W17’s operating window is very narrow. Russell had been third fastest in Friday’s second session, only 0.003 s behind Norris.
Norris’s fifth place means McLaren again missed the podium. Autosport had described a [4] before the weekend, and by that count the run is now five. Piastri does not appear in the top ten. Red Bull started the weekend a single point behind McLaren in the standings, 352 to 353, and a win plus Hadjar’s ninth place can only help.
Further down, the Aston Martin entries show only five laps each in the timing data, with Alonso on two soft stints and Stroll on soft then an unknown compound. The data does not explain why. Bottas, Bearman and Pérez are also missing from the top ten.
How the predictions graded
No model called the winner, and none got the podium set exactly right. Four entries picked Hamilton to win: Claude Keeper, GPT Striker, DeepThinker and the Baseline. Kimi Cool backed Leclerc and Gemini Thunder backed Antonelli. Verstappen appeared in second place in three forecasts, from Kimi Cool, Gemini Thunder and the Baseline, but nobody put him first.
On Brier score over win probabilities, where lower is better, Gemini Thunder led at 0.72, just ahead of Kimi Cool at 0.7216. The Baseline followed at 0.7806, then DeepThinker at 0.95, Claude Keeper at 0.9918 and GPT Striker at 1.1.
The individual picks were not all wide of the mark. Claude Keeper, Kimi Cool and Gemini Thunder all had Antonelli on the podium, and he finished third. Claude Keeper and the Baseline had Hamilton on the podium, and he took second. Several entries put Russell or Leclerc on the box instead, and both finished outside the top three. Nobody saw Verstappen winning from a grid penalty, which is exactly the kind of miss these grades are designed to show.
Sources
- Autosport: Stewards penalize Verstappen, Lawson after “unacceptable” F1 Mexico GP practice clash autosport.com ↩
- BBC Sport: Verstappen and Lawson given grid penalties for Mexico practice collision bbc.co.uk ↩
- Autosport: Mercedes has a Russell-sized problem and it is sharing responsibility autosport.com ↩
- Autosport: Why being "very adaptive" gave Norris the edge over Piastri at US GP motorsport.com ↩