Kimi Antonelli’s Mercedes on sprint pole in Miami. What just happened? A few things simultaneously, but most notably the first full flowering of his extraordinary ability in an Formula 1 setting. It won’t be the last.
Taking nothing away from the 18-year-old’s achievement in just his sixth full grand prix weekend, around a track he’d never driven before, but Oscar Piastri lost pole at the final corner of the lap, braking 12 metres later than Antonelli, locking up a front tyre, sliding wide, losing momentum, with the lap time then just bleeding away from there all the way to the finish line.
As Kimi stood on the brakes for that tight final turn from over 210mph, he was trailing Piastri’s McLaren by 0.082s. Which was remarkable enough in itself, for the Mercedes was not effortlessly McLaren-quick around here.
A look at the GPS shows that exactly 0.082s – the same amount of time to the thousandth of a second that Antonelli was trailing Piastri by as they arrived at Turn 17’s braking zone – was made up by the McLaren over the Mercedes through its happy place, the slow sequence formed by Turns 11-16.
As so often before, it seemed like the McLaren’s better control of the rear temperatures – extra valuable on a C5 compound a whole step softer than any tyre run here before – was what was going to be the decider.
In FP1 earlier in the day, McLaren’s gap over Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari and Max Verstappen’s Red Bull was all gained through there.
But we didn’t at that point know how Mercedes might compare - because they didn’t get to run the soft tyre, concentrating as they were on medium-tyre long runs when a red flag for Ollie Bearman's crash brought proceedings to an end.
That also denied soft-tyre laps to Lando Norris and Lewis Hamilton in that session, putting them on the back foot for sprint qualifying.
George Russell was certainly not feeling he was going to be in a position to fight for pole.
He’d headed SQ1, judging well how to bring the tyre temperatures down enough to improve after a cool-down/charge lap, taking full advantage of the improving track. But he just never quite felt in tune with the car.
Significantly, his first flyer in SQ1 had been over 0.3s adrift of Antonelli.
“With these sprint weekends if you can get in the groove early and build on that, you’re in good shape. But I just haven’t felt it today,” Russell reported after qualifying only fifth, 0.309s adrift of his junior team-mate.
Antonelli had driven 70 laps of the track in the simulator, but FP1 was his first time around the place for real. He was generally a couple of tenths off Russell in that session but he had everything together as qualifying began. That couple of hours out of the car were all that was needed for his brain to automatically re-organise and apply the information.
He reckons it was a similar process to that which the two week break afforded after the quick-fire five-races-in-six-weeks start to his first season.
“Every weekend I’m learning massively,” he explained.
“Having that break really helped me gather that information and process it all. Also recharging a bit the batteries. The whole of qualifying I felt like I was able to make a step lap by lap.
"I’m much more aware of how to do consistent warm-up, how to extract more from the tyre.”
With so much of the workload now beginning to go to auto-pilot, his brain economy is clearly improving, leaving much more of it available to just letting his talent flow. That instant groove which had proved so elusive to Russell was right there beneath Antonelli, and his confidence was blossoming by the lap.
“I’m struggling with the rears, I’m losing traction,” he’d radioed to Pete Bonnington after his first flyer in SQ1. “Yes, that snap through Turn 1 overheated the surface,” replied the engineer, calmly. “But you are P1, just ahead of Norris.”
It can be imagined just how different a perspective that lent to the 18-year-old. Like seeing the world in a different light for the first time, playing with the big boys on equal terms.
Ferrari weren’t in the picture, losing around 0.3s in the twists where the rear tyres get hot. Russell, evidently, wasn’t in the picture. It was just Antonelli and the McLarens, while never counting out something special from Max Verstappen and Red Bull. But on this day, around this hot track, there wasn’t enough in the RB20 for Max to conjure his best magic, not even with its new floor.
“We are quick in the high-speed,” Verstappen reported, “but you can see that in the slow-speed we just don’t have the grip and I have a bit of understeer.”
It’s debatable whether his unique SQ3 approach of push-cool-push lost him more time from having older tyres on his second push lap than he gained from getting into the rhythm of the soft tyres (with everyone on the mediums in SQ1 and SQ2).
He found a quarter-second on his final lap, but that was a couple of tenths too slow to be in the McLaren/Antonelli mix and he lines up P4, half-a-tenth up on Russell.
Norris was ultimately just half-a-tenth behind Piastri, good for P3, but that did seem to be the norm whenever they were running at the same time. Piastri consistently took time from him at the beginning of the lap without taking more from the tyres.
The McLaren’s rear tyre temperature management was, as usual, outstanding. But up until that slow turn and squirt T11-16 section, it was no faster than Antonelli.
The Mercedes was running super-low and perhaps it gains more than the others down there when the low fuel load and distance of a sprint race keeps the plank from being a concern.
Piastri was slightly quicker through Turn 1, Antonelli a sniff better through Turn 4 and his beautifully delicate balancing of grip and rotation into Turn 8 got him out onto the back straight slightly better.
But only enough to be level-pegging as they arrived at the McLaren’s golden section. Six quick-succession slow corners later and Piastri had that 0.082s margin over his rival. Just the braking for that final turn after that.
Not too early. Not too late. Judge it just so. Which is exactly what Antonelli did.
