Kimi Antonelli celebrates his win earlier this season in Shanghai, China.
Getty Images
A common complaint about Formula One is the inevitability factor. Races are often decided on the first couple of turns or at least by the time cars have gone two-thirds of the way through. Season championships may also be decided early in the season.
But the inevitable is sometimes malleable. Two years ago at this time, most Formula One fans figured they’d be spending 2026 watching Max Verstappen’s glum march to a sixth straight championship.
Instead, as the circuit resumes after a summer break with the Dutch Grand Prix, everyone’s wondering if Kimi Antonelli’s lead is insurmountable. Is it a foregone conclusion that the Italian phenom, who turns 20 years old next week, will take what may be the first of many championships?
The calendar would give rival drivers some hope. Due to some schedule shuffling after the outbreak of the war in Iran, the season isn’t quite halfway over. The Dutch GP will be the 12th of 23 races on the schedule.
And since the current scoring system (25 points for first place, then 18, 15, 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2 and 1) went into effect in 2010, seven of 16 seasons have seen a change in leadership in the second half of the season.
- 2010: At the halfway point, Lewis Hamilton led with 145 points, followed by Jenson Button (133), Mark Webber (128) and Sebastian Vettel (121). The lead changed several times over the next several weeks. With one race left, Fernando Alonso (246) had surged into the lead over Webber (238), Vettel (231) and Hamilton (222). Vettel won the finale to leap past Alonso, whose Ferrari team made a tactical error, and Webber, who finished seventh and eighth.
- 2012: Alonso (154) led Webber (120) and Vettel (110) after 10 of 20 races. After two more races, Alonso led Hamilton by 37 points, with Kimi Räikkönen one point further back and Vettel another point back. Vettel won four straight to move past Alonso, then held on in a championship battle that went down to the final race.
- 2014: Nico Rosberg led by 29 with seven races left, but Hamilton won five straight races to take a lead that he held through a rare double-points season finale.
- 2016: Rosberg and Hamilton had a thrilling season-long duel, with Hamilton leading by six halfway through and Rosberg winning by five.
- 2017: Vettel led Hamilton by one point halfway through, but Hamilton went on a tear and clinched the title with two races remaining.
- 2021: Max Verstappen took his first championship in controversial fashion on the last lap of the season, when he was on fresh tires and was gifted a chance to nestle up to Hamilton on a restart.
- 2025: Lando Norris overtook teammate Oscar Piastri and held off the hard-charging Verstappen to take the title.
The bad news for Antonelli’s rivals and anyone wanting to see a close finish this season: Antonelli’s lead more closely resembles the other nine years, in which Vettel (2011, 2013), Hamilton (2015, 2018, 2019, 2020) and Verstappen (2022, 2023, 2024) ran away from the pack.
Where They Stand
Heading into the race in the Netherlands, Antonelli has 219 points. Hamilton, experiencing a resurgence after four forgettable years, is in second place, but he’s a full 50 points back.
Even worse: No one behind Antonelli is showing anything close to the level of consistency required to make this championship chase interesting. Hamilton has his first win since changing teams last season, but the Ferraris driven by him and fourth-place Charles Leclerc don’t yet seem to be the equal of the Mercedes team of Antonelli and third-place George Russell, who has had some rotten luck this season. Nor can we expect Russell to get substantially faster than his teammate out of the blue, giving fans a teammate-vs.-teammate battle akin to Hamilton vs. Rosberg in the 2010s or Norris vs. Piastri last year.
Defending champion Norris is 91 points back, even after winning the last race in Hungary, while fellow McLaren driver Piastri is seventh after a series of calamities throughout the season.
So the title is Antonelli’s to lose. But losing it isn’t out of the question. Antonelli is still a young driver in just his second Formula One season. He has made a couple of crucial errors in two of his last five races — damaging his car in an ill-advised battle with teammate Russell in Barcelona, then aggressively hopping a curb and again damaging his car at Silverstone in England.
The wild card in the second half is the four-time champion Verstappen. He’s 110 points back after his Red Bull team had an abysmal start to the season. But he has been on the podium in the last two races. Last year, he was 97 points back with 10 races left, and he finished just two points behind Norris. Making up 95 points in 10 races is roughly the equivalent of making up 123 points in 13 races.
How To Watch
Apple TV has live coverage of the Formula One season, including feeds that allow viewers to follow one particular driver or dial into Sky Sports’ coverage, which often features the entertaining “grid walk” in which Martin Brundle chats with people from several teams in between celebrity encounters ranging from the engaging to the hilariously awkward. On Friday, practice starts at 6:30 a.m. Eastern, followed by qualification for the weekend’s sprint race at 10:30 a.m. On Saturday, the sprint race is at 6 a.m., with qualifying for the main race to follow at 10 a.m. The main event is at 9 a.m. Sunday.