Five Winners, Five Losers: Spanish Grand Prix
The first Spanish Grand Prix at the Madring has faced widespread criticism, but to whom did it give reason to celebrate?
Winner: Kimi Antonelli
Claiming his eighth race victory of the season, Kimi Antonelli will be one of the few who remembers F1’s first taste of the Madring fondly. The young Italian took well to the new track, finishing every session across the weekend in the top two.
Despite qualifying well in second, though, his win on Sunday was almost entirely down to the fortuitous deployment of the virtual safety car (VSC). Antonelli was around half a second a lap slower than race leader Lando Norris over the first 13 laps, but his 6.3 second deficit when the race was neutralised on Lap 14 effectively handed him the victory.
While Norris drove past the pit entry, Antonelli, who had been instructed by race engineer Peter Bonington to back off, was perfectly poised to swoop in for a change of tyres as soon as the VSC was called.
From then on, on a set of hard tyres that barely degraded, the Italian simply had to wait patiently for the long-running Ferrari of Charles Leclerc in front of him to box before he could claim the inevitable race lead and victory.
Antonelli admitted it wasn’t his best race, which started with a scruffy opening lap during which he left the track on two occasions, saying: “There were a few things there that I didn’t do well. I think today it’s good to win, but it doesn’t feel as good because I think Lando deserved a win.”
Had the track allowed overtaking, Norris may well have come through to take victory. However, given the likely 43 points that Antonelli lost due to mechanical failures at Silverstone and Barcelona, the occasional points he has gained back here and there – see Japan, Canada and now Madrid – have a way of balancing themselves out.
Winner: Franco Colapinto
It’s amazing what a stern telling-off from your boss can do to your performance at work.
It is barely over a year ago that Alpine boss Flavio Briatore made a series of scathing remarks about Franco Colapinto before last year’s Dutch Grand Prix.
The Argentine driver had failed to score a point in his first eight races for Alpine after a mid-season swap with Australian Jack Doohan. Briatore said he was “not happy” with Colapinto and said he did not “need to see anything anymore” before deciding on his driver lineup for 2026.
Colapinto went on to record a season-best 11th placed finish at Zandvoort that weekend, and after an arguably surprising contract extension has not looked back this season.
While he has remained largely in the shadow of teammate Pierre Gasly, consecutive top-seven finishes in Miami and Canada in May demonstrated that the man from Buenos Aires is much more at home in the new era of F1.
However, it was at the Madring that Colapinto put together arguably his finest weekend in F1 to date. The 23-year-old deserves bonus credit for achieving such a feat on a brand-new track, which he took to better than most. The Argentine was in the top 10 in all three qualifying sessions, eventually lining up ninth while Gasly languished in 14th.
Despite constant pressure from Racing Bulls’ Arvid Lindblad, and even McLaren’s Oscar Piastri in the closing laps of the race, Colapinto never looked likely to relinquish seventh place and another six world championship points.
It is not often these days that Pierre Gasly – who had put his Alpine on pole at Monza just a week prior – gets so comprehensively outperformed by a teammate. Stellar effort, Franco.
Winner: Arvid Lindblad
With all the talk about no-longer-a-teenager Kimi Antonelli, the youngest man on the grid is not getting the attention he otherwise may have received. Now F1’s only actual teenager, as well as the only rookie in 2026, there has been a lot to like about Arvid Lindblad’s debut campaign.
The Brit reached Q3 for a seventh straight race weekend in Madrid, taking his total of top-10 starts for the season to 10. His pace was all the more impressive considering his huge shunt during FP2 which ruled him out for much of FP3.
On Sunday, Lindblad was one of many to make his solitary pit stop under the VSC on Lap 14, running to the end of the race on a set of hard compound tyres. Despite a brief tussle with the Audi of Nico Hülkenberg on Lap 49 – which he firmly rebutted – the Racing Bulls driver came under little pressure from behind and was well worth his eighth points finish in nine races.
Winner: Liam Lawson
It was not a standout performance from Liam Lawson in Madrid, but the man from New Zealand again proved a solid deputy for Isack Hadjar in the second Red Bull.
Given the difficulties many drivers have faced playing second fiddle to Max Verstappen – including Lawson himself at the start of 2025 – credit is due to the 24-year-old for putting together a tidy, if slightly anonymous, weekend.
In qualifying eighth and finishing sixth – ahead of the McLaren of Oscar Piastri – Lawson achieved the best that could realistically be expected of a Red Bull second driver, not least a Red Bull second driver who was demoted barely 18 months ago for underperforming.
Winner: Nico Hülkenberg
It was a similarly unremarkable weekend for Nico Hülkenberg, but the wily German veteran knows his brief.
Audi have had to scavenge for every available point this season, and Hülkenberg did so once more by capitalising on Lewis Hamilton’s retirement up ahead to sneak into the top 10 for the third time in four races.
He and Gabriel Bortoleto have now amassed 17 points between them, and with a run of five points finishes in the last six Grands Prix will surely soon usurp Haas in the constructors’ standings. The American outfit is four points clear of Audi, but neither Ollie Bearman nor Esteban Ocon has scored a point since the Monaco Grand Prix in June.
Loser: Lando Norris
Lando Norris is arguably driving more like a world champion in 2026 than he did in the season when he actually won the title.
The Brit scored a scintillating pole position on Saturday – his third in four races – and was well on course to convert this one into victory as he did in Hungary and the Netherlands.
Lady Luck was not on his side, though, with the reigning champion just the wrong side of the pit entry when the virtual safety car was thrown on Lap 14.
Hindsight suggests that McLaren should have anticipated the VSC and brought Norris in, but you have to play to the whistle and on a track where overtaking was almost impossible the team did not want to risk surrendering his track position.
As it transpired, Norris was the only driver not to pass the pit entry during the VSC and dived into the pits at the first available opportunity a lap later. Perhaps McLaren should have kept him out a little longer to give him a tyre offset, but given the pace advantage required to pass cars in front, the damage was already done anyway.
Norris knows better than anybody how races can be won and lost in such circumstances, taking his maiden win at the 2024 Miami Grand Prix thanks to a fortuitous safety car which allowed him a cheap pit stop.
However, when even race winner Kimi Antonelli admitted the Brit deserved to win in Madrid, there is not much you can say to put a positive spin on it from the McLaren driver’s perspective.
Loser: The F1 calendar
F1 tried and failed years ago to build a street circuit in a car park – see the short-lived Caesar’s Palace course in the early 1980s – but has doomed itself to repeating the same mistake twice in the last five years, with the Madring following Miami’s addition to the calendar in 2022.
The new circuit in Spain’s capital is built on part car park, part industrial estate and part purpose-built track which is, bafflingly, perhaps the worst bit of the lot.
The showpiece “La Monumental” corner, despite its elevation and banking, fell ironically flat, while the necessity of steering into heavy braking zones killed any chances to overtake even at the end of the longest straights.
The writing was on the wall after the F2 and F3 feature races, which are normally jam-packed full of action. Even they quickly turned into processions. As anticipated, the Grand Prix was similarly lacklustre, although the meagre total of four overtakes we witnessed was way lower than even the most negative prediction. Even this year’s race in Monaco saw 10.
Gabriel Bortoleto stated he “almost fell asleep” during the race, while Max Verstappen observed that drivers could just “drive [the car] in the middle” and hold position.
The four-time champion said circuit designers should consult drivers in the future, which begs the question of what, if any, input race ambassador Carlos Sainz had on the track layout.
World champion Lando Norris said one section of the circuit was “useless” and suggested straight-lining Turns 17-20, but unfortunately did not consider that this would mean cutting through two huge aircraft hangar-type buildings on the IFEMA complex.
To their credit, the race organisers appear already to have taken the litany of negative feedback on board and are considering changes for next year. Given this circuit has a permanent contract until 2035 – at the expense of the likes of Zandvoort – we can only hope.
Loser: The Virtual Safety Car
For decades, Formula One’s safety car would occasionally pop up on track after a big accident, back the field up for a couple of laps and return to the pits once said accident had been cleared. It was a well-established part of racing, about as uncontroversial and ubiquitous as could be.
Similar could be said of the virtual safety car following its introduction in 2015. Occasionally, like the safety car, it may help one driver or hinder another, but ultimately that was just racing.
However, from Abu Dhabi in 2021 to Madrid in 2025, via a few other incidents in between, safety cars and VSC’s have become a source of controversy. Much like VAR in football, decisions made by stewards, say referees, and their impact on the final result have come under increased scrutiny.
This time, the virtual safety car called on Lap 14 following Lance Stroll’s brake failure was deployed in time for everybody from second-placed Kimi Antonelli downwards to make a cheap pit stop, and ended just as race leader Lando Norris came round to the pits the following lap.
It is no exaggeration to say that the VSC and its timing determined the outcome of the race, with Norris losing a handful of positions and ending up third by the chequered flag, with no prospects of overtaking Verstappen or Antonelli just up the road.
While this was perhaps a special circumstance due to the nature of the Madring’s layout, it does raise questions about the inherent “fairness” of the VSC. Its priority is to serve as a safety measure, but it manages to be “fair” by maintaining the gaps between drivers, as opposed to bunching up the field.
Perhaps, the argument goes, that “fairness” should extend to giving every driver equal opportunity to pit. Such discussions are understandable, indeed reasonable, and would perhaps improve the racing spectacle. However, it is sad that something that for so many years served fundamentally as a safety mechanism and was accepted as a part of racing has become such a source of controversy.
Loser: Carlos Sainz
There have frankly been few Grand Prix weekends in recent memory as poor as Carlos Sainz’s showing in Madrid.
The Williams driver had previously spent months helping to prepare for the new-look Spanish Grand Prix as an ambassador of the Madring, and will no doubt be disappointed by the overall reaction from fans and drivers to the event.
However, his own individual performance was one very much to forget, as everything that could go wrong did go wrong – and much of it was of his own making.
The Spaniard initially qualified 17th after another Q1 exit, but was later handed a three-place grid drop for impeding Cadillac’s Valtteri Bottas. As ever with these types of incidents, Sainz was not really at fault, as the FIA’s report concluded that “the team failed to inform [Sainz] about [Bottas] closing in on a flying lap.”
The Spaniard’s home race weekend got no less messy from there, as he was fortunate to avoid a further penalty for a first-corner incident with Yuki Tsunoda at the start of Sunday’s race. He was bang to rights a few laps later, though, when he squeezed Fernando Alonso into the wall at Turn 5 as his compatriot searched for a way through.
By Lap 25, Sainz had also received a black and white flag for exceeding track limits and was on the verge of a third penalty in less than 24 hours. On Lap 43, with the Spaniard more than a minute down on 17th-placed Alonso and terminal damage from his various mishaps, Williams decided to call it a day and brought him in to retire.
Loser: Lewis Hamilton
By now it is well established that Lewis Hamilton was no fan of the ground effect cars used in F1 between 2022 and 2025. One of the biggest signs of his discomfort during that era of regulations was his growing tendency to crash out of sessions completely of his own accord, something which was almost unfathomable during his peak years at Mercedes.
Since the start of this year, though, the seven-time world champion has generally kicked such errors back into touch, so much so that it was a genuine surprise to see him in the barriers in FP3.
The crash didn’t seem to have affected Hamilton’s weekend, as he qualified a solid fourth, ahead of his teammate, and was jostling for the podium positions at the start of the race.
However, the feeling of faint disappointment in practice grew into a serious case of what might have been when his brakes failed after five laps. The Brit had felt he was firmly in contention for a podium, and was indeed running third when his brakes began to give up.
All in all, it is a fairly inconsequential result for Hamilton, who was already realistically out of the title fight and had before this weekend encountered no reliability issues, in stark contrast to many of his rivals at the front of the field.
However, it is still a minimum of 12 points he dropped in the fight for second in the championship – not that he’ll lose much sleep over that.
Edited by Marit Everett
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