Kimi Antonelli reveals he deliberately slowed to time the VSC to perfection at Madring
Kimi Antonelli's afternoon looked scrappier than the result suggested, having run wide more than once early on while attacking Lando Norris off the line. "Yeah, it was not easy at all," he admitted, "but yeah, you know, it's great today, the win, but of course, you know, I think Lando deserved it today because he was leading and he was unlucky with the VSC."
What followed was a rare piece of honesty about exactly how that luck had swung his way. "With me, you know, the timing was just about right because Bono told me coming into the last sector that VSC might be coming, so I dropped the pace, I slowed down a little bit on purpose just to try and see if I could get the VSC, you know, just before pit entry and, you know, it went very well for me this time."
There's a neat irony buried in that admission. Peter Bonnington [Bono], the engineer who spent twelve seasons calling the shots for Lewis Hamilton before staying at Mercedes to guide Antonelli through his own rise, while Hamilton moved on to Ferrari.
It was Bonnington's warning, and Antonelli's willingness to back off and gamble on the timing, that turned a Virtual Safety Car triggered by Lance Stroll's stricken Aston Martin into a free pit stop, while Norris, already committed past the pit entry, was left to pay the full cost of his own stop a lap later. Antonelli stayed gracious about it. "But yeah, of course, I think overall Lando deserved the win today, but we'll take it and now we will move forward and we'll try to understand what we can do better in order to, you know, keep it up."
Asked how he was processing another extension of his championship lead, his answer was as level as his driving. "Yeah, I mean, you know, just take it race by race, you know, without trying to, you know, overdo things, just enjoy it as much as possible, you know, keep raising that bar because definitely, you know, McLaren is very quick, Red Bull with Max, they've been very quick and Ferrari was, you know, they were up there. So definitely, you know, it's going to be tough, but yeah, we're just going to try to do our best and try to deliver week in, week out."
It was his eighth win of the season, stretching his advantage to 81 points over team-mate George Russell and 101 over Hamilton in third, with Norris and Max Verstappen further adrift again after a Madrid weekend that, by his own admission, could easily have gone the other way.
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