George Russell has conceded that the 2026 Miami Grand Prix slipped through his fingers in unusually painful fashion: by the closing stint, the Mercedes driver was so out of ideas that he stopped racing for position and started using the car as a moving rolling-road, swapping settings on the steering wheel to try to find any kind of usable rhythm.
It is not the way the Briton expected this season — long touted as his best shot at a maiden world title — to begin. Four rounds in, Russell sits 20 points behind 19-year-old teammate Kimi Antonelli in the F1 2026 drivers' championship. Antonelli won in Miami from pole, his third straight Grand Prix victory.
Russell described the race as a "very tough" one in which he was "so lost" on the medium and hard compounds that he treated the final 20 laps as a live development run, rotating through differential, brake bias and torque-deployment maps in search of grip. Mercedes confirmed the swing in pace and feel between the sprint, where he ran competitively, and Sunday's race, where he slid backwards.
Russell pointed to the smooth, hot Miami surface as part of the problem, conceding the layout favoured Antonelli's natural style. He compared the dynamic to the one between Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris at McLaren, where one driver thrives in higher-grip windows and the other prefers the rougher end of the tyre's working range.
That is also why Russell is openly looking forward to Canada. Montreal is a cooler, more abrasive event — the venue where he won last year — and it will also be the first race at which Mercedes brings what is billed as its first major in-season upgrade of 2026. If Antonelli is still on top of him there, with the new parts on the car, Russell knows the framing of the title fight will start to harden against him.
Asked about the rookie next to him, Russell did not duck the obvious: he acknowledged Antonelli is in a good place, that momentum is with him, and that the only sensible response is to ignore the bigger picture and concentrate on getting back to the top step of the podium. Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff went further, calling Antonelli's Miami performance the teenager's best race in Formula 1 so far.
The context cuts both ways. On a different safety-car timing in Japan, Russell would be leading the championship rather than chasing it; the gap to Antonelli is, he insists, a fine-margin reading rather than a structural verdict on his level. But the pattern of a step-behind weekend is becoming difficult to dismiss: bogged-down starts, scrappy restarts, lonely middle stints behind the Ferraris, and now a Sunday in Miami that ended with him essentially using the car as a test mule.
Russell's saving grace is that the Mercedes is, on raw potential, the best car on the grid. Two more wins, his and his alone, will reset the conversation. But the pressure is mounting that the longer he allows Antonelli to stack momentum, the harder it becomes to argue that this is anyone else's title to lose.
Canada — the team's upgrade race, his strongest 2025 venue and the first energy-poor circuit of the year — is now the litmus test for whether Russell's title campaign is recoverable, or whether F1 2026 is quietly slipping toward a generational changing-of-the-guard at Mercedes.
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*Originally published on [News Formula 1](https://newsformula.one/article/russell-miami-experiment-final-laps-antonelli-momentum-2026). Visit for full coverage.*