Antonelli loses 18 points as engine failure ends Barcelona GP run from second

Kimi Antonelli’s Formula 1 championship lead was slashed from 59 to 41 points after the 19-year-old Mercedes driver suffered an engine failure while running second at the Barcelona Grand Prix on Sunday, retiring with just three laps remaining.

Antonelli had been tracking team-mate Lewis Hamilton — now driving for Ferrari — when his car suddenly cut out at the apex of Turn 5. George Russell inherited the runner-up position, but the result did little to mask a growing reliability crisis at Mercedes: Russell himself had been forced out while leading in Montreal two races ago, with both failures believed to be battery-related.

Despite those concerns, Mercedes’ 2026 campaign has been historically dominant on pace, with the Silver Arrows winning six of the season’s first seven grands prix. Yet back-to-back DNFs have cost the team a combined 43 Constructors’ Championship points in three rounds.

“I didn’t see it coming,” Antonelli said. “All of a sudden I was at the apex of Turn 5 and the car just gave up. Is what it is, it’s part of racing, so there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s a bit of a concern because we’ve had quite several issues so far in the year. It’s a point that we need to work on because we’re losing so many points in this kind of race. But I feel very empty emotionally right now because I’m still trying to solve what has just happened.”

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff was equally blunt about the urgency of fixing the problem, warning that reliability must become the team’s top priority ahead of raw performance gains.

“We can’t DNF cars in a kind of regular, or continued way,” Wolff said. “Losing 25 points in a Constructors’ Championship in Montreal, and losing another 18 points today. In order to finish first, first you have to finish — and reliability, this is what we need to get on top of. That’s number one. So nobody’s happy about that and we will leave no stone unturned to understand.”

Wolff added that the title picture remains wide open: “You see at the end of the road you have 25 points and it’s wide open. That’s why we can’t afford to not finish.”

The Barcelona race was not without drama for Hamilton’s Ferrari side either — team-mate Charles Leclerc lost power steering late in the contest, though he was able to continue. With Hamilton now just 41 points behind Antonelli in the standings, the championship fight has tightened considerably heading into the next round.