Mercedes reveals tyre temperature issue behind Antonelli's race-costing Interlagos spin

Kimi Antonelli’s promising Brazilian Grand Prix unravelled on lap 20 at Interlagos when his Mercedes W17 snapped without warning at Turn 1, costing him the lead and ultimately leaving him fifth, 41 seconds behind race winner Lando Norris. Mercedes deputy team principal Bradley Lord has now explained that the culprit was not a mechanical failure but a tyre temperature problem that left both drivers struggling for grip throughout the afternoon.

Antonelli had looked sharp in the opening phase of the wet-dry-wet race, building a comfortable buffer over Norris — who had made a poor start from pole — across the first 15 laps on intermediates. When Norris pitted on lap 17, Mercedes responded a lap later by switching Antonelli to slicks. Almost immediately, the Italian began reporting that the car felt as though it was pulling to one side, a sensation that preceded the rear snapping away from him under braking two laps later.

“No warning, nothing,” Antonelli said after the race. “Already when I put on the softs, I felt something weird with the car. We need to check what happened but, on the other hand, shame because we lost the race there.”

Team-mate George Russell also experienced handling difficulties, surviving a spin at the pit exit before recovering to finish fourth. Lord confirmed that both drivers, and reportedly others in the field, suspected something was physically broken with their cars — but the data told a different story.

“Looking at it, it looked like we were just below the tyre temperature window, sometimes popping into it, but then dropping back out of it in the damp conditions,” Lord explained in the team’s post-race debrief. “That’s what was causing the very strange and unusual car behaviour.”

Lord noted that Antonelli’s spin had also flat-spotted all four tyres, further limiting his pace for the remainder of the race. The broader context of the afternoon was complicated by Sunday’s cooler ambient temperatures, which made it difficult to generate sufficient heat in the soft compound — a problem that appeared to affect multiple teams.

Despite the individual setback for Antonelli, the Brazilian Grand Prix did deliver a landmark result for Mercedes as a whole: the team clinched its first constructors’ championship since 2021. Antonelli himself had already secured the Formula 2 title in Mexico the previous weekend, making Interlagos a bittersweet occasion — a constructors’ triumph overshadowed, for him personally, by a race that slipped away in a matter of seconds.