Race Report: Strong Saturday in Vegas Nets Double Podium Finish

George Russell finished third and Kimi Antonelli fifth in Saturday’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.

Following the race, both McLaren drivers, Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri, were disqualified. This meant that all the other drivers moved up in the classification.

The team thus leaves Las Vegas with a double podium finish: George in P2 and Kimi in P3.

Starting P4 and P17 respectively, both drivers gained places to add a solid 25 points to the team’s overall count in the battle for P2.

George ran a conventional Medium-Hard one-stop; he gained two places on the opening lap but had to cede a position back to the McLaren of Lando Norris in the second stint.

He managed his final stint to bring home his ninth podium of the season.

Kimi meanwhile gained a remarkable 12 places from his P17 starting position with a brilliant drive.

He started on the Soft tyre, switched to the Hard tyre at the end of lap two, and ran that to the end.

He held off Oscar Piastri on the road whilst running P4 but dropped behind the McLaren due to a five-second time penalty picked up for the minutest of movements before the lights went out.

Nevertheless, his pace on significantly older rubber saw him gap both Carlos Sainz and the Ferrari of Charles Leclerc to take P5 on track and P3 in the final classification.

There was success earlier in the day with Mercedes Junior Doriane Pin coming home P5 to claim the F1 Academy title.

Kimi Antonelli

I am very happy with how our race went this evening. It felt like redemption after yesterday where we were knocked out in Q1. It was a shame that we started so far back as without that, we would have definitely been in the hunt right at the front. That said, we need to be pleased with how we performed today and that we were able to add good points for the team after a difficult qualifying.

Halfway through the race I started to see some graining on the front tyres. That made me a little worried that we would be forced into a second stop and lose the positions we had gained. I was focused on talking to the tyres and just asking them to hold on! Eventually the graining cleaned up and I was able to put some strong laps in and limit the damage of our penalty to take P5.

Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director

We'd hoped that both drivers would be able to move forward from our qualifying positions of P4 and P17 so we can be satisfied with P3 and P5 at the end of the race. George didn't quite have the pace to challenge Verstappen or Norris; his tyres started to drop earlier in the first stint and from that point it was more of a case of guaranteeing the podium. He was managing the tyres but even so, still suffered with some graining but when he pushed on the last two laps, the tyres and the pace improved. We'll go through the data to understand if we were actually making matters worse by doing so much management.

Kimi had a great race considering his start position. We knew starting on the Soft and stopping early was a risk but if the Hard tyre held on to the finish, it was our best chance to get him into good points. We took the opportunity presented by the early Virtual Safety Car and from there he drove brilliantly to keep his tyres in good shape, whilst making some critical overtakes.

There are clearly areas we can improve on from this weekend. We had potential to qualify better, and we need to understand why George was suffering from worse degradation than Kimi, but overall it was a good recovery and a useful haul of points in our fight for P2 in the championship.