Kimi Antonelli takes Miami Grand Prix pole for another expected run in the wet
Saturday afternoon’s Formula 1 Crypto.com Miami Grand Prix qualifying returned Mercedes Kimi Antonelli to a place that’s already familiar to him at 19 — the front of the F1 pack after chasing McLarens for two days.
Antonelli, the championship leader after the first three races, took his third consecutive grand prix pole with an early lap of 1:27.798 that nobody could match during the rest of qualifying’s third round. Though Red Bull’s Max Verstappen’s four-championship resume speaks to his greatness, he’s been such a non-factor the first three races this season, that he made the best run at Antonelli with a 1:27.964 lap brought the unexpected to qualifying.
READ MORE: Sunday’s Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix will start earlier to avoid storms’ worst
“Max and Red Bull is a bit more of a surprise, but they brought a significant upgrade,” said Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, who qualified third. “They’re a great team, and they’ve shown it through the past years. It’s not that we can rely on them staying where they were the first three races. We expected a reaction, but it’s a very impressive reaction.”
Verstappen described his Ford-powered car’s improvement with “Before, nothing really worked. I felt like a total passenger in the car. It could understeer, it could snap on me, it could feel different from one session to the other one without even touching parts. We’re still not where we want to be in terms of understanding everything, but most of it. The car just feels a lot more together.”
Everyone found themselves dealing with winds that Mercedes told Antonelli’s teammate, George Russell, gusted at 25 mph in Turn 11.
“This track today was difficult with the wind, pretty gusty,” Antonelli said. “It’s not an easy track to put everything together.”
Starting on pole for a rainy race in Miami flashes back to last year’s very rainy F1 Sprint race in Miami, Antonelli’s first F1 pole of any kind. Both there and in Saturday’s F1 Sprint race, Antonelli flubbed the start or got dusted off the line, depending on your point of view.
(When asked how that experience might help Sunday, Antonelli started to answer, when he laughed, “OK…No, I got distracted by the DJ. It looked like Shaquille O’Neal for a second.” That’s because “DJ Diesel” spinning for the post-qualifying party at Hard Rock was the former Miami Heat, Orlando Magic, Los Angeles Lakers star.)
While acknowledging he needed to improve his starts, Antonelli said a rain race with cars altered over the last month by new regulations is “Definitely, going to be tricky. Because so many driers haven’t driven the car in the wet. Let’s see if they’re going to move the race earlier to avoid thunderstorms.
“For sure, driving the car for the first time in the wet in the race, is not the most fun and easiest opportunity.”
READ MORE: What if rain or lightning comes to the Formula 1 Miami Grand Prix
Antonelli’s age seems to set him up to make history every other week as Formula 1 history’s youngest this or that. Sunday’s potential history has nothing to do with his age. In the previous four Miami Grand Prixs, nobody who started first has finished first.
Despite qualifying third left Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc declaring the car was even worse than Friday’s F1 Sprint qualifying. After winning Saturday’s F1 Sprint race from pole, McLaren’s Lando Norris qualified fourth and teammate Oscar Piastri qualified seventh, the bottom of F1’s established top tier (Verstappen, the McLaren drivers, the Mercedes drivers, Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton with Ferrari).
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The only interruption in a blessedly uneventful session as far as driver safety was what happened after Audi driver Gabriel Bortoleto said on his radio, “My brakes are on fire.”
And, so, they were. Fire rescue personnel got to Bortoleto’s car and put out the mini-blaze. This delayed the start of the second round of qualifying.
This story was originally published May 2, 2026 at 7:05 PM.
