Kimi Antonelli, the Mercedes driver and leader of the drivers' championship standings in the Formula 1 World Championship, said he felt empty after his winning streak ended, which lasted five consecutive races at the Catalonia Grand Prix in Barcelona on Sunday. The 19-year-old Italian driver, the youngest leader of the championship standings in the history of the sport, withdrew five laps from the end of the race after his car suffered a technical failure while in second place.
Thanks to this malfunction, Ferrari driver Lewis Hamilton was able to win the race and reduce the gap between him and Antonelli in the standings from 66 points to 41 after seven out of 22 rounds.
The young driver said, “I didn’t expect that. Suddenly... the car stopped. And of course, I feel a huge emotional void right now because we are trying to understand what just happened.”
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff said he was “upset” about the Mercedes car's retirement for the second time in the last three races after George Russell retired while leading in Canada last month.
The Austrian said, “We cannot retire regularly and persistently, we lost 25 points in the constructors' championship in Montreal and lost another 18 points today. Reliability, that’s what we need. That’s the number one issue. So nobody is happy about that. We will leave no stone unturned to understand (what happened).” Russell, who failed to score any points in the previous two races, acknowledged benefiting from his teammate’s misfortune by finishing second on Sunday, but he also expressed his concern. He said, “It’s disappointing to see how the race ended for him, and of course for us as a team and as a company... We’ve had some failures recently, so this is a major concern for us.”
Hamilton's victory marked Mercedes's first defeat of the season.