After fending off an early challenge from Ferrari, George Russell cruised to victory in the Australian Grand Prix to lead his Mercedes team to a one-two finish in the Formula One season opener.
While the win seemed to confirm that Mercedes will be the team to beat in 2026, Russell hesitated to put more significance into the win, pointing to the 23 other races on the 2026 calendar.
“We’re race one into a very long season,” said Russell. “Of course I want to fight for race wins week in, week out, but we’re all here now to fight for a World Championship, and that’s what we’ve been working so hard towards. And if we want to do that, we still need to raise our game because there were a lot of areas today that we underachieved, mainly around the race start, having the battery in the right place, and we were lucky not to come worse off.”
Russell started from pole but lost the lead in the first corner to a rocket start by Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, who charged to the front from fourth on the grid. A few spots further behind, the second Ferrari of Lewis Hamilton jumped from seventh to third off the line, confirming that the Scuderia found something extra that gives it a huge advantage on starts.
From there, Russell and Leclerc fought a pitched battle in the early going, swapping the lead lap after lap until Ferrari made a strategic blunder that sealed the win for Russell. The Ferrari pair stayed out under a virtual safety car on Lap 12, to recover Isack Hadjar’s stricken Red Bull, while Mercedes pitted its cars for hard tires, which both used to the end of the race. While that left a Ferrari one-two, both cars pitted later under green and never challenged the Mercedes pair again.
“We had this suspicion that it was going to be a bit of a yo-yo effect, and as soon as one of us got in front it just felt impossible to hold it,” said Russell. “We stopped quite early on when the virtual safety car was deployed and knew we were going to have to manage our tires from there. We were not clear on whether the one- or the two-stop was going to be quickest or which one was the right decision to help us take victory.”
In the end, Russell crossed the line 2.974 seconds ahead of teammate Kimi Antonelli in the 55-lap grand prix, with Leclerc third, 15.519 seconds back. Hamilton and reigning world champion Lando Norris of McLaren rounded out the top-five. Norris’ teammate and hometown favourite Oscar Piastri disappointed many in the crowd when he spun and crashed on a reconnaissance lap before the race start.
For his part, Antonelli experienced an up and down weekend. A crash late in the third practice session saw the team scramble to rebuild the car for qualifying and then a bad start almost ruined his race. The sophomore dropped five spots to seventh, from second on the grid, at Turn 1, before climbing back up the time sheets. After Leclerc pitted on Lap 25, followed by Hamilton three laps later, Antonelli found himself behind leader Russell and stayed there to the finish.
“Of course, the start was a game changer,” said Antonelli. “The start was poor — very poor — and I just lost a lot of places and found myself having to chase, but the car was very strong. It was good fun at the end and the team did an incredible job because I think the result of today was thanks as well mainly to the mechanics for the incredible job they did yesterday after FP3.”
Despite the strategic mistake, Leclerc didn’t feel that the outcome would have been different had he pitted under the virtual safety car.
“I don’t think so, but maybe I’m wrong,” he said. “It looked like Mercedes maybe had a bit more pace than us today, but maybe not as much as what we saw yesterday, so that’s a good thing, but I don’t think we could have won.”
The troubles for the Canadian team continued, with the pair of Aston Martins barely completing the race distance between them, with a total of 64 laps for the team. Canadian Lance Stroll managed to put in 43 laps while Fernando Alonso did 21. Even worse, the fastest laps they set turned out to be underwhelming, with Stroll 3.319 seconds slower than the fastest lap put up by Red Bull Racing’s Max Verstappen, while Alonso’s best effort fell 3.662 seconds short.
“Today was primarily an opportunity to learn more about the AMR26,” said team boss Adrian Newey. “Both cars took the start and, when it became clear we could not compete for points, we chose to pit and check the cars over. The team then asked Fernando to retire the car to preserve components. The data and learnings from this weekend will help us as we go into the next event.”
The next race goes in China this coming Sunday, March 15, but rumblings in the paddock appear to point to the cancellation of both upcoming grands prix in the Persian Gulf due to the ongoing conflict led by the U.S. and Israel in Iran. Bahrain on April 12 and Saudi Arabia on April 19 will likely be cancelled without replacement, leaving only 21 more stops on the 2026 calendar.
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