Leclerc won the British Grand Prix from second on the grid, 0.427 s ahead of Russell, with Hamilton third. That margin is not a racing margin: the last five laps ran behind the Safety Car, and the field crossed the line in a queue. The race was settled long before that, in the ten laps between Leclerc's first stop and Antonelli's, and then on lap 41, when Antonelli's chase ended in the pit lane. Leclerc led 42 of the 52 laps.
Race trace, full race: every driver's position, lap by lap.
Pole for Antonelli, the lead for Leclerc
Antonelli had won the Saturday sprint from second on the grid, 2.745 s ahead of Hamilton, and then took pole with 1:28.111, 0.175 s quicker than Leclerc. On Sunday, Leclerc was ahead within the first lap and Antonelli fell to third behind Hamilton. Hamilton was given a five-second penalty for moving before the start signal. Antonelli passed him on lap 11, but by then Leclerc was 4.3 s up the road. For the next fourteen laps the gap barely moved: 4.4 s after lap 16, 3.0 s after lap 24.
Ten laps apart
Leclerc stopped at the end of lap 25 and swapped his mediums for hards. Antonelli stayed out and led until lap 35. The comparison is clean because their pit-lane times were nearly identical: 28.4 s for Leclerc, 28.9 s for Antonelli. The difference came on the track. Leclerc's new hards ran 1:32.95 to 1:33.43 on laps 27 to 34; Antonelli's mediums, by then more than 26 laps old, ran 1:33.45 to 1:33.77. A gap of 15.5 s in Antonelli's favour after lap 27 had shrunk to 13.0 s when he came in. Leclerc had been about 3.0 s ahead before his own stop. When both had stopped, he was 7.0 s ahead.
The chase that stopped on lap 41
On new hards Antonelli was the fastest car on the track. Lap 37 was a 1:31.777, the fastest lap of the race and 1.7 s quicker than Leclerc's lap. His laps 38 and 40 were 1.2 s quicker again. A brief Virtual Safety Car on lap 39 did not change the picture, and after lap 40 the gap was down to 3.7 s, with twelve laps still to go. Whether he would have caught Leclerc is a question the timing cannot answer, because he came into the pits at the end of lap 41. That stop took 41.2 s in the pit lane, against 28.9 s for his first, and dropped him from second to sixth. He was back in two laps later for 33.7 s, and fell to tenth. Our tyre feed shows no new set at that second stop, so we do not say what was fitted. His lap 43 was then deleted for track limits, and a later five-second penalty for track limits turned ninth place on the road into fifteenth.
A 20-second lead and a Safety Car that stayed out
With Antonelli gone, Leclerc led Hamilton by 20.2 s after lap 47. Verstappen was third when he stopped on track near the end of that lap, and the Safety Car was deployed seconds later, with marshals at Turn 15. Leclerc, Hamilton and Norris all stopped under it for softs. Russell did not. He had fitted a set of mediums on lap 34 and ran the last 18 laps on them, and staying out moved him from third to second. On lap 51 race control called the Safety Car in and then deployed it again seconds later. It was still out on the final lap. The order at the front did not change over the last four laps, and Russell finished 0.427 s behind Leclerc, Hamilton 0.772 s behind him.
Further back
Hamilton served his false-start penalty at his first stop on lap 23. It cost him time in the pit lane, 34.9 s against 28.7 s at his second, and it dropped him to sixth before he climbed back to second, but it did not cost him the podium. Colapinto came from 19th on the grid to ninth and Gasly from 15th to tenth. Piastri, eighth on the grid, came into the pits at the end of lap 2, spent 40.6 s in the pit lane and rejoined 21st; he finished eleventh. Verstappen, Albon and Hülkenberg did not finish.
What decided it
Two things, one after the other. The first was the timing of the first stop: by going ten laps earlier on to the hard, Leclerc turned a 3 s deficit to the leader into a 7 s lead. The second was lap 41. Antonelli had the fastest car in the closing stint and was taking more than a second a lap, but he spent most of the next three laps in the pit lane. Our data shows how long those stops took, not why. By the time the Safety Car came out, nobody was close enough to make it count. It is Leclerc's first win at Silverstone.