Antonelli won the Monaco Grand Prix from pole, 6.271 s ahead of Hamilton, with Hadjar third. He was in front at the end of every one of the 78 laps. For 59 of them that was simple: by lap 59 he was almost half a minute clear. Then came two Safety Cars, a red flag of about 37 minutes and a standing restart with eight laps to go, and the race he had already built had to be won a second time. Six cars retired.
Race trace, full race: every driver's position, lap by lap.
The front row lost half of itself
Antonelli took pole in 1:12.051, 0.043 s faster than Verstappen. Verstappen did not complete a lap. A double yellow came out a few seconds after the start, and his name is in the classification as retired with no laps done. Our data shows when his race ended, not why. That left Hamilton, third on the grid, in second place, and at Monaco a place won at the start usually stays won: from lap 2 to lap 27 the top four ran in the same order, Antonelli, Hamilton, Leclerc, Hadjar.
Half a minute in hand
Antonelli's lead over Hamilton was 1.8 s after lap 1 and about 11 s after lap 27. Hamilton made his first stop on lap 28. Leclerc stopped on lap 35 and Antonelli on lap 37. He came back out about 12 s ahead of Hamilton and kept pulling away: about 29 s by the end of lap 59, roughly eight-tenths of a second a lap over the preceding twenty laps. These gaps are from line-crossing times in our timing stream and are approximate, but the size of the lead is not in doubt. Hamilton and Leclerc, second and third, were within 3 s of each other and both nearly half a minute behind. The race looked settled.
Lap 60 to lap 70: the lead disappears
The Safety Car came out on lap 60. Race control sent the whole field through the pit lane on lap 61, and when the Safety Car came in at the end of lap 65 Hamilton was within half a second of Antonelli at the line. A second Safety Car followed on lap 66, the field was again sent through the pit lane, and on lap 68 the race was red-flagged. Our feed records the Safety Cars and the red flag but not their causes, so we leave those open. Leclerc's timing stops after 64 laps; he was classified as retired. The suspension lasted about 37 minutes. Race control set the resumption order as Antonelli, Hamilton, Hadjar, Russell and Gasly, and after the field had run behind the Safety Car again, the race restarted from a standing start at the end of lap 70, with eight laps left.
Eight laps
Antonelli kept the lead at the restart and was 1.4 s ahead of Hamilton after the first racing lap. From then he was faster on almost every lap. On laps 73 to 77 he lapped in 1:14.585, 1:13.958, 1:14.008, 1:13.481 and 1:13.728; those were the five fastest laps of the race. The best by anyone else was Hamilton's 1:14.643, 1.162 s slower than Antonelli's best. The 1:13.481 on lap 76 was the race's fastest lap, 0.572 s off the circuit's lap record of 1:12.909. The gap at the flag was 6.271 s. Hamilton finished second, one place up on his grid slot.
A podium settled after the flag
Hadjar lost two places in the first seconds of the restart, to Russell and Gasly, and the order behind Hamilton was not settled until the penalties were applied. Russell was third on the road after lap 71, but he had a drive-through penalty to serve for not serving an earlier 5 s penalty correctly. He took it after the restart and was classified 13th. Gasly took the chequered flag third on the road, 20.4 s behind Antonelli by our timing, with two 5 s penalties still to be added, both for speeding in the pit lane. They made him seventh, 30.369 s back. Hadjar, fourth across the line, was classified third, 23.394 s behind, with Piastri fourth.
Pit-lane speeding was the theme of the afternoon: six 5 s penalties for it, to Hamilton, Russell, Colapinto, Piastri and twice to Gasly. Further back, Lindblad started 15th and finished sixth, and Alonso came from 21st on the grid to take the last point in tenth.
What decided it
For 59 laps Antonelli won the race the usual way at Monaco: pole, a clean start, and a lead that grew lap after lap. The Safety Cars and the red flag took all of that away and handed him a new race, eight laps long, with Hamilton directly behind him. He won that one too, and he won it with the five fastest laps of the day.