Helmut Marko, Red Bull advisor, judged “obvious” that Kimi Antonelli let Lando Norris pass voluntarily at the end of the 2025 Qatar F1 Grand Prix.
The championship leader seemed doomed, after many laps in the Mercedes‘ exhausts, to finish the race in fifth place when, on the penultimate lap, he suddenly took the lead over Antonelli.
The international TV production left doubt for a long time about what had happened by offering a helicopter view of the overtaking which did not tell the whole story of the sequence.
Faced with this situation, the Red Bull clan began to be suspicious, with Gianpiero Lambiase, Max Verstappen‘s engineer – for whom this change of position made him “lose” two points on Norris – then telling his driver on the radio: “I don’t know what happened to Antonelli, Max, it looks like he just slowed down and let Norris pass.”
Antonelli is now helping our main competitors.
However, after the finish, the missing piece of the puzzle arrived when the TV production finally showed Antonelli and Norris’ on-board cameras : the Italian simply missed the exit of turn 10, suffering heavy oversteer which forced him to go off the track and slow down so as not to lose control of his Mercedes. Norris, who came out better, then easily passed.
However, questioned by Motorsport.com on the subject after the race, Helmut Marko launched : “It’s been twice that he has more or less let Lando pass. It was completely obvious. Antonelli is now helping our main competitors. In Austria, he hit [Verstappen] at the back.”
Antonelli: “I just made a mistake”
Kimi Antonelli (Mercedes)
Photo by: Zak Mauger/LAT Images via Getty Images
In fact, during the race, Norris only passed Antonelli once, on lap 56. The Austrian is undoubtedly referring to the only other pass by a McLaren on the Italian at Losail, when Oscar Piastri – armed with less worn tires – caught the Mercedes and threw himself onto the inside at the first corner of lap 30, without much resistance from the Italian.
As for Antonelli, he himself explained: “With the [pneus] hard, I attacked a lot, and in the end I was going to be in the DRS [de Carlos Sainz] but in turn 9 [10 en réalité]I had a big scare and almost crashed, so I went off the track and lost the position to Lando, which was very disappointing.”
“I was pretty comfortable because he was even out of DRS for a few laps, and in dirty air you just can’t overtake. So I felt like I could hold him off, but I just made a mistake.”
With Filip Cleeren and Ronald Vording
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