For Russell, this cannot be an easy moment in his career. A Mercedes protege himself, he has waited eight years for this moment – the best car, with Mercedes.
Last year, he was comfortably the better driver of the two; only rarely did Antonelli get the better of him. So he earned his status as pre-season championship favourite.
The Briton, 28, lived up to that when he won the first race of the season in Australia from pole position, but since then things have gone against him.
A technical problem almost certainly robbed him of pole in China and handed it to Antonelli, who converted it into a maiden win. A safety car intervened to hand the victory in Japan to Antonelli, when without it most likely either McLaren’s Oscar Piastri or Russell would have won.
But there was no doubt about the Miami win. Antonelli put it on pole. Russell was fifth on the grid, behind upgraded cars from the Red Bull, McLaren and Ferrari teams.
Antonelli made a sixth bad start in a row and lost ground. But he stayed calm, fought back, and grabbed the win from McLaren’s Lando Norris over the pit stop period.
Norris initially thought that was all about McLaren making a mistake by letting Mercedes pit first, not wanting to go too early with rain threatening.
But McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said the team still had the margin to stay ahead of Antonelli when they did stop three laps after him, but that a series of events conspired against them.
First, there was the time gained by what Stella called a “huge” first lap out of the pits by Antonelli after his stop. That risked overheating his tyres, which he would have to deal with later, but ensured he was still within striking range of the McLaren.
Then Norris made a couple of errors on his in-lap and had a slow stop. Combine all that, and it was enough to put Antonelli right on Norris’ tail when the McLaren came out of the pits. The Mercedes quickly swept past, and Antonelli held Norris off for the rest of the race.
Russell is keeping things in perspective, recognising there are still 18 races to go, and a lot can happen.
“Clearly he’s in a very good place at the moment and momentum is with him,” Russell said. “But, having got enough experience myself in championships I’ve won and how momentum swings throughout the year, and looking at the championship last year, to be honest, I’m not even considering it.
“It’s just that I want to get back on to the top step of the podium. The first three races, I had the performance to do that, but this weekend I absolutely did not have the performance to do that.
“So, I could be standing here now with three very different results in previous races, with this one being a bit of a one-off, but obviously things worked out differently in Japan and China, but that’s Formula 1 sometimes.”
Russell admitted that the “pace was really, really poor on my side”, and that he has never gelled with the Miami circuit and its low-grip surface and slow corners.
But Hill said: “You can’t have that, you can’t have a track that you don’t gel with. You’ve got to be good across everything. George now has to regroup, has to look at where he is at and what the new paradigm is.”
