There are comeback drives, and then there are comeback drives that make you wonder whether someone forgot to tell the guy in 19th that Formula 1 races are supposed to be difficult.
Kimi Antonelli apparently received no such memo.
The 19-year-old Italian went from 19th on the grid to victory in Sunday’s Italian Grand Prix at Monza, producing one of the most spectacular drives of the 2026 Formula 1 season and becoming the first Italian driver to win his home Grand Prix since Ludovico Scarfiotti did it in 1966.
And because merely winning from 19th apparently wasn’t dramatic enough, Antonelli had to beat his Mercedes teammate and championship rival George Russell to do it.
He also had to pass Max Verstappen.
And Lando Norris.
And Oscar Piastri.
And Lewis Hamilton.
Basically, Antonelli spent Sunday afternoon treating the Formula 1 field like a particularly aggressive game of Frogger.
When the race began, it was Pierre Gasly who looked like the man destined to enjoy the Italian sunshine. The Alpine driver had taken his first career pole position and made a clean getaway, leading Russell and the rest of the field into Monza’s first chicane.
Antonelli, meanwhile, had an awful lot of work to do.
An engine penalty had dumped him to 19th on the grid, but he immediately began carving through the field. By the time the opening laps were completed, he was already into 12th.
Then everything went properly sideways.
On the second lap, Charles Leclerc lost control of his Ferrari exiting the Curva Alboreto and slammed into the barriers. Leclerc escaped unharmed, but the damage to the barriers was significant enough to bring out the red flag.
At the stoppage, Russell led Gasly and Verstappen. Antonelli was already seven places higher than where he had started.
And he was nowhere near finished.
Russell took command again after the restart, while Verstappen quickly reclaimed third after Franco Colapinto briefly jumped ahead. Gasly, meanwhile, discovered the unpleasant truth about Formula 1: qualifying pace and race pace are not necessarily on speaking terms.
Verstappen passed him. Hamilton got by. Piastri got by.
Then Antonelli arrived.
The Mercedes driver was suddenly slicing through the leading group with the sort of urgency normally associated with someone who has just discovered his flight leaves in five minutes and he’s on the other side of the terminal.
He passed Piastri and Hamilton, then dispatched Verstappen.
On Lap 18, just 18 laps after restarting from 19th, Antonelli swept past Russell into the first chicane.
He was leading his home Grand Prix.
Monza had officially gone bonkers.
What followed was a superb battle between the two Mercedes drivers. Russell and Antonelli traded positions repeatedly, with Verstappen lurking close enough behind to make every mistake potentially expensive.
Then came the strategic curveball.
When Lance Stroll stopped with a hydraulics problem, Formula 1’s Virtual Safety Car appeared and teams were suddenly handed the sort of tactical puzzle that can make perfectly intelligent engineers behave like people arguing over the last slice of pizza.
Antonelli and Verstappen came in for fresh tires.
Russell stayed out.
That decision put Russell into the lead, but it also left him trying to finish the race on increasingly tired hard tires while Antonelli had a fresh set of mediums and a very obvious target.
Antonelli had to work his way through traffic again, passing Hamilton after the Ferrari driver made a mistake at the first chicane and then getting by Piastri.
With 16 laps remaining, Antonelli was second.
And Russell was in trouble.
The Mercedes driver’s advantage began evaporating as the older tires surrendered grip. Antonelli closed rapidly, and by the time five laps remained, the battle for victory was no longer theoretical.
It was happening.
Antonelli made his first serious attempt on Lap 49 at the first chicane. He drew alongside Russell but ran wide on the exit and bounced through the gravel.
For a moment, it looked as though the rookie had thrown away his best opportunity.
He hadn’t.
Antonelli regrouped, came roaring back and attacked again on the following lap. This time, he made the move between Lesmo 2 and the Ascari chicane, taking the lead decisively.
Russell had nothing left.
Antonelli pulled away over the final laps and crossed the finish line 3.857 seconds ahead of his teammate.
The boy from Bologna had won at Monza.
From 19th.
In front of the Tifosi.
In a Mercedes.
It was the second-lowest starting position from which anyone has ever won a Formula 1 Grand Prix.
“Unbelievable, I’m so happy and I could never have imagined to be here today but we managed to pull it off and I’m really happy,” Antonelli said immediately after climbing from the car. “It’s a dream coming true.”
It was more than a dream. It was a statement.
“After the second restart I was up there and I knew I could have a shot for the win,” Antonelli said. “Definitely I believed in it, especially when I was behind George but it was really difficult because it was really difficult to break away with the tow being so strong.”
The decisive moment, he said, came with the tire strategy.
“At the end, we pitted and he [Russell] stayed out and he struggled a bit with his tires at the end. With fresher tires I was able to increase the pace and managed to win it.”
Russell could only admire the performance.
“Huge congratulations to Kimi of course – an incredible result from him,” Russell said. “When I looked on the leaderboard at the beginning and I saw he was already in P5, P4, I knew straight away he was going to be in the mix. Huge congrats to him.”
Russell admitted the tire strategy ultimately worked against him.
“It was looking like a pretty strong race from us and then I was just struggling with the tires towards the end – obviously we did the whole race on that one hard tire,” he said.
Asked whether Mercedes had discussed bringing him into the pits when the Virtual Safety Car appeared, Russell admitted the decision had been a gamble.
“To be honest I thought we were both going to stay out. I was surprised to see him pit,” he said. “I think at the end it was a roll of the dice both ways. In the moment, the team wouldn’t have known which strategy was better. It made sense to split the cars but, in the end, Kimi had great pace, and there we are.”
Max Verstappen finished third for Red Bull after his own aggressive afternoon, while Norris narrowly beat Piastri in a McLaren civil war that ended with just 0.197 seconds separating the teammates.
Hamilton recovered from his difficult opening lap to finish sixth, followed by Gasly in seventh.
Arvid Lindblad continued his impressive form with eighth, Colapinto recovered from his earlier off-track adventure to finish ninth and Yuki Tsunoda completed the points in 10th.
Gabriel Bortoleto and Nico Hulkenberg brought their Audi machines home 11th and 12th, with Hulkenberg involved in a Turn 4 fight with Liam Lawson that attracted the attention of the stewards. Carlos Sainz was 13th, followed by Lawson, Ollie Bearman, Esteban Ocon, Alex Albon, Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas.
It was a miserable afternoon for Aston Martin, with Fernando Alonso retiring with suspected car damage and Lance Stroll stopping with his hydraulics problem.
Leclerc, of course, was already watching from the sidelines.
But none of that mattered to Antonelli.
On a day when Ferrari’s home crowd had every reason to be miserable, Mercedes’ 20-year-old star gave Italy something it had been waiting 60 years to see.
An Italian winning at Monza.
Formula 1 doesn’t get much better than that.
And now it gets another new track.
The championship moves immediately to Madrid for the Spanish Grand Prix, scheduled for September 11-13 at the new Madring circuit.
FORMULA 1 GRAN PREMIO D’ITALIA 2026 – RACE RESULT
Greg was a writer for DriveTribe supporting Amazon's The Grand Tour and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek and a regular contributor to Forbes.
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Greg Engle
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