Spanish Grand Prix: Antonelli wins to extend title lead after Norris’s bad luck

Welcome to our live coverage for the 2026 Spanish Grand Prix, the first time the race has been held at the all-new, purpose-built street circuit, the Madring. The track has developed a reputation in its short life for being a bit of a tricky one. Some have gone so far as to call it a “car killer”? Is it living up to that reputation? Probably, especially if you look at some of the lower formulae that have run on it. It has also increasingly become the case for the Formula One cars, too. The first couple of practice sessions on Friday revealed little to worry about. As the drivers began to push, though, from final practice and qualifying, the mistakes and crashes happened. The biggest so far was Oliver Bearman but also a smaller one for Lewis Hamilton. There will almost certainly be some kind of incident in the race, but whether we see red flags, safety cars and so on remains to be seen. A bigger and perhaps more significant question will be how much overtaking will take place on this track. The drivers are not optimistic. The theory goes that if tyre degradation is high then there will be, because you will have significant pace offsets between worn and fresh tyres. The problem is that the leaders tend not to differ to greatly from one another on strategy these days... Perhaps George Russell, who qualified down in sixth and has little to lose, will be brave and put on a set of hard tyres to start with. Russell has work to do yet again. He was not miles off Antonelli in qualifying when it came to pace, but given how close it was in the top six, finds four cars between himself and the championship leader, who just missed out on pole to McLaren’s Lando Norris. Norris said it was the best lap of his life and seemed to come from nowhere. He improved more than a second from Q2 to Q3 and continues his fine form in 2026. He will start alongside Antonelli with Max Verstappen in third, Lewis Hamilton in fourth and Charles Leclerc in fifth, before Russell.