Mercedes makes major Kimi Antonelli and George Russell F1 penalty admission

Mercedes believes grid penalties are “inevitable” for Kimi Antonelli and George Russell in the second half of the F1 2026 season.

Both Russell and Antonelli have encountered reliability issues in the first half of the season, leaving them facing grid penalties in the second half.

Mercedes expects Kimi Antonelli and George Russell to face grid penalties

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Kimi Antonelli’s healthy championship points lead could have been even greater than his current 50-point advantage over Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton, with the Italian having suffered a battery issue on his W17 while running in second place at the Spanish Grand Prix.

Within sight of the chequered flag, Antonelli had just overtaken Russell to set off in pursuit of Hamilton’s lead when his car ground to a halt with a problem on the electrical side of the power unit, replicating a very similar issue to what Russell had encountered two races prior in Canada.

In a spirited battle between the two Mercedes drivers, Russell’s afternoon in Montreal came to an end with a battery problem on his car.

In the first season of the new power unit regulations, both Antonelli and Russell are already reaching the limits of what teams are allowed to use in terms of component usage, with prescribed figures for each of the main components.

Given this rate of usage, both drivers are likely to take grid penalties in the second half as components from their pool of parts become unusable, requiring more new parts to be fitted.

“Looking at how many we’ve used in the first half of the season, I think it’s almost inevitable that, at some point, there will be penalties to take,” Mercedes deputy team principal Bradley Lord confirmed in a mid-season review with select media, including PlanetF1.com.

“That’s something that the strategy team and the guys in Brixworth will work to figure out what the optimum route is through the rest of the season.

“But it’s realistically going to be hard to get to the end of the season on the existing hardware that we’ve got.

“We’ve got half a season to do. Kimi’s on his fourth set of bits, so the next ones incur penalties, and George is on his third in the first half of the year.

“So yeah, the probabilities and the maths would suggest that both, at some point, will need to take a form of penalty; size to be determined!”

Lord was referring to the extent of potential penalties, with different grid demotions being applied depending on the components being replaced. For instance, the first time any new component from outside the above allowances is used, a 10-place grid penalty will apply. Any subsequent replacements of the same component would trigger a five-place grid penalty.

But, rather than only introducing elements when absolutely necessary, the team can look at ways to strategically introduce new components at tracks where recovery from lower grid positions is made easier by overtaking possibilities: for instance, fitting new components and taking a resulting grid penalty is more likely at the likes of Monza than it is in Singapore.

Speaking after the Hungarian Grand Prix, team boss Toto Wolff hinted that Mercedes could look to the Italian Grand Prix as an opportunity to fit Antonelli with new components, despite the “special” nature of it being his home race.

“In terms of engine penalties, I still very much hope we don’t need to take it,” he said.

“We need to decide when that is, when we need to take one, and which tracks – there could be one that can be very special for Kimi, but on paper looks like it’s a good place to take an engine penalty.

“So we need to speak to Marco [Antonelli, Kimi’s father] whether we want to take an engine penalty in Monza!”

With the assembled Italian media aghast at Wolff’s suggestion, the Austrian laughed: “We’ll take the pressure off in Monza by starting him from the back! Our reliability has just not been good. Whether we take a penalty or not, we shall see.”

But the outright battery failures haven’t been the only reliability concerns the drivers have faced. In Japan, Russell suffered harvesting and deployment problems, affecting his Safety Car restart at Suzuka. In Belgium, a harvesting issue left him powerless down the Kemmel Straight on the first lap, leading to a collision with Hamilton that knocked Russell out of the race.

A gear issue left him unable to challenge for pole position in qualifying in China, while a water leak in qualifying in Hungary saw him lose his final run, before a poor start, caused by the anti-stall kicking in after wayward throttle behaviour, also wrecked his chances in Budapest.

Russell has borne the brunt of the reliability issues, but Antonelli hasn’t entirely escaped: aside from his Barcelona failure, a wheel shield issue at Silverstone saw him fall down the order and out of the points after being in contention for the win against Charles Leclerc.

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Reliability has been a challenge for Mercedes, Lord explained, but the main area of concern on the power unit has been addressed by way of reliability fixes on the latest-specification power unit introduced in Austria.

“Initially, we had some challenges with the ERS and the whole sort of the SME, the pack, that were closely related issues that were responsible for the failures in Canada and in Barcelona that we believe are, for the most part, resolved with the reliability update we brought to Austria,” he said.

“On the chassis side, it’s been different things: the wheel shield in Silverstone, other elements elsewhere. So yeah, there’s been a number of different elements for us to get on top of.

“But the most frequent one was the concern with the ERS pack, and we hope… a lot of hard work went into the many, many fixes that were contained in that latest spec that we brought in Austria.”

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