Kimi Antonelli started Sunday’s Italian Grand Prix in 19th place. By the time the checkered flag came out, he had won the race outright and kept his lead atop the drivers’ standings. For most weekends, that alone would be the story out of Monza.
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This wasn’t most weekends.
Behind Antonelli’s win, the Italian Grand Prix turned into one of the most chaotic afternoons of the season, which included a serious Charles Leclerc crash, a heated radio exchange between Ferrari teammates Lewis Hamilton and Leclerc, and a near-miss between McLaren’s Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri that their own team is now reviewing.
Three separate storylines, all from the same 53 laps.
Leclerc’s Crash Brought Back A Bad Memory
Leclerc went off at 160mph at the Parabolica curve while battling Piastri for fourth place, hitting the wall hard enough to bring out a red flag for roughly 30 minutes. It was the same corner where he crashed six years earlier, not exactly the kind of coincidence a driver wants repeated.
“The neck was OK, it was just the vision a little bit at first. The right eye was not showing me great vision, but now it’s all good, so that’s the thing I was most worried of getting off the car,” Leclerc said afterward, describing what he felt in the moments right after impact.
“Then after that, everything, a bit of pain here and there, which is normal after a crash like this, so nothing more.”
Leclerc said he’d undergo further checks ahead of the Madrid Grand Prix on September 13, and for now, the early read is that he avoided anything serious.
Hamilton’s Frustration Started Before the Crash
The Leclerc drama at Parabolica wasn’t even the first Ferrari moment of the day. From the start, Hamilton and Leclerc ran side-by-side into the second corner, with Hamilton getting forced onto the gravel and dropping backward through the field.
“Charles pushed me off!” Hamilton said over the radio in the moment.
Sky Sports commentator Martin Brundle saw it differently, arguing Hamilton had no business trying to make the move in the first place, and that Leclerc was always going to respond by giving him nowhere to go.
Hamilton has been open about wanting his team to prioritize his title bid, and he now sits third in the standings on 191 points, behind Russell’s 201 and Antonelli’s 267.
A moment like this, whoever was at fault, doesn’t help a driver trying to make that case to his own team.
What Actually Happened Between Norris and Piastri
The third flashpoint came from a different team entirely. Norris and Piastri spent the closing laps fighting for fourth, and on lap 51, Norris was forced onto the grass while trying to pass his teammate, nearly losing the car in the process.
“He pushed me off. That was very dangerous,” Norris said over the radio.
Commentator David Croft called it a moment that “could have been very, very nasty indeed at high speed.”
Norris ultimately completed the pass a lap later to take fourth, and afterward softened his own read on the incident, saying he didn’t think Piastri had done anything wrong. McLaren team principal Andrea Stella confirmed the team would review the moment, while still praising both drivers.
Why bring this up at all if Norris himself walked it back? Because the gap between what a driver says in the heat of the moment and what he says an hour later is often where the real story sits. McLaren choosing to formally review it, rather than wave it off, suggests the team isn’t fully comfortable calling it nothing.