RECENT SUNDAY BREAKDOWN · ISSUE 048
The 43-point gap, and what it would take to close it
George Russell took pole at Villeneuve. He led every lap until lap 29. He scored zero points. The championship has been moved by twenty-five, in the wrong direction, in a single afternoon.
Antonelli won the race he was second to the entire time he was in it. That sentence shouldn't be possible, and yet that's the season we're in. Five rounds, four wins, one second. He has scored 131 points. Russell, on the other side of the same garage, has scored 88. The gap between them is 43 points.
Before the weekend, our model gave Russell a 12.4% race-win probability against Antonelli's 28.1%. The model was wrong about which Mercedes would win, but right about the team. Reality narrowed to a single coin-flip on lap 29 and the coin came up Antonelli.
Forty-three points is, in isolation, a manageable number. It's roughly one strong race weekend, if the leader scores nothing. The problem is that Antonelli has not been scoring nothing. He has been scoring twenty-five.
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