Antonelli closes on the title in Austin as Russell, Alonso and Bearman are left without answers

Wolff admitted afterwards that the team didn't see a step this big from him coming. Russell, in the same car, finished 54 seconds behind him. He called his pace "rubbish", the long and short of it in his words, and had no explanation for why. As The Race put it, a confused Russell "lacked answers" for a pace that "contrasted brutally" with his championship-bound team-mate. When a driver has nothing to offer as a reason, that's usually the real story.

Part of the gap is easy to explain. A penalty parked him behind Piastri for the back half of the race. He had a go at the McLaren, got rebuffed, and that was that. Stuck there, the final margin ended up looking worse than it really was.

But that's the back half of the race. The opening stint had already gone wrong before any of that, and this is the part that matters. Verstappen and Leclerc, both early stoppers, had caught him and re-passed him before he'd even pitted. There'd have been some dirty air (the turbulent wake a car leaves behind it, which costs the car following grip), but The Race reckons nowhere near enough to explain it, and we agree. Traffic doesn't explain dropping that far back, and that's the bit Mercedes have to understand.

On the hard tyre, Russell reckons he matched Antonelli's pace for a handful of laps, then caught Piastri and couldn't get by. Even those laps, by The Race's reckoning, were still slightly slower than the sister car. Closer, but still behind. "Six good laps, 50 bad laps" was how he summed it up himself, and that's as blunt as a driver gets.

The Race lumps him in with Piastri as the chief strugglers with this generation of car, both beaten by their team-mates this weekend. Its view is that the way the pair drive these cars and engines is part of it. That's a harsh contrast, and Antonelli being that good made it harsher.

Our take is simple. The result we can explain. The pace we can't, and neither can he, and Antonelli being superb doesn't make the other car slow. Mercedes have to understand that opening stint before Mexico City, and it isn't about the overtake. So in Mexico we're watching Russell's opening stint, not where he finishes.

Formula 1 has called the title, and it's right to

While Mercedes work on that, the sport itself has quietly moved on to a different fight. Formula 1's own site has started selling the battle for second. Its headline reads "Second place battle intensifies as Antonelli nears title".

Read that again, because it's the sport conceding its own championship is close to done. Headlines like that don't appear while a championship is live. To be fair, that's the honest call. We'd rather they said it plainly than kept selling a fight that's over. Better to admit it than keep pretending.

Which raises a fair question. If the title's as good as decided, is second still worth caring about? Our answer is yes, every lap of it.

It's the biggest fight left on the table, and it decides who leaves this season closest to the champion. Whoever takes it gets to call themselves the nearest thing to a challenger this year had, and that's not nothing. It also tells you who the chasing pack's best driver was when it mattered. With the top spot gone, it's the only prize left with any drama in it. That's the one we're watching from here, more than the title.

Alonso's verdict on the back of the grid rests on one corner

At the other end of the grid, Austin's opening laps did a lot of damage. Alonso rated a third of the grid very low after one tangle, with Albon the example.

"Albon forgot that corner 11 was there and he had to turn left," Alonso said after the race. "But we need to get better and start a little bit higher up because I think the bottom third of the grid, the quality of the drivers is very low at the moment."

That's a big claim, and it rests on one corner. On lap one at Turn 11, Alexander Albon dived to the inside of Alonso while Ocon's Haas sat on the Aston Martin's outside. Too many cars into not enough corner. There was contact, and both cars paid for it. The Williams damaged its front wing. The Aston lost its left-hand bargeboard, and Alonso's own description was that he drove the rest of it with half a car. He didn't know how they kept going and stayed semi-competitive with that much missing.

He finished a lapped 16th, four places lower than he started. The stewards didn't even open an investigation. No investigation, no penalty, nothing.

Albon sees it differently. "I just thought it was lap one, I felt like there was a car on his right side at the time, maybe I'm wrong, I need to have a look," he said. "But I was on the inside for most of the corner and then it eventually tightened up as it always does in that corner. I tried to get out the way, I was completely on the inside kerb. There was a point when I realised he didn't see me or he was pinched by the car on his right-hand side."

That's a lap-one squeeze, not grounds to write off the drivers around him. Alonso's quotes weren't put to Albon directly, and the bit he did talk about, their later fight, he enjoyed. They did fight again late on, after a slow stop where the Aston's front wing was changed, and the Aston got back past. "I thought that was quite fun, but maybe he doesn't agree, I'm sure," Albon said.

Then there's the pace claim. "I think it was the best race of the year by far for us in terms of competitiveness," Alonso said. "We got a lot of damage on lap one with Albon incident, despite that the car was still competitive. So I think we today we could have had maybe a P9, P10 on merit."

We'll take that at face value. We don't doubt it. But a good car ruined on lap one is still a lap-one incident, which is a different thing from a quality problem. The damage was real and the afternoon was rough, but rough is not the same as evidence.

Alonso already had the better answer, and it was his own: Aston need to get better and start higher up, because the back always carries this risk. Start further up and the problem goes away. The quality line was the wrong call.

Bearman's own words make the stewards' case

That wasn't the only squeeze at Austin that ended in an argument. The next one came a lap later and cost more. Oliver Bearman couldn't disappear, and that's exactly why he got 10 seconds. "I couldn't disappear" is his phrase, not ours.

Bearman said he was "pretty shocked" by the 10-second penalty for his collision with Pierre Gasly, and called it "crazy". That's a fair reaction from a driver whose race was going well up to then.

He gained two places on the opening lap, so the car was clearly going forward and he'd shown the pace to pass people. On the next lap he went for the inside of 10th-placed Gasly at Turn 13. The gap started disappearing. The room was running out, and that's the moment the whole thing turned. So he put two wheels on the yellow inside kerb to get through.

That's the giveaway. Not the contact, the kerb. A move is only a move if the car on the outside has to leave you room. When the gap's shutting and your way through is the kerb, you were never properly alongside. You're committed and hoping the other car blinks, and Gasly didn't owe him space for that.

Being there isn't the same as being entitled to be there. If the only way to avoid contact was to vanish, the move was already too late before he reached the kerb. He wasn't there, he was arriving. His own explanation hands the stewards their case. They didn't need to find anything, he found it for them.

He's allowed to be annoyed, and honestly we like that he's going for gaps. But a lunge that needs the kerb isn't a racing move, and crazy is the wrong word for the penalty. The stewards saw that, and so, in his own way, did he. Right penalty, and he's the one who proved it. It's a shame, because his start was good and the car had something in it.

One weekend, two stories

Pull it together and Austin was one weekend with two stories. At the front, a title all but settled and a Mercedes driver with no answer for his own pace. Antonelli being superb made Russell's afternoon look worse, but it didn't make his car slow.

At the back, drivers explained away contact in ways that didn't hold: Alonso by grading the grid, Bearman by blaming the stewards. Heading to Mexico City, the two things worth watching are Russell's opening stint and the fight for second.