Sepang: Verstappen wins after a ninety-three-minute wait, on intermediates at the start and softs at the restart
Red Bull's first win of 2026, and the first for its own power unit, comes from two tyre calls. Hamilton recovers to the podium, Russell stops late on.
At Sepang the race was due to start on Sunday 4 October at 15:00 local time. It got under way at 16:33, ninety-three minutes later.
The rain came first. The circuit weather station records it for an hour and twenty minutes, until 15:39. Race Control delayed the start and sent the field out on the formation lap behind the safety car; at 15:45 it suspended the procedure.
On that lap some cars were left with no power. Verstappen said on the radio that he could not accelerate, and the Ferrari pit wall told Hamilton it was a software issue. Hamilton says he had to stop on track and restart the car, something he had never done. According to him and to Verstappen, the wait that followed was spent updating the software and loading it into every car.
When things resumed, the Safety Car led the field to the end of the second lap, and then came the standing start. Of the 56 scheduled laps, 55 were run.
At the start nine drivers were on intermediates and thirteen on slicks. Verstappen, from pole, and both Mercedes, driven by George Russell and Kimi Antonelli, started on intermediates. Lewis Hamilton, second on the grid, and Charles Leclerc were on softs.
Verstappen says his start was horrendous: he dropped the clutch and the engine died. At the end of the first lap after the standing start Antonelli led from Russell, with Verstappen third. He took second place back on the sixth lap.
On the ninth lap Valtteri Bottas's Cadillac went off and the race was neutralised. All nine drivers on intermediates pitted to switch to slicks: Verstappen took new softs, both Mercedes mediums.
At the restart, on the thirteenth lap, Verstappen passed Antonelli; behind him Russell did the same. Antonelli says that on the still slippery surface Verstappen knew much better than him how to place the car in the first corners.
From the thirteenth lap to the flag Verstappen led every lap except the forty-fourth. He handed it to Antonelli for his third stop, made under the Virtual Safety Car: it had been called on the forty-third lap for Alex Albon's stopped Williams. The Mercedes pitted a lap later, with the virtual neutralisation still running. Then it became a real Safety Car.
The Safety Car came in on the fifty-first lap. Verstappen kept Antonelli behind over the last four and won by 2.307 s; on the final lap he also set the fastest lap, a 1:38.220.
It is his seventy-second win and his first of the season, and the first for a Red Bull Ford power unit, in its sixteenth race. Verstappen points to the call made before the start as the decisive moment: the intermediates, he says, were the right tyre.
Hamilton says Ferrari made the wrong call at the beginning, and recalls warning the pit wall that the pit lane was still wet; the team thought that after such a long wait the track would dry quickly. At the end of the eighth lap he was eighteenth, 83 seconds behind the leader.
He did not stop under the first Safety Car, kept the softs until the thirty-first lap and finished third, 4.919 s behind Verstappen, with Leclerc fourth after a switch to intermediates in the early laps.
Russell was third when he stopped, during the last Safety Car, after 49 laps. Toto Wolff, Mercedes team principal, says it was a power unit failure. Antonelli, second, takes his championship lead over Russell to 84 points.
Antonelli says second place was the maximum, and that Mercedes does not yet know whether the upgrades brought to Sepang made the car faster or slower: he expects to find out in Singapore, where they race next Sunday.