Prime Tire Newsletter | This is The Athletic’s F1 newsletter. Sign up here to receive Prime Tire directly in your inbox twice a week during the season and weekly in the offseason.Welcome back to Prime Tire, where I regret to inform you this is my last edition of the newsletter.For four weeks, while I’m on World Cup duty for The Athletic. Got your hopes up, didn’t I!Anyway, I’m Patrick, and Madeline Coleman will be along shortly. Let’s dive in.This Just In: Antonelli is very fastKimi Antonelli won another grand prix this weekend. I came across a post about it from theScore’s F1 writer Daniel Valente that got me thinking …That’s obviously wild. But how much wilder can we get? I dove into some numbers.Across the six races so far (Australia, China, Japan, Miami, Canada and Monaco), Antonelli accounts for exactly 63 percent of all top-five fastest laps.But wait, there’s more!Across the 364 valid flying laps recorded so far in 2026, Antonelli posted the fastest time on 161 of them, meaning Antonelli was the fastest driver on 44 percent of the laps so far this season.The other fastest drivers? Well, just take a look at the top five …1. Antonelli: 44 percent2. George Russell: 14.84 percent3. Lewis Hamilton: 9.34 percentT4. Charles Leclerc: 6.87 percentT4. Lando Norris: 6.87 percentWhy does this matter? Well, because lap time percentage isn’t just a fun party-trick stat. It’s one of the better signals we have for separating the driver from the car. And Antonelli is faster than his own teammate (Russell) on roughly three out of every four Mercedes-led laps, across six different tracks, in different conditions. No wonder it looks like his rivals are out of answers already.Antonelli’s 66-point lead, five wins in six rounds and the fastest lap on 44 percent of all flying laps this season make a compelling case that this is one of the greatest campaigns in modern F1 history, and that the car isn’t doing all the work.Trending Down: Russell’s pace problem is realRussell said he is “bamboozled” by his sudden drop in form. (Resisting the urge to go on a tangent about how much I love the word “bamboozled.”) He’s right — his raw speed has taken an undeniable hit as the season has progressed.We can look at this by tracking his percentage of absolute fastest laps on track and his deficit to the ultimate pace-setter from race to race, thanks to the lap-by-lap analysis published by the FIA.At the start of the season, Russell was a constant threat to be the fastest driver on any given lap. By the time Miami rolled around, that presence began to vanish:Russell went from trading fastest times with Antonelli on nearly half the laps in China to barely registering a single fastest lap in Miami and Monaco.