The championship leader, Kimi Antonelli, is starting from the back of the grid this weekend at Monza. The team decided weeks ago.
He is taking the penalty for a full power unit change. Toto Wolff called it "taking the full thing." The 2026 rules ration each component separately, and Antonelli is at the limit on four of them: internal combustion engines, exhausts, energy stores and control electronics. This will be his fifth ICE, his fourth energy store and his fourth set of control electronics. Each one is a first exceedance of its own component type, so the penalties stack, and once you are more than fifteen places down the FIA simply puts you behind everyone else. It's the back regardless of qualifying.
He ran out of parts because of battery problems. The same issue shut him down late in the race at Barcelona while he was running second, and took Russell out of the lead in Canada. Then Mercedes found a problem with his engine after Silverstone and fitted his fourth ICE at Spa, where he won.
Mercedes has regretted taking a Monza penalty before. Low degradation and low drag mean the tow is smaller here than people assume, and recovering through the field is harder than the long straights suggest. Andrew Shovlin, their head of trackside engineering, says those regrets belong to a different era of car.
Because 2026 changed the maths. Without DRS, Monza is an energy-hungry circuit, and the overtaking that used to depend on a drag reduction now depends on how you manage a battery. You might assume a more complicated system makes passing harder. It doesn't.
There's also precedent. Antonelli is the first Mercedes driver in four years to take a grid penalty at Monza. Hamilton started nineteenth here in 2022 and finished fifth. Bottas did the same in 2021 and finished third. Neither started quite as far back as Antonelli will, but both recovered a long way.
And it's better to take the hit now than later. He is 59 points clear, but he has one win in his last six races, a run that started in Barcelona. If that form holds and the gap closes, a back-of-the-grid start in October costs far more than it does in September.
Russell is next. He still has an ICE, a turbo and an MGU-K in hand, but he is on the limit for the battery and the control electronics, and Mercedes have said a penalty before the end of the season is close to unavoidable.
For Kimi, that 59-point gap is what makes this race survivable.