The Medium Is the Message.
Who Has the Upper Hand in 2026?
Lando Norris won the 2025 championship on one compound above all others. Across 24 races, OpenF1 stint data tells a remarkably consistent story about how McLaren built a title. Eight rounds into 2026, someone else is running the same playbook — and Norris has zero wins.
The Championship That Was Won in the Pits
Lando Norris won the 2025 Formula 1 World Championship by two points from Max Verstappen. The narrative around it leaned on pace, overtakes, and that extraordinary final stretch of the season. But pull the raw OpenF1 stint data across all 24 rounds and a quieter, more methodical story emerges — one built on a single compound and a strategy McLaren deployed with extraordinary consistency.
In 16 of 24 races, Norris opened on the Medium tyre. That is 67% of the season. Across the full year, his dry compound split was 46% Medium, 40% Hard, 14% Soft. The Soft barely featured. The Hard was the closer. And the Medium was the foundation almost everything was built on.
The Medium opener worked brilliantly at circuits where the Hard tyre could then run long without degrading. Seven races delivered the textbook one-stop: Shanghai, Suzuka, Miami, Budapest, Baku, Singapore, Las Vegas. At each of them, Norris built a gap on Mediums in the opening stint, then pitted for Hards and simply managed the gap to the flag. When it clicked, it was clinical.
Selected 2025 race strategies — NorrisBarcelona was the outlier that almost cost Norris everything. A chaotic four-stop strategy — Soft→Medium→Soft→Soft — left him fourth. Verstappen took the win and cut the championship gap. Norris won the title by two points. Barcelona gave Verstappen the breathing room he nearly used to the end.
Eight Rounds In. Antonelli Is Running the 2025 Norris Script.
Eight rounds into 2026, Kimi Antonelli leads the drivers' championship by 66 points with five wins. He has zero retirements. He has converted every pole-or-front-row into a podium or win. Pull his tyre data and the similarities to peak-2025 Norris are striking.
Antonelli's 2026 compound profile: 57% Medium, 39% Hard, 4% Soft. In four of his seven races with dry data, he ran a clean Medium→Hard one-stop: Melbourne, Shanghai, Suzuka, Miami. The same four circuits where Norris's 2025 strategy was at its most decisive. The coincidence of circuits is telling — high-speed, relatively low-deg tracks where the Medium thermal window suits the race opener and Hards simply don't fade over long stints.
| Driver | Melbourne | Shanghai | Suzuka | Sakhir | Jeddah | Miami | Montréal | Monaco |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Norris | MHM | H | MH | — | — | MH | IMM | M |
| Antonelli | MH | MH | MH | — | — | MH | SM | — |
| Piastri | — | M | MH | — | — | MH | IMMS | MHSS |
| Verstappen | HMH | SH | MH | — | — | MH | SM | — |
| Russell | H | MH | MH | — | — | MH | S | — |
Source: OpenF1 API. — indicates data unavailable for that round. Sakhir and Jeddah not yet in OpenF1 2026 dataset.
Verstappen, Russell, Piastri: Three Different Strategies, Three Different Stories
The contrast between the title contenders extends beyond the top two. Red Bull's approach with Verstappen has been notably more varied. He opened Shanghai on Softs — an unusual choice — and ran a Hard→Medium→Hard three-stopper in Melbourne. Of his five races with dry data, only Suzuka and Miami delivered the clean M→H one-stop that Antonelli has made his signature. Verstappen sits seventh in the standings on 43 points, a long way off the pace of 2025.
Russell is an interesting case. His compound data is actually the most Medium-heavy of the group — 60% of his dry stints have been on the yellow-walled tyre. But he retired from Melbourne having barely put a lap in, abandoned Montreal after a single Soft stint, and has scored only once from those five races with strategy data. The compound profile is fine. The results are not.
Piastri at McLaren presents the starkest contrast within a team. His Monaco stint data — Medium→Hard→Soft→Soft→Soft→Soft — is about as far from Antonelli's clinical one-stop template as it gets. Montreal was similarly messy: four compounds, including intermediates. Where Norris built his 2025 title on strategy stability, Piastri's 2026 season has been reactive.
What the Data Actually Says
The tyre numbers alone don't explain a championship lead of 66 points. Antonelli's superiority in 2026 comes from pace, from qualifying, from clean air management. But strategy is the multiplier. A driver who qualifies on the front row and then executes a disciplined M→H one-stop is much harder to beat than one who qualifies on the front row and invites strategic variance.
What makes the Norris comparison genuinely instructive is this: in 2025, McLaren had identified a car that worked best when you got it into clean air on a Medium tyre, looked after it for 20-odd laps, and then covered off the Hard. The 2026 Norris data does not yet show that same clarity. His compound profile is more varied, his one-stop count is lower, and the results reflect it.
The question for the second half of 2026 is whether McLaren find that rhythm again — or whether Antonelli's 2026 Mercedes is simply the car that the strategy fits most naturally, in the same way the 2025 McLaren was built for it.
Norris needs to convert Medium openers into wins — not just points finishes. In 2025, his seven M→H one-stops produced race wins or podiums at every circuit. In 2026, his four races with clean dry data have produced zero wins. The tyre is the same. Something else has changed.