For the first time since March, the championship has a live question in it, and Monza is about to stress-test both halves of it at once. Lando Norris has won the last two Grands Prix from the last two poles. Andrea Kimi Antonelli - home race, freshly twenty, 59 points clear - is set to start from the back: Toto Wolff has confirmed Mercedes will fit a fifth power unit of the season, one over the allocation, at the circuit where a fresh engine and 200 mph slipstreams make a recovery drive most plausible. The unit has already cost him a retirement at Barcelona and a wounded fifteenth at Silverstone; Mercedes are trading Saturday for the final ten rounds.
The championship
George Russell and Lewis Hamilton are level on 183, Russell ahead on wins - and with the leader at the back of the grid, Sunday is their clearest shot in months at taking real points out of him. Lando Norris is 83 back with ten rounds and two sprints left. The arithmetic still favours Antonelli enormously; the momentum, for the first time all year, does not.
What Monza asks of the 2026 cars
More than any circuit yet. The new power units split their output roughly 50/50 between combustion and electric, and Monza’s long flat-out stretches are exactly where the battery runs dry - “clipping”, the deployment fading before the braking zone, is expected to be the technical story of the weekend. Teams that harvest efficiently through Parabolica and manage the energy map down the straights will find lap time nowhere else offers; the FIA can trim the race energy allowance at venues like this, and every team has been simulating it for months. Verstappen’s pre-season complaint about the concept was aimed at precisely this weekend.
“Being flat-out on the Monza straight and having to lift off the throttle 400 or 500 metres before braking is not the right direction at all.”
Skinny wings, active aero at full stretch, and the year’s biggest test of straight-line efficiency: if the Red Bull-Ford unit really is the class of the field, Monza is where it should finally show.
The storylines
Ferrari mark thirty years since Michael Schumacher’s first win in red - and twenty since his last - with tribute race suits carrying his seven stars. Hamilton arrives level with Russell on 183 and openly warning that Ferrari need more pace; an upgraded engine is built and bench testing, with the call on racing it due during the week. No pressure, then - just Monza.
Hungary and Zandvoort were maximum-downforce tracks; Monza is the opposite extreme, and McLaren themselves call it the true benchmark of whether their second-half surge is real. Verstappen beat Norris here last year; Antonelli starts at the back. The door has never been more open.
Fresh engine, the season’s fastest car, and the calendar’s most overtaking-friendly straights: if you had to pick one venue to serve a back-of-grid penalty, it’s this one. Antonelli’s six wins this year have all come from the front two rows. Sunday shows us something new either way.
Elsewhere: Max Verstappen won here in 2025 by nearly twenty seconds and Red Bull have promised a Monza fightback after the Zandvoort disaster; Isack Hadjar hopes his wrist has healed enough to reclaim the seat Liam Lawson kept warm - though Monza’s high-speed right-handers are no place for a sore left wrist. The forecast is set fair: sunny all weekend, race-day highs around 30°C, no rain expected. Monza itself is safe on the calendar to 2031, with a sprint arriving from 2027 - this is the last September the Temple of Speed hosts a plain old Grand Prix weekend.