Italian GP 2026 Radio: Verstappen, Stroll and Every Message
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Italian GP team radio: Mercedes ran the race on the radio
Mercedes swapped their drivers twice, told Russell eleven laps early that Antonelli was forecast to catch him, and then told both cars the same thing one minute apart.
"George has been given the message to build the gap... we will invert."
That is Kimi Antonelli's engineer, about twenty three laps into the Italian Grand Prix, explaining why the driver who had just led his home race for five laps was being moved back behind his team mate.
Antonelli won it anyway, from nineteenth on the grid. The radio is the only place the decisions behind that result are audible, and Mercedes made a lot of them.
Seventy one messages came out of the Monza weekend across five sessions. Here is the race first, because that is where the story is, then qualifying and Friday practice. Every quote is checked against the timing data.
Verstappen finished third, from fifth on the grid, and his messages across the weekend trace a car he was unhappy with until the podium.
FP2, Friday: "Wow, this is really bad." Then "it's like driving on ice. And the brakes aren't working", and later "the car starts jumping a lot more now" on the front axle. His engineer offered to bring him through the pit lane to look at the front wing.
FP3, Saturday: "I need to see the difference again, this is slow", and later "my god, stay on the racing line".
Race, after the flag: "It is a very nice podium. You can see clearly our weaknesses here."
What the Friday complaints look like in the telemetry is further down.
Stroll does not have a radio message of his own from any session of the Italian Grand Prix weekend in the archive. He is in it because of Lando Norris, who called a near miss with him at Turn 1 in second practice "dangerous". The stewards found Stroll had unnecessarily impeded Norris and, citing a potentially dangerous situation because of the high speed difference, gave both Stroll and Aston Martin a formal warning. In the race Stroll started eighteenth and retired.
Mercedes swapped their drivers twice, and said why
Antonelli took the lead on lap 18 and held it for five laps. On lap 23 Russell had it back. Both moves were the team's, and both were explained on the radio.
Around lap 22, with Antonelli leading:
The engineer opens with "we're gonna try and stop yo-yoing. We just have to build that gap to the stop." Antonelli's reply is not a happy one, and the clean part of it is "Do you want me to have to sit behind or what?"
About a lap and a half later, the inversion:
The transcript garbles one word in the middle, but the shape of it is not in doubt: "George has been given the message to build the gap", he cannot do it, "we will invert." Antonelli was P1 on lap 22 and P2 on lap 23. The radio and the timing sheet agree.
That is a team deciding the order of its own cars twenty three laps in, with the slower one in front.
That word, invert, appears ten times in the whole archive. We counted the full vocabulary of team orders across 37,359 messages in F1 team orders, measured.
"I'm giving up at the moment"
Russell led from lap 23 to lap 49. He was not enjoying it.
Two things in one clip. Russell says "I'm giving up at the moment", and the engineer answers with the pit wall's own model: "Currently, Kimi forecast to catch right at end of race."
That went out around lap 39, when Antonelli was still 7.5 seconds behind. Mercedes knew the pass was coming eleven laps before it happened, and told the man who was going to be passed.
The tyre nobody mentioned on television
Around lap 46, with the gap down to about 1.7 seconds, Russell's engineer said this:
"We can see the damage on the tyre and these vibrations picking up every lap. So let's take no risks. Let's just bring this back."
His hards were forty two laps old by then, and damaged. That reframes the last ten laps.
It is worth being precise about what this does and does not excuse. Antonelli averaged 1:24.663 over the final stint against 1:25.192 for Verstappen, who was third and nowhere near him, so he was quicker than the whole field rather than quicker than one damaged car. He also set eight of the ten fastest laps of the race. The tyre explains why the pass itself was clean. It does not explain the fourteen seconds he took back before it.
Both engineers said the same thing, a minute apart
Antonelli went through on lap 50. What happened next is the clearest thing on the whole weekend's radio.
To Russell:
To Antonelli, fifty seven seconds later:
"But we'll just keep it clean, no risk here." And "Just keep it clean, [Kimi]. No risks." One instruction, both cars, inside a minute. Mercedes finished 1-2.
The rest of the race
Hamilton's engineer, around lap 35, on the medium tyre that was supposed to be the clever call: "This tire is terrible." He finished sixth.
McLaren spotted an opening the stewards had not closed yet. Around lap 38, Piastri's engineer: "Russell is under investigation... if we can stay within 10 seconds that could be an opportunity." Race control had noted Russell for a yellow flag infringement on lap 33. The stewards cleared him with no further action on lap 40, and the opportunity closed.
Verstappen, after third: "It is a very nice podium. You can see clearly our weaknesses here."
Hamilton, after sixth, to his own garage: "That one hurts, that one really hurts, but thank you for continuing to show up, mate."
And Antonelli's engineer, once it was done: "Beautiful work there Kimi." Then, a minute later, "Yes, Kimi! What a drive!", with Antonelli answering "Thank you guys, thank you for the support!"
Every race radio message
All twenty five, in order, with the audio:
Qualifying: the sound of a first pole
Gasly beat Russell to pole by 0.060 seconds, his first and Alpine's first. His engineer got the first word in.
Sixteen messages came out of qualifying. Verstappen's assessment of his own car is not printable and Lawson's is not either.
Friday practice
Sixteen messages came out of Friday across both sessions. That is a small number, and normal for a Friday, but several of them explain things the timing screen only hinted at.
Every message from both sessions, placed against the session clock.
Every FP1 radio message
"We need to stop the car." That is not the driver. It is Colton Herta's engineer, 19 minutes into first practice, telling him to park it. The team saw the problem on the telemetry before Herta could do much about it, which is how a hydraulic failure usually gets caught. Seconds later his Cadillac was stationary at Turn 6, the virtual safety car was out, and by 10:49:36 the session was under a red flag.
Seven messages, six of them with usable audio transcribed.
Herta's engineer: "We need to stop the car"
Luke Browning: "I got blocked by Hamilton."
Carlos Sainz: "There's still a bit of overbalance"
Ayumu Iwasa: "Whoa, what's he doing?" (the clip is broken across speakers, so the wording is approximate)
Ayumu Iwasa: "That's so bad"
Yuki Tsunoda: "Well, then what is he doing, then?"
Fernando Alonso's message came through with audio but no usable transcript.
Two things stand out. The call to stop is the red flag itself, and it lines up exactly with race control: the virtual safety car went out at 10:47:51, marshals were sent to Turn 6, and the red flag followed at 10:49:36. The Cadillac was stuck in gear, which is what turned a routine recovery into a stopped session. Herta completed five laps all morning.
Luke Browning's is the one worth pausing on. A rookie in his FP1 outing for Williams, reporting that he was blocked by a seven-time world champion. Hamilton lost four laps to track limits that session, more than anyone, and Browning lost four of his own. Traffic at Monza is the defining problem of a Friday: everyone wants the same clear lap on the same piece of road, and the tow is worth enough that nobody wants to be the car in front.
Every FP2 radio message
Nine messages, eight with transcripts. This is where the session gets interesting.
Lando Norris: "what the hell is this guy doing? It's dangerous"
Max Verstappen: "it's like driving on ice. And the brakes aren't working"
Max Verstappen: "the car starts jumping a lot more now... on the front axle"
Kimi Antonelli: "what an idiot, what an absolute idiot"
From Ocon's radio: "I just struggle to position the car in a straight line. It's moving left to right a lot." (the archive labels this the engineer, which looks like a mis-attribution given the words)
Gabriel Bortoleto: "Hey, is everything okay with my engine?"
George Russell: "Just keep an eye on the front suspension. I've got a bit of a weird vibration under braking."
Pierre Gasly's message had audio but no usable transcript.
Norris, Stroll and the word "dangerous"
Norris's message arrived at 16:14 local time. Race control had noted a Turn 1 incident involving cars 18 and 1, Stroll and Norris, at 16:12:24, and confirmed shortly after that it would be investigated after the session for impeding.
Stroll had come out of the pit lane and drifted across the racing line as Norris arrived at the fastest point on the circuit. Norris took to the run-off to avoid him. At Monza the approach to the first chicane is the highest closing speed anywhere on the calendar, which is why a car in the wrong place there is treated differently from one at a slow corner.
The word Norris used was "dangerous", and it is a word the stewards read too. The stewards found Stroll had unnecessarily impeded Norris and, citing a potentially dangerous situation because of the high speed difference, gave both Stroll and Aston Martin a formal warning.
Antonelli's "what an absolute idiot" came four minutes later, at 16:18. He did not name anyone, and no incident involving him was noted by race control, so it is not clear who he meant. On a circuit where the whole field is hunting a tow in a one hour window, there is rarely a shortage of candidates.
Verstappen's radio explains his lap time
This is the part where the radio and the data say the same thing, and it is the most useful thing on the timesheet.
Verstappen finished FP2 ninth, 0.818s off Russell. On the radio he reported no grip, brakes that were not working, and a car jumping on the front axle. He described it as "like driving on ice".
Now put that next to the telemetry. We measured the minimum speed every fast driver carried through each corner, and Verstappen was the slowest of the seven quickest drivers at Lesmo 1 (196 km/h), Lesmo 2 (178) and Ascari (182). Not by much at any one corner, but at every single one. That is exactly what a car with no aerodynamic load and no front-end confidence looks like in numbers.
Red Bull agree. Technical director Pierre Wache said afterwards that "clearly we have a balance issue on the car, that is the main thing", and pointed out that it does not help when Verstappen misses FP1 and climbs in for FP2, because the team has less of his feedback than usual. Ayumu Iwasa drove his car in the morning, one of four rookies who ran in FP1.
So the sequence reads: rookie in the car for an hour, driver gets in with a balance problem, complains it will not turn or stop, and posts a lap that is slowest of the front group in precisely the corners where load matters. The full corner-by-corner numbers are in the Monza telemetry analysis.
The fastest man on track was worried about his suspension
Russell topped the session with a 1:22.559. At 17:01 he told his engineer to "keep an eye on the front suspension", reporting "a bit of a weird vibration under braking".
That is a normal thing for a driver to flag on a Friday and not necessarily a problem. It is worth knowing because of where it happened. Monza asks more of the brakes than almost anywhere: the first chicane alone takes a car from about 322 km/h down to 72, a drop of roughly 251 km/h, and there are six braking events in 5.8km. A vibration under braking at this circuit is not a small note.
Bortoleto's question about his engine belongs in the same category. Fridays are when things get checked.
A note on the transcripts
These come from our own archive, and they are automatically transcribed from the broadcast audio rather than typed by hand.
That means they are good but not perfect. Radio is compressed, drivers talk over engine noise, and both sides of a conversation sometimes run together in one clip. Speaker attribution can be wrong too, which matters more than a garbled word: the opening line of this article is a case where the archive correctly marks the engineer as the speaker and it would have been easy to credit the driver instead. Several messages across the weekend had audio with no usable text at all, and two of the race clips are among them. Where a phrase was garbled we have left it out rather than guess, which is why some quotes above are shorter than the clip.
One example of why that matters: a fragment of one Verstappen message transcribes as the car having "blown up", which did not happen. He completed 30 laps. He was describing a lack of downforce, and the team changed his front wing. Quoting that fragment as written would have invented a mechanical failure out of a transcription error.
Listen to it yourself
The messages above are in the Team Radio Archive, our searchable collection of over 39,000 F1 radio messages from 2018 onward, with colour-coded transcripts you can read alongside the audio.
The archive is what you read afterwards. During a session, the interesting version is hearing it as it happens.
The Formula Dream app carries live driver radio as it is broadcast, inside a live Dashboard that runs through every session: every car on the circuit map, and a timing tower with lap times, gaps and intervals, tyre compound and age, plus flag and safety car alerts as race control calls them. When a driver comes on the radio complaining about balance, you can look straight at what his sector times just did. You also get every FIA document of the weekend as it is published, which is where investigations like the Stroll one actually appear before anyone reports them.
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"We need to stop the car", from his engineer rather than from Herta himself. The Cadillac stopped at Turn 6 in FP1 and the session went to a red flag at 10:49:36 after a virtual safety car period. The car was stuck in gear, and Herta completed only five laps.
What did Lando Norris say about Lance Stroll?
Norris called the move "dangerous" on his radio after Stroll drifted across the racing line at the approach to Turn 1, forcing Norris into the run-off. Race control noted the incident at 16:12:24 and it was investigated after the session for impeding. The stewards found Stroll had unnecessarily impeded Norris and, citing a potentially dangerous situation because of the high speed difference, gave both Stroll and Aston Martin a formal warning.
What did Max Verstappen say on the radio at the Italian Grand Prix?
After finishing third he said "It is a very nice podium. You can see clearly our weaknesses here." Earlier in the weekend, in second practice, he described the car as "like driving on ice" and said the brakes were not working.
Did Lance Stroll have team radio at the 2026 Italian Grand Prix?
None of his own messages appear in the archive for the weekend. He features through Lando Norris's FP2 radio, which called their Turn 1 near miss "dangerous". The stewards found Stroll had unnecessarily impeded Norris and, citing a potentially dangerous situation because of the high speed difference, gave both Stroll and Aston Martin a formal warning. He retired from the race.
What was wrong with Max Verstappen's car in FP2?
He reported a lack of grip, brakes that were not working and a car jumping on the front axle, describing it as like driving on ice. Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache confirmed a balance issue with the car. Verstappen finished ninth, 0.818s off the pace.
How many team radio messages were there at the 2026 Italian Grand Prix?
Seventy one across the weekend: seven in FP1, nine in FP2, fourteen in FP3, sixteen in qualifying and twenty five in the race.
Where can I read F1 team radio transcripts?
In the Team Radio Archive, which holds over 39,000 messages from 2018 onward with searchable, colour-coded transcripts alongside the audio, including every session of the 2026 Italian Grand Prix.
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Sources
Radio transcripts: the Formula Dream Team Radio Archive, 2026 Italian Grand Prix sessions
Race classification and grid positions: Formula 1 timing data, via FastF1
Every Miami Grand Prix winner, measured: five races, and pole has won only one of them
Five Miami Grands Prix have been held since 2022, and only one was won from pole: Kimi Antonelli's in 2026. Max Verstappen won from ninth in 2023, and Lando Norris took his first win there in 2024. Every winner, grid slot and safety car, measured.
George RussellMercedes · Italian Grand Prix 2026 · Race · 16:43:42 local
EngineerSo we can see the damage on the tyre and these vibrations picking up every lap. So let's take no risks. Let's just bring this back Bring it home
George RussellMercedes · Italian Grand Prix 2026 · Race · 16:43:42 local
EngineerSo we can see the damage on the tyre and these vibrations picking up every lap. So let's take no risks. Let's just bring this back Bring it home
Kimi AntonelliMercedes · Italian Grand Prix 2026 · Race · 16:56:23 local
EngineerBeautiful work there Kimi. Ah! Oh my god. It feels like a dream. Don't worry, when you get back I'll give you a pinch. Kimi Grande, hero. My Italian, our Italian hero. He so deserved it. It was a fantastic lap. I hated the last one, but it was fantastic.
Kimi AntonelliMercedes · Italian Grand Prix 2026 · Race · 16:59:20 local
EngineerWhat about these problems at the end? What about the problems at the end, Kimi? What about these problems? You know how I am, boy. Hey, go, go. Yeah, I want you like this, actually. I want you like this. Well done. We're so happy. You might enjoy this podium, mate.
Lewis HamiltonFerrari · Italian Grand Prix 2026 · Race · 17:11:31 local
DriverWell, I mean, that one, that one hurts, that one really hurts, um, but thank you, uh, for continuing to show up, mate, and, uh, great, great job all weekend, guys, just in the garage as always, still living, but I've seen it through to you, and, uh, let's proceed, thank you for joining us, give us your love, sorry, we can't give you what you need, thanks.
