Bahrain GP Race Result: Verstappen Wins Chaotic Malaysia Return

Max Verstappen has finally got his first win of the season, and he picked an appropriately ridiculous race to do it in. The Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia took over three hours to complete from its original scheduled start, buried under rain delays, stalled cars, a red flag and enough safety car periods to make the actual racing feel like an afterthought. Verstappen didn’t care. He won it anyway.

This was Max Verstappen‘s and Red Bull‘s first victory of 2026, snapping a winless run that stretched back to last year’s finale in Abu Dhabi. On a weekend that handed out grid penalties, swallowed a start procedure whole and then served up a wet-to-dry lottery, the four-time champion recovered from losing the lead at the start and controlled the race from lap 13.

A Start That Refused to Start

Heavy rain over Sepang meant the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia was delayed well before a single car turned a wheel in anger. Marshals and medical cars went back and forth assessing standing water, and once the field finally did get moving behind the safety car, multiple cars promptly ground to a halt during the formation phase, forcing officials to abandon the attempt entirely. The race eventually went to a red flag, with original grid positions restored for a second attempt at a standing start nearly an hour later.

That delay created its own small drama. Several teams scrambled to swap tyres in the final minutes before the lights went out, having realised the track was still too wet for slicks. Verstappen lined up on intermediates, as did both Mercedes drivers. Others gambled differently, and some of those gambles went horribly wrong almost immediately.

Hamilton’s Slicks Gamble and the Mercedes Launch

When the race did finally get underway, Verstappen actually lost the lead at the start, with Kimi Antonelli surging through from Mercedes and George Russell following him past, dropping Verstappen to third on merit rather than misfortune. Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc, meanwhile, were sinking fast after Ferrari opted to start on slick tyres on a track that was still clearly wet. Hamilton later rejected a team offer to pit early, choosing to stick with the gamble rather than compound the error, a call that ultimately helped him stay ahead of Leclerc once things settled down. For more details on Hamilton’s recovery, see our separate analysis of his tyre gamble. His recovery drive to third was one of the genuine highlights of an otherwise shambolic afternoon.

Verstappen Strikes Back

Verstappen needed a handful of laps to shake off Liam Lawson and find a rhythm, then went after Russell for second. Having closed to within a couple of seconds of Antonelli, he briefly had a look at the lead before being forced back into line. A safety car for Valtteri Bottas, beached in the gravel, triggered a round of stops that saw most of the field, Antonelli and Verstappen included, dive for fresh rubber. Antonelli went onto the medium compound, Verstappen onto the soft.

The restart was where the race actually turned. Verstappen jumped Antonelli into the first sequence of corners and suddenly had both Mercedes cars behind him. Russell, taking advantage of the scrap between Verstappen and his team-mate, slipped past Antonelli as well, but it didn’t matter. Verstappen simply drove off into the distance, building a gap that stretched past five seconds and then into double figures as the race wore on. By the midpoint he held around nine seconds over the Mercedes pair, consistently finding two tenths a lap that nobody else had.

Russell’s Title Hopes Take Another Hit

George Russell’s afternoon fell apart late. Already struggling for pace relative to Verstappen through the second half of the race, his Mercedes stopped on track with a power unit problem just as the race prepared to resume from another safety car period, this one triggered by Alexander Albon’s stricken Williams. Russell’s retirement promoted everyone behind him by a position and did nothing for a championship picture that already has Antonelli well clear at the top. Russell’s gap to his team-mate, and the state of his title hopes more broadly, is grim reading regardless of how this particular Sunday went.

Lando Norris had his own moment of chaos during that same late safety car spell, running wide through the gravel to avoid hitting the back of Oscar Piastri, and recovered from that detour to salvage ninth. It summed up a race where staying on the circuit was, for long stretches, the main achievement.

How It Finished

Isack Hadjar, who spent much of the middle of the race complaining over team radio about a difficult car, inherited third after Russell’s retirement but was passed by Hamilton and Leclerc and finished fifth, ahead of Piastri, while Fernando Alonso’s eighth place was Aston Martin’s best result of the season, a small mercy for a team that has otherwise had a miserable year, including four double DNFs already in 2026.

Arvid Lindblad recovered from the back of the field, after a grid that had already been reshuffled by three separate penalties, to grab the final point in tenth.

The win came in the first grand prix held at Sepang in nine years, a fittingly odd venue for a race that spent most of its afternoon refusing to behave like a normal Sunday.