Max Verstappen can equal Lewis Hamilton's record at the Circuit of the Americas on Sunday. Hamilton has won the United States Grand Prix in Austin five times; Verstappen has won it four times, and a fifth would put them level at the top of the COTA winners list.
The two records were built in different eras. Hamilton's five wins came in a six-year run between 2012 and 2017: the first with McLaren, the next four with Mercedes, the last two from pole. He has not won in Austin since. In seven starts since, he has three second places and a third, and in 2023 he crossed the line second before being disqualified for excessive plank wear. Last year, in his first visit with Ferrari, he started fifth and finished fourth.
Verstappen's run is more recent and more complete. He has won four of the last five races at COTA (2021, 2022, 2023 and 2025), and the one he lost, in 2024, he still finished on the podium. His 2023 win came from sixth on the grid. Back in 2018 he went from 18th to second, the drive that first marked this track as one of his best. In ten starts he has seven podiums and two poles. His full record in Austin is here.
The one that got away
The only break in Verstappen's streak belongs to Charles Leclerc, who won from fourth on the grid in 2024 to become the only non-Red Bull winner at COTA since 2020. Leclerc also owns the circuit's lap record, a 1:36.169 set in 2019 that has stood for six seasons. Leclerc's COTA record is the shortest of the three and the most volatile: in seven starts, a win, two thirds, two fourths, and two classifications outside the top ten, including a 2023 disqualification for the same plank wear that caught Hamilton.
The championship backdrop
The record is the side story. Kimi Antonelli arrives in Texas leading the championship by 102 points, 340 to George Russell's 238, with eight wins so far. Hamilton is third on 229 and Verstappen fourth on 221, so Sunday matters more to Verstappen's place in the history books than to this year's title. Antonelli's only previous start in Austin, as a rookie last year, ended in 13th after he qualified seventh. The standings as they stand.
COTA has hosted 13 United States Grands Prix since its first race in 2012, the 2020 edition lost to the pandemic. Six drivers have won there: Hamilton, Verstappen, Sebastian Vettel, Kimi Räikkönen, Valtteri Bottas and Leclerc. On Sunday, Verstappen can turn the top of that list into a tie.
I'm Alex Da Costa, a systems engineer with more than ten years of experience designing and maintaining data-heavy infrastructure. I've been watching Formula 1 since the 2005 season — Alonso's first championship, the year Schumacher's seven-title era finally cracked — and it's been an obsession ever since. Pit Lane F1 is what happens when that IT background meets a lifelong F1 habit. I started this site because the big outlets cover the headline result but rarely the data underneath: why a pit-stop window mattered, how a circuit's lap-record history actually compares, what every driver has done at every venue. So I built it. Race recaps for every Grand Prix since 1950, head-to-head career comparisons, telemetry replays for 2024 onward, and per-circuit deep dives — all from open data sources, fact-checked against multiple references, and written in plain language. The site is run independently. No team, driver, or commercial partner influences what gets published. If you spot a factual error or want to suggest a feature, the contact page is the fastest way to reach me.
