F1 sensation Antonelli has teammate Russell against the wall heading into Barcelona

MONTMELO, Spain (AP) — This was supposed to be George Russell ’s chance to shoot for the Formula 1 title.

Coming into the season as Mercedes’s presumptive lead driver, with his team producing the best car after a rulebook overhaul, Russell looked perfectly positioned to compete for the world championship after winning the year’s opening race in Australia.

That was when his second-year teammate Kimi Antonelli blew past him and took the Formula 1 circuit by storm.

Antonelli has made F1 history on several counts this season. At age 19, he became the youngest pole-sitter en route to his first win in China, followed by becoming F1’s youngest points leader after a win in Japan.

The bushy-haired Italian just kept going, sweeping the alliterative triple of Miami, Montreal and Monaco to make it five in a row and tie the longest winning streak ever managed by F1 victory leader Lewis Hamilton.

He will now try to make it six of six at the newly renamed Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix — the race formerly known as the Spanish GP — on Sunday.

And while he's perfectly aware that he is now the driver to beat, Antonelli is trying not to let it get to him.

“About the championship, I am not really worrying about it," he said on Thursday at the Montmelo track. "I know the opportunity that is on the table and I want to make the most out of it, but at the same time I don’t want to drive a race thinking about about it.

"I want to enjoy the weekend as much as possible and drive as fast as possible and we will see at the end of the season where we are.”

While F1 discovered its new star driver, Russell found himself floundering for the first time with Mercedes, where he had managed to better Hamilton before the British driver left for Ferrari two years ago. That huge move opened the door for Antonelli to join the Silver Arrows.

The 28-year-old Russell, who is liked for his schoolboy charm and chatter on team radio that has included gems such as “Yabba Dabba Doo” and “get the kettle on,” now faces his most difficult moment since joining Mercedes four years ago.

Last season, Russell outperformed Antonelli, scoring two victories and earning 319 points, the fourth-most points of the grid, while his new partner was seventh with 150 points and no victories.

Now, Antonelli’s winning run has him leading the championship with 156 points after six races. Hamilton, who is enjoying a resurgence at Ferrari, is next with 90. Russell is third with 88.

“The pressure feels off, to be honest. I’m just going to try and enjoy every race, not even thinking about a championship,” Russell said on Thursday. “It’s so far out of reach right now that it’s just go and enjoy the races and have fun, drive fast and do what I know I’m capable of doing and what I’ve done for my whole career in Formula 1.”

Could Barcelona, an old-school, permanent, high-speed track that drivers know well from their years of racing and testing here, give Russell the chance he needs?

He topped the first practice session for the race on Friday, when the field featured seven reserve drivers, including Frederik Vesti, who stepped in for Antonelli.

Russell has never been on the podium here in seven tries with Mercedes and Williams, even if he has come close with three fourth-place finishes, including the past two years. That is partly because he has never had a top-three finish in qualifying either, so a strong Saturday will be key.

Another triumph by Antonelli would have him match Russell’s career victory haul of six races won.

Russell said he has come to the conclusion that he needs to stop overthinking, obsessing about data, and get back to “driving by instinct.”

“I don’t want to chase the dream, I want it to come toward me. And it will come towards me if I take it race by race,” he said.

From 1991 until last year, the race at the circuit located half an hour by car from Barcelona (on a normal day without F1 fan traffic) was called the Spanish Grand Prix.

Now it is called the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix, while the Spanish GP name has been given to the new race to be held for the first time in Madrid in September.

The future of the Barcelona race was in doubt until F1 announced a deal struck in February to continue holding it, but every other year while it alternates with the Belgium GP. The Barcelona race will be held in 2028, 2030 and 2032.

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Red Bull driver Max Verstappen of the Netherlands prepares at pit during the first free practice for the Spain F1 Grand Prix at the Barcelona Catalunya racetrack in Montmelo, near Barcelona, Spain, Friday, June 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Joan Monfort)

Ferrari driver Lewis Hamilton of Britain adjusts his headphones at pit during the first free practice for the Spain F1 Grand Prix at the Barcelona Catalunya racetrack in Montmelo, near Barcelona, Spain, Friday, June 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Joan Monfort)

Britain's George Russell steers his Mercedes during the first free practice for the Spain F1 Grand Prix at the Barcelona Catalunya racetrack in Montmelo, near Barcelona, Spain, Friday, June 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Fatima Shbair)

Mercedes driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli of Italy stands at pit during the first free practice for the Spain F1 Grand Prix at the Barcelona Catalunya racetrack in Montmelo, near Barcelona, Spain, Friday, June 12, 2026. (AP Photo/Joan Monfort)

Italy's Andrea Kimi Antonelli steers his Mercedes during the Formula One Monaco Grand Prix race at the Monaco racetrack, Sunday, June 7, 2026. (Yves Herman, Pool Photo via AP)

Mercedes driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli of Italy attends a press conference ahead of the Spanish Formula One Grand Prix at the Barcelona Catalunya racetrack in Montmelo, near Barcelona, Spain, Thursday, June 11, 2026. (AP Photo/ Fatima Shbair)

Mercedes driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli of Italy leaves after a press conference ahead of the Spanish Formula One Grand Prix at the Barcelona Catalunya racetrack in Montmelo, near Barcelona, Spain, Thursday, June 11, 2026. (AP Photo/ Fatima Shbair)

LONDON (AP) — David Hockney, a treasured British artist whose paintings of shimmering pools and colorful iPad drawings became icons of contemporary art, has died, his publicist said Friday. He was 88.

Over a seven-decade career, Hockney explored and reimagined classical portraiture, landscape painting and pop art, working in painting, collage, photography and digital drawing.

Hockney was born in the north of England but lived much of his life in Southern California, making its sun-drenched suburban views a major motif.

Later in life he returned to Europe, finding renewed inspiration in the wooded hills of his native county of Yorkshire and the fields and trees of France’s Normandy region. One of the most popular and critically lauded British artists of his generation, his works sold for record prices at auction.

Historian Simon Schama said it's no mystery why his work is so enduringly appealing.

“His work is admired — loved is not too strong a word — by the millions who, worldwide, flock to see it because it presupposes an expectation of pleasure,” Schama wrote in an essay accompanying a 2025 Hockney exhibition in Paris.

Hockney’s publicist, Erica Bolton, said he died at his home in London on Thursday, less than a month short of his 89th birthday. She did not give a cause of death.

He is survived by his longtime partner Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima; his great-nephew and studio assistant, Richard Hockney; his brothers Philip and John; and numerous nieces, nephews, great-nieces and great-nephews.

With his trademark round glasses and bleached-blond hair, Hockney was a well-known figure in the swinging British and American art scenes of the 1960s, even before he reached the age of 30. His paintings were just as distinctive, many of them creating a dreamlike world of patterned light bouncing off water and windows, and human forms rendered in flattened, simplified shapes in matte acrylic paint.

“I’m excited every day,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1979. “London has lots of dreary parts but I never find anything dreary in Los Angeles.”

Hockney was born July 9, 1937, in Bradford, a large industrial city whose chief export was woolen textiles. He spent his first two decades there before going to London’s Royal College of Art. He made an impact even before his graduation, and art dealer John Kasmin took him into his stable of artists in 1961.

His artistic influences ranged widely, including Renaissance portraitists, 18th-century English artist William Hogarth's satirical drawings, 19th-century English painter J.M.W. Turner’s landscapes, Pablo Picasso’s experiments in Cubism and 20th-century American pop art.

He shared with other pop artists an interest in the polished surface of modern life. And, like Andy Warhol with his Brillo boxes and Campbell’s soup cans, Hockney occasionally incorporated advertising labels, such as a British Typhoo Tea box used in his 1961 “Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style.”

He told The New York Times in 1964 that he enjoyed the burgeoning pop art scene in New York but wasn’t sure he was part of it.

“I’m just an ordinary artist,” he said. “I do admire American pop — in fact it seems that everything fresh-looking and vital in England these days has been coming from the U.S.”

Nonetheless, he said in 1995 that he still considered himself “very much an artist in the English tradition.”

Even his move to California in 1964 had a historic precedent, he noted, since earlier generations of English artists had sought out the brilliant light of Italy.

Hockney, who was out as a gay man long before it was common, explored erotic themes, giving youthful male bodies the same tender scrutiny that artists had been giving the female nude for centuries.

Early works like “We Two Boys Together Clinging” and “Two Men in a Shower” celebrated gay relationships when homosexuality was still illegal in Britain.

Early in his career, two of his drawings were bought for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“The moment I first sold pictures to earn a living, I felt rich. I’ve been rich ever since,” he told The Associated Press in 1995. “I didn’t have much money but I did what I wanted. ... You are a rich man if you do the things you want to do.”

In 2018, his 1972 painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” sold at a Christie’s auction for $90.3 million, at the time a record for a living artist.

While many of his best-known paintings had American scenes, he also tackled British subjects. He immortalized his parents in several portraits. “Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy,” a 1971 dual portrait of two of his English friends and their cat, was ranked No. 5 in a 2005 BBC Radio-National Gallery (London) online poll of the greatest paintings in Britain. It was the only work by a living painter in the top 10.

Like many traditional artists, he considering drawing a fundamental skill and lamented that it wasn’t taught as rigorously as it used to be.

“Human beings are the most interesting things we see, so they’re the hardest to draw,” he said in a 1996 AP interview.

He didn’t limit himself to drawing and painting, though. He contributed costume and set designs for the theater and opera, including a celebrated production of “Tristan und Isolde” first staged in 1987 at the Los Angeles Opera.

Hockney also embraced printmaking, photo collage and video.

When he took up photography, he fused genres, assembling individual photos into elaborate collages like “Pearblossom Highway, 11-18th April, 1986,” built up of individual views of a desert highway intersection.

“My photographer friends said it was a painting,” Hockney told the AP in 2001. “I said it’s a photograph; I used a camera.”

The insight he gained from his photo work led him to research and write a 2001 book, “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.” He argued that through the centuries, artists used lenses and other optical devices to aid them in drawing much more often than most historians believe.

Later he began to draw on iPads, which became his favorite tool.

In the early 2000s, he looked afresh at the fields and forests of Yorkshire in a series of landscape paintings that combined bold color with minute attention to the texture of snow on a hillside or a blossom on a hawthorn hedge. They featured in a 2017 exhibition at Tate Britain in London that was visited by half a million people and moved to the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Hockney used the English landscape for inspiration in his design for a stained-glass window installed at Westminster Abbey in 2018 to celebrate the long reign of Queen Elizabeth II.

In 2019, he moved to Normandy, where during the 2020 coronavirus lockdown he produced joyous iPad drawings of springtime for his friends. His message — “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring” — was emblazoned in neon across the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris when it hosted a huge Hockney exhibition that opened in April 2025.

Art curator Norman Rosenthal, who helped put together the exhibition, called Hockney “the Picasso of our times.”

“When I say that, people laugh at me, as Picasso was the archetypal artist of the 20th century,” Rosenthal told the Independent newspaper. “But David Hockney is also an incredibly popular artist whose work changes how we see things.”

An unrepentant cigarette smoker who railed against government anti-smoking rules, Hockney complained when a poster for the 2025 exhibition was banned from the Paris Metro because it showed him holding a cigarette.

The announcement of his death from his publicist noted that Hockney was “a committed life-long and defiant smoker, expressing the pleasure in life it brought him. ... He smoked up to the end.”

Hockney had a minor stroke in 2012 and was increasingly deaf in later years — something he said improved his visual perception.

“If you lose one sense, you gain other senses, and I feel I could see space clearer,” he told the AP in 2017.

He never stopped working.

“It’s my work that keeps me young,” Hockney told the Sun newspaper in 2017. “I’ve been a professional painter for 60 years. Sixty years of getting up every day and doing exactly what I want to do.”

FILE - British artist David Hockney poses for photographers in front of his acrylic on canvas "Studio Interior #4" which features as part of the "David Hockney Painting and Photography" exhibition at the Annely Juda Fine Art gallery in London, Thursday, May 14, 2015. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

FILE - British artist David Hockney poses as he unveils his painting 'Bigger Trees Near Water', the largest painting ever shown at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition, London, Friday, May 25, 2007. (AP Photo/Sang Tan, File)

FILE - British artist David Hockney sits in front of The Queen's Window, a new stained glass window at Westminster Abbey, London, designed by David Hockney and revealed for the first time on Wednesday Sept. 26, 2018. (Victoria Jones/Pool via AP, File)

FILE - Painter David Hockney, right, with British Ambassador Edward Tomkins, left, at the opening of his exhibition at Musee des Arts Decoratifs on Oct. 10, 1974 in Paris. (AP Photo/Michel Lipchitz, File)

FILE - British artist David Hockney, stands next to his friend and model Celia Birtwell, in front of one of his most famous works ' Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy' at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Wednesday Oct. 11, 2006. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant, File)

FILE - British artist David Hockney stands before one of his paintings of the East Yorkshire landscape at The Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly, London, Monday, Jan. 16, 2012, ahead of his exhibition called 'A Bigger Picture'. (AP Photo/Joel Ryan)

FILE - Artist David Hockney after unveiling the bottle design for the 2014 vintage wine of Château Mouton Rothschild in London, Friday, Feb. 3, 2017. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, File)