Kimi Antonelli

#1Kimi Antonelli’s first official Formula 1 weekend with Mercedes lasted about ten minutes before he put the car in the wall.

#2It was Monza, August 2024. He was 18 years old, driving George Russell’s Mercedes in Friday practice. And he wasn’t easing himself in.

#3Antonelli was fast immediately. For a moment, his first timed lap put him at the top of the session.

#4Then he reached Parabolica.

#5The rear stepped away. The Mercedes spun across the track and slammed into the barriers.

#6The impact registered at around 52G.

#7Antonelli was okay. The car very much wasn’t.

#8Afterward, he admitted what had gone wrong. He had pushed too hard, too soon. He should have built up his speed as the conditions came to him.

#9That would already have been an awkward F1 debut for any teenager. But Antonelli had another problem: everyone knew Mercedes was considering him for the seat being vacated by Lewis Hamilton.

#10So imagine the optics.

#11You’re 18. You’ve never raced in Formula 1. You get a Mercedes for an official practice session. Ten minutes later, it needs rebuilding.

#12Then Mercedes did something that made the whole scene even stranger.

#13The next day, the team announced Antonelli as its 2025 race driver.

#14Hamilton’s replacement.

#15Why?

#16To understand why Mercedes wasn’t scared off by ten disastrous minutes at Monza, you have to go back much further than Monza.

#17Racing was normal life in the Antonelli family.

#18Kimi’s father, Marco, raced cars and later ran a racing team. Kimi grew up around circuits, garages and paddocks because that was where his family worked.

#19One family story captures it better than a résumé ever could.

#20In 2014, Marco was racing at Hockenheim. Seven-year-old Kimi was too young to be allowed into the paddock.

#21Marco found a workaround.

#22He hid his son among a stack of tires on a trolley, put an umbrella over the top and wheeled him inside.

#23Years before Kimi Antonelli had his own Formula 1 paddock pass, apparently he needed to be smuggled in with the tires.

#24But this wasn’t simply a father deciding that his son would become a professional racing driver. Later accounts from the family describe Marco as knowing enough about the brutal side of motorsport to have reservations about sending Kimi down the same road.

#25Kimi kept wanting to drive anyway.

#26And eventually, people outside the family started noticing why.

#27Around the end of 2017, when Antonelli was 11, word reached Toto Wolff that there was a young Italian karter worth seeing.

#28The recommendation came through the Minardi racing circle. Wolff sent Gwen Lagrue, who was responsible for developing Mercedes’ young drivers, to take a look.

#29Lagrue wasn’t interested only in lap times.

#30Mercedes wanted to see how Antonelli raced, but also how he behaved.

#31The exact timeline of when he formally became a Mercedes junior is unusually messy. Antonelli has described being with Mercedes from 2018, while Mercedes’ official driver profile records his Junior Programme entry in April 2019.

#32What matters for this story is clearer: Mercedes had begun evaluating him when he was about 11.

#33And he wasn’t some child who won absolutely everything the moment Mercedes arrived.

#34In Mercedes’ own retrospective, that early period included finishes like third, fourth and fifth.

#35They kept watching anyway.

#36That becomes important later.

#37Because Mercedes’ bet on Antonelli was never based on one spectacular weekend.

#38It was built over years.

#39By 2022, the results were getting difficult to ignore.

#40Antonelli won both the Italian F4 and ADAC F4 titles. In 2023, he won Formula Regional championships in the Middle East and Europe.

#41Four titles across two seasons.

#42Normally, the next move would have been Formula 3.

#43Mercedes skipped it.

#44Antonelli went directly from Formula Regional to Formula 2, a huge jump in performance, complexity and power. He was going from machinery with roughly 270 horsepower to an F2 car producing well over 600.

#45Even Antonelli hadn’t expected it.

#46He knew drivers normally went through F3. He knew the F2 jump was enormous. He also knew there would be circuits he had never raced on and very little practice time to learn them.

#47There is no solid basis for the neat explanation that Mercedes thought “F3 had nothing left to teach him.”

#48What Mercedes’ actions do show is that the team had enormous confidence in his ability to adapt.

#49Then, for the first time in a while, Antonelli stopped making every promotion look easy.

#50Antonelli entered F2 with PREMA in 2024, just as the championship introduced a new car.

#51PREMA struggled early.

#52So did Antonelli.

#53This was different from the pattern people had become used to seeing. He couldn’t simply arrive, learn the car and immediately take over the championship.

#54He had to work through it.

#55Eventually, the results improved. He won at Silverstone and Budapest.

#56But he did not dominate Formula 2. He did not become the F2 champion before Mercedes decided his future.

#57In fact, when people were already talking about promoting him to Formula 1, Antonelli himself gave a strikingly cautious answer.

#58He wasn’t sure he was ready.

#59There was still a lot to learn in F2.

#60Under a normal timetable, Mercedes could have given him more time.

#61Then something happened that had nothing to do with Antonelli.

#62Lewis Hamilton decided to leave.

#63Early in 2024, Hamilton told Toto Wolff that he would leave Mercedes for Ferrari in 2025.

#64Years later, Wolff described how quickly one possibility entered his head.

#65Within about five minutes, he was already thinking about a future Mercedes pairing of George Russell and Kimi Antonelli.

#66That didn’t mean the decision was signed five minutes later. Mercedes considered other options.

#67But think about what it reveals.

#68A seven-time world champion had just told Mercedes he was leaving, and one of the first names in Wolff’s head was a teenager who hadn’t even completed one Formula 2 season.

#69Mercedes hadn’t necessarily planned to move Antonelli into F1 this quickly. Wolff later acknowledged that, under a different scenario, another season of F2 could have made sense.

#70Hamilton’s departure changed the clock.

#71Mercedes had already been accelerating Antonelli through junior racing.

#72Now the biggest seat of all had suddenly opened.

#73And instead of finding an experienced replacement, Mercedes began preparing to accelerate him again.

#74Which brings us back to Monza.

#75Antonelli hit the wall at 52G.

#76Over the radio, Wolff’s message was simple.

#77“All good, Kimi.”

#78Later, Wolff said the crash had “zero” effect on the driver decision.

#79That reaction makes more sense once you know the timeline.

#80Mercedes wasn’t judging Antonelli on ten minutes.

#81It had been watching him since he was a kid. The team had seen his junior career, his rapid adaptation to new cars, his victories, and then his first extended period of difficulty in Formula 2.

#82By the time Antonelli crashed at Monza, Mercedes did not need that session to answer the question, “Is this kid fast?”

#83That part was already settled.

#84The problem on display was different.

#85He needed to learn when not to use all of that speed.

#86And as dramatic as the crash looked, it would not become the hardest test of Mercedes’ faith in him.

#87That came after he actually got the seat.

#88Antonelli’s rookie Formula 1 season in 2025 started well enough to make the concerns about his age look overblown.

#89He scored regularly.

#90In Miami, he took Sprint pole.

#91In Canada, he reached his first F1 podium.

#92Then the season moved into its European stretch, and things began to unravel.

#93A rear-suspension change on the Mercedes hurt Antonelli’s confidence in the car. He struggled to trust what the rear would do when he committed to a corner.

#94At the same time, the noise around him got louder.

#95More media. More attention in Italy. More expectations at the European races.

#96Then came mistakes.

#97And the mistakes started following him from one weekend into the next.

#98The biggest problem was no longer simply what the car was doing.

#99It was what Antonelli was doing to himself after things went wrong.

#100Antonelli later described that period in brutal terms.

#101He said he had allowed the pressure to “destroy” him.

#102Part of that pressure came from feeling that he was letting down the people who believed in him.

#103Especially Toto Wolff.

#104That created a strange reversal.

#105Wolff’s belief was one of the reasons Antonelli had this extraordinary opportunity in the first place. Mercedes had chosen him before he had completed the conventional checklist. They had trusted potential that was still unfinished.

#106That trust should have felt like protection.

#107Instead, inside Antonelli’s head, it began to feel like a debt.

#108What if Toto regretted choosing him?

#109What if every bad weekend made the decision look foolish?

#110The more Antonelli felt he had to justify his place, the tighter everything became. Mistakes created pressure. Pressure made the next mistake harder to escape.

#111He later said his rookie year felt like living three years in one.

#112Then Formula 1 returned to Monza.

#113Again.

#114At the 2025 Italian Grand Prix, Antonelli was no longer the teenage junior borrowing a Mercedes for an hour.

#115He was a Mercedes Formula 1 driver racing at home.

#116And he arrived during the worst stretch of his rookie season.

#117In practice, he put the car into the gravel at Lesmo 2.

#118He eventually finished the race ninth.

#119A year earlier, he had destroyed a Mercedes at the same circuit and Wolff had immediately reassured him.

#120This time, Antonelli finished the race—and Wolff publicly called his weekend “underwhelming.”

#121That sounds harsher because it was.

#122But it wasn’t a withdrawal of support. Wolff continued to make clear that Mercedes believed in Antonelli’s talent and long-term future.

#123What had changed was the standard.

#124In 2024, Antonelli was a junior getting his first taste of an F1 weekend.

#125In 2025, he was one of the two people Mercedes employed to race its cars.

#126Believing in him no longer meant pretending every performance was good enough.

#127Antonelli didn’t fight the criticism.

#128He agreed.

#129Then, after Monza, the team sat down and talked.

#130Antonelli, Wolff and key members of his engineering group had a serious discussion after the Italian Grand Prix.

#131What Antonelli began to recognize was how much energy he was spending on the final result before he had even done the driving.

#132Where do I need to finish?

#133What if I make another mistake?

#134How do I prove I deserve to be here?

#135Those questions were taking up space he needed for something much simpler.

#136Driving the car.

#137So the reset was not a magical speech followed by an instant transformation.

#138Antonelli later described it as slowly finding his way back.

#139There were still good weekends and bad ones.

#140That matters, because otherwise the story becomes too neat.

#141The clearest evidence of change didn’t arrive the next race.

#142It came months later in Las Vegas.

#143Las Vegas started badly.

#144Antonelli went out in Q1.

#145Another poor qualifying result. Another opportunity to carry frustration straight into Sunday.

#146Instead, the race became one of the strongest examples of what he had learned.

#147Mercedes stopped him early and put him on hard tires.

#148Antonelli then kept those tires alive for 48 laps.

#149He worked his way through the field and eventually reached the podium.

#150Afterward, he made the comparison himself: he didn’t think the Antonelli from the beginning of his F1 career could have produced that race.

#151The raw speed wasn’t new.

#152What was new was his ability to have one part of a weekend go wrong without allowing it to own the next part.

#153Even then, 2025 did not end as a tidy comeback story. There were more difficult results, including 15th in Abu Dhabi, and Antonelli finished seventh in the championship.

#154He had not solved Formula 1.

#155He had started learning how to recover inside it.

#156Then came 2026.

#157Antonelli won his first Formula 1 Grand Prix in China.

#158He won again in Japan.

#159More victories followed, and he moved into the championship lead.

#160It would be tempting to draw a perfectly clean line:

#161He suffered in 2025. He became mentally stronger. Therefore he started winning in 2026.

#162That isn’t what the evidence says.

#163Mercedes had produced a highly competitive car under the new regulations. Its characteristics also suited Antonelli’s aggressive driving style. Antonelli himself acknowledged that having a good car made a difference.

#164Experience mattered too.

#165By his second season, he understood more about what a Formula 1 weekend did to his body and his concentration. He had learned more about managing his energy, rebuilding focus and reacting when a session went badly.

#166So the driver had changed.

#167But so had the machine underneath him.

#168By early September 2026, Antonelli was 20 years old, had won six races and held a 59-point championship lead over George Russell and Lewis Hamilton.

#169Then he arrived at Monza.

#170For the third year in a row, the same circuit had something waiting for him.

#171An Italian had not arrived at Monza leading the Formula 1 World Championship in 73 years.

#172Now Antonelli had.

#173Home crowd. Six wins. A championship lead.

#174There was every reason for this to become the most pressurized weekend of his career.

#175Then Mercedes chose Monza to take a power-unit penalty.

#176The team’s calculations said this was the best place to absorb the grid loss and recover positions. Wolff put the logic rather dryly: algorithms don’t care about a driver’s nationality.

#177So the first Italian in 73 years to arrive at Monza leading the championship was set to start from the back.

#178Antonelli’s reaction was revealing.

#179He said the penalty actually took pressure away.

#180Of course he would have preferred to fight for pole. But once that expectation disappeared, so did part of the burden. He could experiment more in practice. He could approach the weekend differently.

#181Most importantly, he compared the situation directly with the year before.

#182In 2025, Antonelli said, he had felt that he needed to prove he belonged in Formula 1.

#183He had driven tense.

#184He hadn’t even properly enjoyed being in the car.

#185Now he felt different.

#186He had already shown that he could win.

#187He had already shown what he could do.

#188He no longer needed every lap at Monza to serve as an argument for why Mercedes had chosen him.

#189In 2024, Antonelli came to Monza for his first official F1 practice session and crashed after about ten minutes.

#190In 2025, he returned as a Mercedes race driver and felt consumed by the need to prove he deserved the opportunity.

#191Now he is back in 2026 as the championship leader.

#192And he is starting from the back.

#193The remarkable part isn’t that Antonelli suddenly claims pressure no longer exists. It’s that he is interpreting the same kind of bad news differently.

#194Three years earlier, Mercedes had already been doing that with him.

#195The team did not look at one crash and decide the entire bet had failed. It had years of evidence behind its decision. And when Antonelli struggled for real in 2025, Mercedes still didn’t abandon the bet.

#196But it also stopped treating belief as the same thing as protection.

#197That may be the clearest answer to why Mercedes was willing to put an unfinished 18-year-old into Lewis Hamilton’s car.

#198The team had never been betting that Antonelli was already finished.

#199It was betting on what happened when he wasn’t.

#200Six victories and a championship lead make that bet look much better today than it did during his worst stretch in 2025.

#201But they do not settle it.

#202Antonelli’s first championship campaign is still unfinished.

#203So is the 2026 Italian Grand Prix.

#204For now, the story ends at the same circuit where he once lasted ten minutes before hitting the wall.

#205Only this time, Kimi Antonelli is standing there saying he no longer feels that he has to prove why he belongs.

#206Whether he drives that way is the part Monza still gets to answer.

#207Before Antonelli, George Russell was Mercedes’ model young driver.

#208Russell won GP3. Then he won Formula 2. And even after doing everything the conventional way, Mercedes still didn’t put him straight into its works team.

#209It sent him to Williams.

#210For three full Formula 1 seasons.

#211Toto Wolff would later describe that period as an ideal education for Russell.

#212Then, just a few years later, Mercedes took Antonelli—a driver who had skipped F3 and hadn’t won the F2 championship—and skipped that entire apprenticeship.

#213Why did the same team make one young driver wait three years, then hand another Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes almost immediately?