Heir to Hamilton’s throne: Antonelli is F1’s next big thing

Andrea Kimi Antonelli has a party trick. Name any race weekend he has driven in and he can respond with his qualifying lap time down to a tenth of a second.

When you consider he has driven in more than 30 qualifying sessions at more than 20 circuits in the past two years alone, that’s a lot to remember. Before speaking to Antonelli about his path to Formula 1, ESPN had to put him to the test.

“What was your qualifying time in Imola, Formula 2 this year?”

“A 1:27.3,” he says confidently. Correct.

“Budapest, F2?”

“1:30.3.” Bang on.

“How about two years ago in the Formula Regional European Championship. Let’s try Q1 at Mugello?

“It was a 1:42.4 and Q2 was 1:42.6.” Correct again.

“Lap time is so important for me,” Antonelli explained. “You always want to get the fast lap times and they kind of get stuck into my head without even doing it on purpose.”

As remarkable as this next-level memory game is, the performances behind those lap times are what have convinced Mercedes to choose Antonelli as Lewis Hamilton‘s replacement for next year.

The move will thrust the 18-year-old onto the biggest stage in motorsport, potentially presenting him with a car capable of winning in his first year in F1. Not since Hamilton made his debut with McLaren in 2007 — albeit at the age of 22 — has a team shown such confidence in the raw talent of a rookie.

Team boss Toto Wolff said he made the decision to promote Antonelli from Mercedes’ junior team within five minutes of learning Hamilton was leaving for Ferrari, describing the choice to pair him with George Russell as “instinctive.” This was not a knee-jerk reaction to losing the biggest name in motorsport, though. This was the realization of a plan that was more than seven years in the making.

This is the coming-of-age of a driver earmarked for F1 since he was a boy.

Inspired by Senna

Born in Bologna to parents Elisabetta and Marco Antonelli, “Kimi,” as he prefers to be called, has been surrounded by motorsport for as long as he can remember. He insists his adopted name is not an homage to former Ferrari driver Kimi Räikkönen, who became Formula 1 world champion one year after Antonelli’s birth, but instead the suggestion of a family friend who believed it would sound good between the double A’s of Andrea Antonelli.

In the first few years of his life, there was no escaping the intoxicating world of motorsport. Marco, a racing driver himself, was the boss of a GT team, and Kimi’s formative years were spent in paddocks following his father’s racing outfit.

“I have been growing at the race track since I was very young, because my dad, he used to be a racing driver,” Antonelli said. “Since 1994 he runs his team in GT3, and now Formula 4 as well, but mainly GTs. … I was going around the paddock, spending time inside the garage, so I have been growing up in this environment my whole life.”

Marco saw the benefit of starting his son’s own racing career as early as possible, and Antonelli says there is a photo of him aged “1 or 2” propped up in the seat of a go-kart. By the time he was old enough to reach the pedals, he was out on track, and so the journey to F1 began.

“My first actual drive was when I was 5½ and was in a go-kart called a Delfino — a baby go-kart — and it was around a mini-bike track in Forli,” he said. “I just remember I was really enjoying just the feeling of the speed. That was the thing that I really liked.”

Antonelli entered his first official go-kart race aged 8, in the EasyKart 60 category, and won by a margin of seven seconds. In EasyKart the emphasis was on equal machinery, thereby allowing future talent to shine through, and by the time he was 9, Antonelli had won his first championship — crowned after a remarkable drive from 21st on the grid to win in the final.

Racing was Antonelli’s world, and it didn’t take long for the goal of racing in F1 to crystalize in his mind.

“Since the very beginning I didn’t have anything else in mind,” he said. “I think I realized at the age of 9 that racing was what I really wanted to do. Around that time, I started to compete at a high level and I was seeing that I was going pretty well and I was enjoying it as well, so I knew that was what I wanted to do.”

Away from the kart track, Antonelli continued to live and breathe motorsport. He followed F1 on TV, and when there wasn’t a live race to watch, his father introduced him to the sport’s history on DVDs. As he watched grainy footage of races from the 1980s and 1990s, one driver stood out to the impressionable, young go-karter above all others: Ayrton Senna.

“With my father, especially when I was little, we used to watch so many races and some from DVDs,” he explained. “I just remember looking at Ayrton, and especially what was really impressive was his qualifying lap. I thought to myself, ‘I like this driver,’ and then I just started to read about him and watch more videos about him, just to get more knowledge about him.”

When Antonelli makes his F1 debut next year, it will be with the No. 12 on his car. It is the same number Senna used during his time at Lotus from 1985 to 1987 and in his first championship-winning season with McLaren driving the iconic MP4-4 in 1988. Despite being born 12 years after Senna’s tragic death at the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, Antonelli says the number is dedicated to his biggest racing hero.

“It’s a number I like as well, it looks pretty cool, but it’s also for [Senna],” Antonelli added. “I am inspired by him and of course to race that number, on my side, brings a bit of responsibility as well.”

A rising star

Antonelli’s first contact with Mercedes came in 2017. Wolff had been made aware of the Italian wunderkind by Giovanni Minardi — son of the founder of the Minardi F1 team, Giancarlo — who had first spotted Antonelli at the very early stages of his karting career.

Wolff sent the head of Mercedes’ junior program, Gwen Lagrue, to check if the hype around Antonelli was real. Later the same year, the then-11-year-old was signed to a junior contract with the team at the peak of its domination of F1.

“It was end of 2017, I was doing a go-kart race and we had just had the [first] contact with Toto and Mercedes to make a deal and join their academy,” Antonelli said. “So Gwen came end of 2017 to a go-kart race, one of the last couple of races of the year, and he just came to watch to see how I was performing and behaving. They wanted just to check and see how I was going, and from that point they would decide if they would sign me or not, and luckily it happened.

“We have a funny picture together, Gwen was in Mercedes kit and I was racing in Tony Kart, which was supported by Ferrari, and there was this funny picture where Gwen was covering the Ferrari logo on my jacket. That was the first time I met Gwen.”

It raises the question how Antonelli, who grew up just 30 miles from Ferrari’s base in Maranello, was not noticed by the Italian team before Wolff and Lagrue.

“Tony Kart was the main team, supported by Ferrari, but to be honest there was not much contact,” Antonelli said. “I don’t really remember exactly because I was like 11. We weren’t really in contact, but eventually we got the call from Mercedes and we had no doubts and just accepted.”

It was a major step in Antonelli’s burgeoning career, but at that time F1 was still a long way off. There has been an increasing trend in F1 teams signing young go-karters to their academies, but for every one that makes the F1 grid, there are dozens more who get cut loose along the way.

Even so, Antonelli was seen as something special right from the start. When he was still competing in go-karts in Italy in 2018, he was invited to the Monaco Grand Prix to meet Wolff for the first time. A photo exists online of a young Antonelli stood by Wolff’s side during a practice session in Mercedes’ engineering office, with oversized headphones from the pit wall across his head.

“I was excited and a bit nervous,” Antonelli recalled of the moment. “I was very little, I was only 12. Then I stood next to him in the garage for free practice and that was a cool experience.”

From 2025 onward, that same kid who stood next to Wolff in Monaco will be sat in one of Mercedes’ cars on the F1 grid. Even within the sink-or-swim world of grand prix racing, Antonelli’s progression has happened at breakneck speed, but Wolff’s reasoning is that the sheer pace the Italian has shown will ultimately win through.

Questions were raised over Mercedes’ judgement when Antonelli had a big crash on his second flying lap in an F1 practice session at this year’s Italian Grand Prix. The idea had been to give him a run in Friday practice ahead of his official confirmation as an F1 driver, but the plan rather backfired when Antonelli took too much speed into the Parabolica and slid into the barriers.

Wolff was happy to write off the incident as a learning experience, and while speaking to the media afterward, he emphasised the speed Antonelli had shown just moments earlier while pushing the car to the limit on his first flying lap.

“Most importantly he is OK because the crash was 52G, so that’s important,” Wolff said. “We’re investing in his future and these moments, they will happen. They will continue to happen next year.

“We’d rather have a problem in slowing him down than making him faster. What we saw from one and a half laps was astonishing.”

Even before he was named as Hamilton’s successor, Antonelli was creating headlines in lower categories. In 2022, representing Italy at the Motorsport Games (an Olympics-like competition for Formula 4 drivers at Paul Ricard), he won the competition while racing with a broken wrist.

After he had already set a time fast enough to secure pole position in qualifying, Antonelli was attempting to improve when he collided with a slower car at the end of the session. On impact, his steering wheel snapped in his hands and he felt a sharp pain in his left wrist. He decided to race on with the help of pain killers and won the qualifying race with the fastest lap before winning the feature race by seven seconds.

“I didn’t know [my wrist was broken],” he recalled. “It was painful but I could still move it slightly.

“Once the race was over it was really swollen and also the color was not so nice! It was kind of black, so I thought maybe something was wrong with the wrist — and after the race weekend I couldn’t really move it. The pain was there — mainly in the first phase of the race, because then when you get driving and the muscle gets hot and with adrenaline you feel less pain, but yeah, it was painful.”

Another story to burnish the Antonelli legend emerged this year when he joined a test in Euro Formula cars (old F3 cars) at Silverstone in order to learn the circuit. A number of current F3 and F2 drivers were also present for the same reason, but this being the United Kingdom, the track was soaking wet when the test got underway.

Wolff recalls that Antonelli “was four seconds quicker than the rest” on his first flying lap. Antonelli doesn’t hype the story in quite the same way, but says the lap time simply came easily to him on the wet track.

“I was feeling real confidence in that test and in the wet,” he said. “I have to say I love wet conditions. I feel very comfortable in any car, and I feel good because I can just drive by instinct without any thinking.”

What makes Antonelli so fast?

There has been one clear theme in Antonelli’s relatively short career: raw pace. No matter the step in performance asked of him, whether it be through various levels of go-karting, the huge leap from karts to Formula 4 cars or the decision to skip Formula 3 and go straight to Formula 2, he has been able to adapt remarkably quickly.

By all accounts, he gets in a new car and has an innate ability to discover its limits and set lap times beyond the expectations of his engineers. Refining that into a rounded package with the consistency needed to win races is sometimes a longer process, but the initial pace is always there. So where does that speed come from?

“I think it’s because I drive a lot by feeling and by instinct,” Antonelli said. “Every time I jump in a car for a new track, the main thing I try to do is go as fast as possible straight away. Especially when I’m feeling comfortable with the car, I feel like I have a lot of confidence to really push the car, and it’s something that I had from a very young age — to go straight away and be on it from the very beginning.”

The step to F1 will be his biggest yet and comes with the added pressure of racing for Mercedes on motorsport’s biggest stage. To prepare Antonelli, the team has laid out a series of private F1 tests at various circuits this season, which he has dovetailed with his F2 campaign.

Driving a two-year-old car to comply with F1’s testing restrictions, sources within the team say his pace has exceeded expectations. Those tests were a key factor in confirming Wolff’s instinct that Antonelli is ready for F1.

For Antonelli, however, there is still more to come.

“I have to say I felt very comfortable in F1 from the very beginning, because the car gives you a lot of confidence,” he said. “It’s not easy to reach the limit because the car can allow you so much and give you so much that you keep asking and she keeps delivering.

“Of course, it’s hard to arrive to that point where you just keep asking and the car doesn’t return any more. It gives you a lot of confidence to start with, but to reach the absolute limit is not easy at all. It’s something I am still working on, because I am still in a phase where it is still giving me a lot in testing and I am working to arrive to that edge without going over it.”

Lap times from his private tests have not been made public, and would likely mean very little if they were. Differing conditions, a two-year-old car and non-race tires make comparisons pointless until he hits the track with the rest of the F1 grid at the Australian Grand Prix in March.

It wouldn’t be surprising if Antonelli had already memorized the fastest ones, though. Right down to the last tenth of a second.

Source: www.espn.com