Kimi Antonelli Has Always Been (Really) Fast
The first time that Andrea Kimi Antonelli, the youthful sensation of this year’s Formula 1 racing season, took part in a Formula 1 Grand Prix weekend was in the summer of 2024. The race was at Monza, a celebrated old racetrack outside Milan. Antonelli, who is Italian, had just turned eighteen. He didn’t yet have a driver’s license. But he had been tracked and trained for years by the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula 1 team, after tearing up go-kart tracks as a boy. Although the news had not been formally announced, Antonelli had been chosen by Mercedes to replace Lewis Hamilton, the mainstay of the team and the most successful driver in the history of the sport.
Antonelli wasn’t scheduled to start racing for the team for several months, but Monza was a chance to introduce the rookie to a home crowd. Antonelli is from Bologna. His father, Marco, is also a racing driver. As a child, Kimi spent weekends at Monza, playing on a racing simulator while his father competed on the track. The course is august and sweeping, with long straights and punishing curves, framed by the tall pine trees of a former royal park. Italians call it Il Tempio della Velocità, the Temple of Speed. In 2018, when Antonelli was twelve years old, he had been a grid boy—a kind of team mascot—for Mercedes at Monza. He high-fived Hamilton, who went on to win the race.
Six years later, on the afternoon of Friday, August 30th, Antonelli climbed into the Mercedes W15 car. He has curly brown hair and a steely, feline frame. Most Formula 1 weekends open with three practice sessions, during which drivers and teams experiment with their cars and power settings, and familiarize themselves with the course. Since he was about ten years old, Antonelli has been known for his ability to reach full speed disquietingly fast. “Even in practice. Being, you know, straight away, up there,” he acknowledged when we spoke recently. “I don’t like giving compliments to myself.”
At Monza, Antonelli was borrowing the car of his future teammate, George Russell. Even in his first minutes on the course, engineers in the Mercedes garage were taken aback by the speeds that the rookie was reaching, as he hit Monza’s corners. “He wanted to demonstrate that he was the best, already,” Toto Wolff, the team principal, recalled.
Nobody else was pushing to the limit, but Antonelli was braking late, hitting the curbs. On his second lap, he drove through the Ascari chicane—one of the fastest series of turns in Formula 1—fourteen kilometres an hour faster than Max Verstappen, the then world champion, did. Raw speed is a God-given thing, but frightening. (Alberto Ascari, for whom the chicane is named, died after a crash at Monza, in 1955.) Wolff watched the feed from Antonelli’s onboard camera. “I was seeing that this was too much risk,” he said. James Allison, the team’s veteran technical director, warned Wolff that Antonelli needed to slow down. Wolff hesitated. “I thought, I’m either going to interfere here or let him finish the lap,” he said. “We let him go.”
Formula 1 is often described as the most technologically advanced sport in the world, but its heart could not be simpler. Stirling Moss, a British driver for Mercedes in the fifties, said that racing was about locating “the ragged edge,” the limits of speed, grip, and earthbound physics beyond which a car will definitely leave the road. On his second lap at Monza, Antonelli went past the ragged edge. Entering the Parabolica, the course’s final curve, his rear tires overheated and lost adhesion, and the car spun off the track at some hundred and fifty miles an hour. The W15 hit the wall with an impact of fifty-two g’s, or fifty-two times the force of gravity. Antonelli had been driving for seven minutes.
Antonelli swore and apologized and stumbled from the car. He was unhurt but mortified. Wolff tried to reassure him. “We would rather have a problem in slowing him down than making him faster,” he joked with reporters. During his first season in Formula 1, which began six months later, Antonelli’s talent was plain. He finished fourth in his début, in Australia, moving up twelve places in the rain. He made the podium on a handful of occasions. But he often found himself tense and struggling with starts, holding back from the edge. The crash at Monza stayed in his mind.
In race after race, Antonelli finished behind Russell, his more experienced teammate. This was no great surprise. He was the youngest driver on the grid. “It was all new,” Wolff explained. The tracks, the engineers, the data, the media attention, the sheer amount of racing—the Formula 1 World Championship consists of twenty-plus races, on five continents, in nine months. “He had this long spell of bad results,” Wolff said. At Spa, in Belgium, last summer, Antonelli finished sixteenth, almost a minute behind Russell. Six weeks later, on his return to Monza, he made a series of errors throughout the weekend and came in ninth. After the race, Wolff had a meeting with Antonelli at Mercedes’s team headquarters, in Brackley, England. Wolff told Antonelli that he wasn’t impressed. The kid needed to recapture his speed. Wolff told me, “We sat down and said, ‘You need to take the corner now.’ ”
Antonelli’s second season in Formula 1 has been electrifying. Going into the U.S. Grand Prix, in Austin, this weekend, there have been seventeen races. Antonelli has won eight of them. He leads the World Championship by a hundred and two points, a margin that is all but unbridgeable. If he finishes at the top of the standings at the end of the year, as he is expected to, he will be the youngest Formula 1 champion of all time, and the first Italian driver to win the title since Ascari (of the chicane), in 1953.
There is something so shocking—and so complete—about Antonelli’s racing this season that it makes people stand back a little in his presence, both out of admiration and also, to some extent, from fear, because they don’t want to disturb him in the slightest. When I met Wolff at Brackley to talk about his protégé, the first thing that he said, with celebration in his voice, was “He’s not a dick!” Later, Wolff spoke more soberly about the need to “condition him and calibrate him in the way that he stays like he is.”
This Formula 1 season was always going to be disruptive. Every few years, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, which regulates the sport, makes the teams redesign their cars. The changes for the 2026 season were the most dramatic in a long time: the cars became smaller and lighter, with more electric power and new driver controls for overtaking during a race. People have speculated that the new setup suits Antonelli’s driving style particularly well. His aggressive cornering helps him to better manage the car’s battery power through the course of a lap. But Wolff told me that Antonelli’s real advantage is his brain. This year’s cars are more complicated to drive—more settings, more modes, more lightning-quick decisions—and Antonelli has an unusual head for data. Wolff has compared him to an A.I. agent.
“He has this ability of processing quick, and kind of putting the pieces of puzzle together,” Wolff said. You can watch videos of Antonelli hanging out with fellow-drivers, in which they quiz him about lap times from years earlier, before he was in Formula 1. “You know when we did the race at Monza, in F4? What was your lap time in quali?” Oliver Bearman, who drives for Haas, asks Antonelli, of a race in 2021. “You wanna know?” Antonelli says, before offering “Fifty-two, nine.”(As in, one minute, fifty-two point nine seconds). Bearman checks his phone. Antonelli is right. Bedlam. Laughter. “Another one!” Antonelli calls out. “I like the challenge.”
Before this season began, Antonelli spent three weeks at the team factory, immersed in the new cars and their technological demands, “trying to make them become natural—like, secondhand,” he said, “so I don’t have to think too much about it while driving.” Like many drivers, Antonelli visualizes before he gets in the car. He closes his eyes, imagines the lights changing, and previews the course: turning the wheel, stiffening his body suddenly when his mind hits the brakes. “It’s always difficult to visualize perfectly,” he said. “For example, the length of a straight. But corners-wise? Yes.”
Antonelli told me that, during a race, he feels almost like a different person. “You’re so in the moment that you’re kind of disconnected from everything else,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t even realize what I’m doing. I’m just driving as if I put on autopilot.” The team radio can disrupt Antonelli’s concentration, so Wolff told me that the engineers have learned how to use it less often, or with fewer words. “He doesn’t realize any external world,” Wolff said. “Sometimes you see him getting out of the car and I see he’s physically there, but his brain is still in that car.” On the day after a race, Antonelli told me, he needs time alone, without his phone, to decompress. I asked him what that looked like. “Most of the time I just play on the simulator,” he said.
At Monza this year, Antonelli started on the penultimate row of the grid: in nineteenth position, out of twenty-two drivers. He was there because of a grid penalty—Mercedes had decided to use the race to upgrade his engine—and had close to no chance of victory. There have been more than eleven hundred Formula 1 races since the World Championship began, in 1950, and only two have been won by drivers who started in nineteenth place or below. “It felt strange at first,” Antonelli said. “Also, because of that, the weekend was a lot more relaxing in some ways.” Watching Antonelli on the track and in the garage in the days before the race, Wolff sensed an easiness about his driver. “He could only positively surprise,” he said.
At the team meeting on the morning of the race, the Mercedes computer models suggested that Antonelli might be able to finish as high as fifth place. “I was, like, Yeah, not bad. But I was, like, I feel I can do more today,” Antonelli said. In the stratified codes of Formula 1, élite cars and drivers that reach more than two hundred miles an hour but are unlikely to compete for the podium places are referred to as traffic. Antonelli’s challenge at Monza was to clear traffic. In the first seven laps, he overtook eleven cars. Two left the track. With forty-one laps to go, he found himself in fourth. “The mind-set shifted completely,” he said. “All of a sudden, now the only goal is to win.”
The leader was Russell, in the other Mercedes. By the sixteenth lap, about a third of the way through the race, the two were jostling at the front. “It’s the most difficult situation you can have—a younger guy that is faster than you,” Roberto Chinchero, a veteran correspondent for Motorsport, told me, of the dynamic between Russell and Antonelli. Last season, Antonelli’s race pace, on average, was about half a tenth of a second slower than Russell’s. This year, he is running about two-tenths quicker. In the course of a race, three-tenths of a second per lap adds up to more than half a mile. At the start of the year, Russell was widely expected to win his first World Championship. He was twenty-eight, in his prime, in the quickest car. “It was all George’s to lose. He was dominating Kimi last year,” Wolff said. “Then came this kiddo, and he won race after race after race.”
On lap twenty-eight, in Monza, an Aston Martin driven by Lance Stroll came to a halt at the side of the track. There was a “virtual safety car,” while the vehicle was being moved: the other drivers had to slow down, and they weren’t allowed to overtake one another. The V.S.C. was an opportunity for drivers to change their tires. But it was a fifty-fifty call. The Mercedes race data suggested that, if Antonelli made a pit stop and Russell stayed out on his old tires, then Russell would lose the race, but only by the slenderest of margins—around 0.6 seconds. The calculation was based on “free air,” meaning it didn’t take into account the time it would take for Antonelli to overtake other drivers, or other mishaps that could happen along the way.
When Antonelli emerged, on fresh tires, he was fifteen seconds behind Russell and back in sixth. Two laps later, he was in fourth. Russell asked the team to stop telling him the lap times over the radio. Antonelli was gaining much faster than he was supposed to. “This is why I love this sport so much,” Wolff said. “The human drove better than the data expected.” Chinchero was commentating on the race for Italian TV. “The pace was so strong,” he told me. “There is a kind of magic, you know, sometimes, when everything is perfect. You feel the car is like part of your body. That was Kimi in that moment.”
With five laps to go, Antonelli caught Russell. The two Mercedeses raced side by side. Wolff had his fingers poised over the radios to both drivers, to tell them to cool it. But he didn’t. “I was thinking, Is this Monza, 2024, again? Me not pushing the button and interfering, and watching this disaster unfold?” On lap forty-nine, at the first chicane, Antonelli’s car narrowly missed Russell’s and swung off the course and into the gravel. “I was, like, Shit,” Antonelli said. “I was just trying not to get biffed.” This year, though, his tires gripped. He powered down and resumed the chase. He passed Russell on the following lap and kept accelerating to the end.
Antonelli won the race by almost four seconds. Up in the commentary booth, Chinchero was on the edge of tears. “A lot of things together,” he explained. “I was moved.” He was born in 1968, two years after the most recent Italian driver won the Grand Prix at Monza. At a certain point, Chinchero realized, he had given up on the idea of seeing an Italian win the race again, let alone compete for a World Championship. As it happened, there was no Ferrari driver—the traditional focus for fans, who are known as tifosi—in the top three at Monza, meaning that Antonelli had the adulation of the crowd to himself. “If Kimi wins the World Championship,” Chinchero told me, “that is, in Italian, epocale.”
Antonelli’s driver number is twelve. He chose it in honor of Ayrton Senna, the Brazilian world champion, who used the number in the eighties. Senna holds an immortal presence in modern Formula 1 for the manner of his racing—ferocious, endowed with grace—and for his untimely death. Senna died after a high-speed crash at the Imola circuit in northern Italy, in 1994, at the age of thirty-four.
Antonelli was born in the hospital where Senna died twelve years earlier, and in certain photographs the drivers bear a vivid resemblance. Antonelli rejects comparisons with Senna—“I don’t feel like it’s very fair,” he told reporters in June—while simultaneously invoking them. At last year’s São Paulo Grand Prix, Antonelli visited Senna’s grave twice and sat nearby, reading a biography of his hero. When we met last month, at the Mercedes headquarters, Antonelli was wearing black shorts and a white Senninha T-shirt, from a Brazilian comic-book series that started a few months before Senna’s death.
It was early evening. Antonelli had spent the day on the simulator and working with the engineers. He was a few minutes late, because he had gone to the wrong building, and was lugging a backpack. While we spoke, he played with his Mercedes lanyard, wrapping the cord around his fingers and then letting it go. “He’s like an intern,” Wolff said.
Antonelli was preparing for three races in Asia: Baku, in Azerbaijan; Sepang, in Malaysia (where the Bahrain Grand Prix was taking place, owing to the war with Iran); and a night race on the streets of Singapore. Engine modes, track conditions, tire strategies. “Just trying to cover three hundred and sixty degrees,” he said. In humid race conditions, Formula 1 drivers lose between four and seven pounds of sweat. By Antonelli’s standards this year, the Asian races were successful rather than spectacular. (Since Monza, Wolff has told Russell and Antonelli that they can’t race through corners side by side.) He finished fifth in Baku, second in Malaysia, and third in Singapore.
But the results meant that he extended his lead in the World Championship, to the point where only a catastrophe can stop him now. “I’m just saying, probably we have something to celebrate in Austin, Mexico, or Brazil,” Chinchero said. Until then, Antonelli will spend as much time as possible in his preferred unthinking racing state: visualizing, in the simulator, on the track, not quite here. “It’s kind of like I regain consciousness,” he told me, of the moments when the radio barks, or the world intercedes, or he has to get out of the car. “But then,” he said, “I go back in.” ♦