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“Maybe it’s a chance to do something bold.”
Less than 24 hours after Mercedes had announced Lewis Hamilton would leave at the end of the season to join Ferrari in 2025, Toto Wolff already had an idea in mind.
He always knew this could happen. The one-plus-one-year contract Hamilton signed with Mercedes less than six months prior in August included an exit clause at the end of 2024. When Ferrari called, Hamilton couldn’t resist the chance to race for F1’s most famous team.
It left Wolff with a tough question to answer. How do you replace the greatest driver in F1 history?
A succession plan had long been in place; it just wasn’t expected to be required this soon. George Russell, a product of Mercedes’ young driver program, was the future leader. Someday, he’d be joined by Andrea Kimi Antonelli, the Italian youngster Mercedes first met as a karting sensation and brought onto its academy books in 2019.
Now Wolff had to decide whether to accelerate that plan. “To do something bold.” To put his faith in a driver who would be just 18 by the time he joined the grid.
There was no need to rush through a decision. Mercedes had the time and its pick of the market, allowing Wolff to court Max Verstappen if he wanted away from Red Bull. It also gave Antonelli time to continue building his experience in private F1 testing and Formula Two, giving Mercedes a wealth of data to assess his performance.
But a decision did have to be made. It finally arrived on Saturday at the Italian Grand Prix that Antonelli would graduate to F1 next year with Mercedes.
Not since Max Verstappen joined the grid in 2015 has there been such hype around a young driver. Filling the seat vacated by Hamilton is daunting for anyone, much less an 18-year-old. But it’s one Mercedes is confident Antonelli is ready to fulfill.
Antonelli’s star quality
To go for such a young driver with no prior F1 racing experience is a first for Mercedes. Its approach to developing young drivers has traditionally been very methodical, letting them adjust to each level without any pressure to rush up the racing ladder. George Russell went through F3 and Formula Two before moving up to F1 at Williams, only securing a Mercedes seat in his fourth season on the grid when he was 24.
For Antonelli, Mercedes abandoned that plan entirely. After Antonelli won titles in Formula Four and Formula Regional, the decision to fast-track him to F2 for this year instead of putting him into F3 was a sign that it saw something special in the Italian.
The F2 campaign has not been an easy one for Antonelli. His team, Prema, struggled to adjust to the new-spec car for 2024, particularly with tire management. It limited what Antonelli and teammate Oliver Bearman — whose star Ferrari cameo in Jeddah led to a seat with Haas for 2025 — could do in the early part of the season. Antonelli’s first win in the Silverstone sprint race was, by his admission, a weight off his shoulders, before an impressive feature race victory in Hungary provided a further uplift. At Spa, he made a daring overtake up the inside of Eau Rouge, which will surely grace future highlight reels.
Kimi Antonelli overtaking an F1 driver through eau rouge. My goat 🐐
pic.twitter.com/j6wFOTEAgz— ama ☆ (@p1ntonelli) August 27, 2024
F2 wasn’t ever going to be make-or-break for Antonelli’s Mercedes prospects. The team already had extensive private testing planned for him going into 2024, putting him behind the wheel of its previous F1 cars to see how he would fare. Wolff even joked that Antonelli’s first test at the Red Bull Ring in Austria back in April was deliberately in the Mercedes W12 from 2021 so the Italian would know “what a really good car feels like” before moving onto the oft-maligned 2022 Mercedes, the most recent car available.
Mercedes was delighted with what it saw from Antonelli. The nature of the new F2 cars, particularly the difficulty of tire management, makes it harder for the driver to push flat out than in F1. His performances in testing offered a more meaningful reading for the team of how he was progressing.
James Allison, Mercedes’ technical director, described Antonelli in May as being “very, very fast” and “metronomic in his pace” through the tests. “He has not been in an F1 car until recently but made it look like he’d been in one for ages within a lap or two,” he said.
It is that kind of rapid adaptation that Mercedes hopes to exploit next year. As valuable as taking time at the lower levels can be, developing in the full F1 environment could make Antonelli’s trajectory even steeper and more lucrative for Mercedes.
The upside of backing a rookie
After Mercedes decided to pass on Sainz, the only driver who could deny Antonelli the seat alongside Russell for 2025 was Verstappen. Despite being under contract at Red Bull until 2028, the tension within the team this year meant there was always a faint hope from Wolff that Verstappen might become available. Talks did take place with the Verstappen camp, and Wolff remains hopeful they will unite someday, be it in 2026 or beyond.
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But Verstappen’s influence in Antonelli’s promotion goes far beyond him not taking that seat. It actually reaches back 10 years to 2014, when a 16-year-old Verstappen was looking for a place on the F1 grid.
The Dutchman starred in go-karting and immediately thrived upon stepping up to single-seater cars despite going straight to Formula Three (most do Formula Four and Formula Regional before F3), leading to a wealth of interest from F1 teams with junior programs.
Red Bull and Mercedes were the two leading teams, but there was one big difference: Red Bull could offer Verstappen an F1 drive for 2015 with its junior team, Toro Rosso. Mercedes could not. Wolff told Verstappen and his father, Jos, they should take the Red Bull offer.
The rest is history. That bold call by Red Bull paid off handsomely as it landed the outstanding driver of his generation, eventually leading to an unprecedented period of domination. For Wolff, Verstappen always seemed like the one who got away.
Antonelli and Wolff speak at the Circuit de Monaco in May. (Sipa USA)
With a driver of Antonelli’s quality, Wolff can make up for it. There will always be a risk in fielding a rookie, particularly at a top team, and Verstappen is proof that such boldness can be rewarded. So is the driver Antonelli will replace: Hamilton, who has endorsed Antonelli for months now, debuted with McLaren in 2007 and was one point away from becoming a rookie champion.
“That’s what McLaren did for me, and it worked out well,” Hamilton said. “In my opinion, it’s just an opportunity for him to grow. He would get to work with the best in class, learn from people that I’ve worked with for so many, many years. But it is a lot of weight on someone’s shoulders.”
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Why the FP1 crash didn’t matter
Antonelli’s FP1 bow at Monza on Friday would always be different from the tests. He’d be out on the track with 19 other drivers, dealing with the unique stresses of a grand prix weekend. But Antonelli’s debut session ended after just 10 minutes following a mistake at Parabolica, resulting in a 52G crash at the final corner. Antonelli got out of the car unassisted and quickly apologized to the team, but Wolff reassured him on the radio that it was “all good.”
Antonelli into the wall! 💥
It’s a high-speed spin into the barrier at Parabolica for the youngster, who reports over the radio that he’s OK.
The red flags are out 🔴#F1 #ItalianGP pic.twitter.com/aQQQPqjaeb
— Formula 1 (@F1) August 30, 2024
“(It was) just a mistake by my side, pushing a bit too much for the conditions,” Antonelli said after the session. “I should have built the run a bit more progressively. But definitely, lesson learned for next time.”
There’s no sugarcoating that the crash was not how Antonelli or Mercedes envisaged this weekend, one that was planned to be about celebrating his ascension to an F1 seat and looking to the future. But it would never have a material impact on Mercedes’ thinking over Antonelli. “I think (what is) most important is to hire based on ability,” Wolff said. “An FP1 that’s gone wrong is not the reason why you decide for or against the driver.”
From the glimpse Wolff got of Antonelli in FP1, he said Mercedes would “rather have a problem in slowing him down than making him faster because what we’ve seen from one-and-a-half laps is just astonishing.” Wolff said Antonelli’s next FP1 outing was still to be confirmed but would likely be in Mexico at the end of October.
The spotlight on Antonelli is so bright it could be blinding. To fly the flag for Italy, a country so steeped in F1 history but starved of success, is pressure enough. Then you factor in driving for Mercedes, one of F1’s front-running teams, and filling the shoes of Hamilton. Antonelli will need to take all of that in his stride next year.
Almost eight months to the day that Hamilton announced his Ferrari move, Wolff has made good on his thought of doing something bold. Now, it is up to Antonelli to take full advantage of this rare, exciting opportunity for a rookie.
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Mercedes’ next F1 star? Andrea Kimi Antonelli prepares for his next step
Top photo: Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto; Design: Meech Robinson/The Athletic
