Finally, it’s out: Andrea Kimi Antonelli will race for Mercedes as Ferrari-bound Lewis Hamilton’s replacement in the 2025 Formula 1 season.
In signing with the Silver Arrows squad, Antonelli breaks a long tradition, which stretches back 70 years to 1954 and the season Karl Kling made his world championship F1 debut for Mercedes alongside the legendary Juan Manuel Fangio and co.
Their career paths are starkly different. Kling’s early motorsport successes – achieved at an older age anyway given how things went back during motorsport’s infancy – were interrupted by the Second World War and so he was nearly 44 by the time he made his world championship F1 debut. Antonelli is a fresh-faced 18-year-old. Each is the product of very different ages.
The closer comparison for Antonelli is, of course, Red Bull’s Max Verstappen. Once a Mercedes target during a rapid run up and across the junior ranks, it was his making good on brilliantly burgeoning potential as a teenager that in effect forced Toto Wolff’s hand here. He simply didn’t want to miss out a second time with a highly-rated youngster.
PLUS: Why comparisons between Antonelli and Verstappen go beyond their driving talent
But such a decision doesn’t come without risks for Mercedes, Antonelli, Wolff and George Russell. For the last named, although memories of his breakthrough 2014 BRDC Formula 4 title, that year’s 2CV Oulton Park race and then hard-fought later rise through successive GP3 and Formula 2 titles are still recent, Russell is suddenly no longer Mercedes’ star in waiting.
It’s now up to him to lead the team – one which is still climbing back towards the dominant position it once occupied in F1, with all the peril of possible sudden plunges down the mountain face of the championship’s compact constructors’ battle.
Russell simply must beat Antonelli convincingly in 2025 to ensure his stock remains high, because Wolff just won’t stop publicly courting Verstappen. On one level this could be a shrewd tactic to keep the pressure on Mercedes’ Red Bull rival, still seemingly flailing from the fallout of its early 2024 scandal and design missteps.
Russell knows that beating Antonelli will be important to keep his stock high
Photo by: Mercedes AMG
But equally if Wolff senses that there is a chance to finally make good on what he views as a relationship that “needs to happen at a certain stage” with the Dutchman, as he said earlier…
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