The youngest of Formula 1’s rookie class, Andrea Kimi Antonelli is facing the daunting task of replacing Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes, but the team is confident some of the attributes that made him stand out in karting will help him ease into the seat.
Born in 2006, the year Fernando Alonso won his second world championship, Antonelli will be F1’s youngest driver on the 2025 grid after being prepared to replace Ferrari-bound Hamilton.
Antonelli was picked up by Mercedes as an 11-year-old in go-karting and under the guise of Mercedes’ driver development advisor Gwen Lagrue the Italian continued his march through the European karting scene.
Soon after his 15th birthday Antonelli switched to cars in the 2021 Italian F4 championship, leading to dual titles the following year in Italy and in the German F4 championship. His rookie year in Formula Regional Europe or FRECA also yielded a championship crown, and instead of progressing to F3 for 2024, Mercedes decided to immediately drop him into F2 in just his third full-time junior formula year.
Hamilton’s decision to leave for Ferrari then prompted Mercedes to accelerate his development even further, ramping up a private testing programme to prepare the youngster to eventually replace the seven-time world champion.
It is an enormous weight to be placed on a teenager, especially with Antonelli’s relative lack of single-seater experience, and the jury is still out on whether the 18-year-old will be ready for it. But if anything, the adaptability Antonelli will need to succeed in his rapid rise to F1 is the very attribute that Mercedes felt made him so special to begin with.
“With Kimi I noticed quite quickly he was already a bit different than other kids in karting,” Lagrue told Motorsport.com. “But back then my thought was: ‘Okay, he’s the best one I can have in go-karts’, not even thinking about Formula 1.
Andrea Kimi Antonelli
“Then when we did the first test in single-seaters, the way he adapted himself so quickly to pretty much every situation you started seeing that you have someone very special.
“Of course, that doesn’t mean he has everything. You still need to work a lot to help him to grow, to guide him, to also let him make mistakes. It’s part of the learning process. And then, to me, Formula Regional has developed quite well recently in terms of driver preparation and we have seen over the years that all the kids coming from it – or before when it was called…
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