OPINION | Formula One: How Italian Kimi Antonelli is raising the bar

Last time an Italian hoisted his country’s flag on top of the Formula 1 world, the races still ran in black and white. In fact, Italians couldn’t even watch it, as televisions only arrived in the country in 1954, a year after Alberto Ascari’s final triumph in F1. Since then, Italy has proceeded to have a long list of legendary drivers piloting some of the finest machinery made to race around the world. At one point, with 256 starts, Italian Riccardo Patrese was the driver with the most races driven in F1, while also adding six Grand Prix wins to his name. Michele Alboreto, Giancarlo Fisichella, Elio de Angelis, and Jarno Trulli have all at least once stood on the top step of the podium, and seen the red, white, and green rise up above every other flag. Remarkably, Italy is also the home nation of Lella Lombardi, still the only female driver to have scored F1 World Championship points, with her half a point at the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix. 

Despite having no dearth of talent, and having the bragging rights to call the most successful (albeit the most erratic) Formula 1 team their own, Italians had to wait all the way from the grainy black-and-white days to the democratisation of streaming and 4K UHD to finally see one of their drivers become World Champion. Contrary to what popular estimates might have been, it didn’t even come from Ferrari—it came from the British-German Mercedes F1 Team, and a 20-year-old, Andrea Kimi Antonelli.

Kimi Antonelli is Bologna’s greatest contribution to the world after Spaghetti Bolognese. Although, he would rather have you say ragù, and that Bolognese is an ignorant bastardisation of his hometown’s favourite. Unless Bologna’s ragù lists an accelerating serum as one of its required ingredients, Kimi Antonelli’s rapid ascendancy to the top of the motorsporting world is inexplicable; such has been the speed with which he’s come from nowhere and taken the sport by storm. When you peel back the layers, though, it really isn’t that abrupt.

Kimi’s fortunes of being able to drive great F1 machinery at an apparently tender age attribute back to another one of the sport’s greats, Max Verstappen. Having made an unprecedented Formula 1 debut at the age of 17 in 2015, Verstappen’s camp—mostly his father and former driver Jos—had held preliminary discussions with Mercedes boss Toto Wolff regarding a future driver contract. However, due to possessing then three-time world champion Lewis Hamilton and soon-to-be-champion Nico Rosberg at his disposal, Toto never took Verstappen’s stake at the seat seriously, offering the Dutchman only a junior category or an associate team’s seat. Understandably, Wolff now looks back on the decision with regret—so he has stated several times—as Verstappen is now a five-time F1 World Champion, winning 73 races, all with Red Bull Racing.

Two years later, when the Mercedes Junior Team spotted a young Italian dominating the country’s karting competitions and staking a claim at the WSK Super Master Series, it was an opportunity that Toto was not willing to let go of. He wanted his ‘Project Verstappen’ to take off, and Kimi was his trump card. As was expected, he hit the ground running, winning six championships back-to-back after graduating to OK-Junior, the premier racing category for drivers under the age of 15. A few weeks after turning 15, Antonelli graduated from go-karts to open-wheel racing, doing a year in the Italian F4 Championship and finishing tenth overall as the highest-placed rookie.

Since 2022, however, Kimi hasn’t had to look back. Before making the ultimate step to the pinnacle of motorsport, Antonelli had racked up an impressive racing CV, with the Italian F4, ADAC F4, Formula Regional Middle East, and Formula Regional European (FRECA) championships to show for it. Moreover, after entirely bypassing FIA Formula 3, Kimi impressed in the testing ground for F1 drivers, Formula 2. With a sprint victory at Silverstone and a race victory at Budapest the following round, Antonelli finished sixth in the 2024 F2 standings in an inconsistent Prema, 38 points ahead of his teammate and (now) fellow F1 driver Ollie Bearman.

Interestingly—and unknown to many—in his road to Formula 1, India was one of Antonelli’s stops. Prior to his FRECA campaign in 2023, Kimi contested as one of the drivers for the Mumbai Falcons, the first all-Indian team in the racing category. In the twin rounds at Kuwait and Dubai, Antonelli won three out of the six races, and eased home with the championship with a race to spare, 40 points ahead of his closest competitor.

Despite having an enviable junior racing career, the way Antonelli was fast-tracked into one of the most coveted seats in Formula 1, as the replacement for outgoing seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton, raised more than a few eyebrows. To echo the sarcasm of Toto Wolff over the team radio of Kimi’s first win: “He’s too young, we shouldn’t put him in a Mercedes, put him in a smaller team, he needs the experience.” Given the context of 2026, any team other than Mercedes would’ve been too small to contain Kimi’s talent, which he was unearthing more and more of as an up-and-down 2025 season came to a close. 

At the Brazil Grand Prix, where it’s often said that the greatest drivers show their best, Antonelli finished second in all four competitive sessions, ahead of his teammate George Russell. When 2026 arrived, and even more so after the first race in Australia, it was expected that with the hegemonic Mercedes engine, backed by a constant stream of upgrades and a defined number one driver, George Russell would have a cakewalk to the Drivers’ World Championship title, and Mercedes to the Constructors’ one. Whilst the latter part has come to fruition, it has been Antonelli who has reaped most of the rewards of the Mercedes High Performance Power Unit made in Brixworth. Following a fifth-place finish in the China sprint ensuing a slow start, Antonelli became the youngest pole-sitter in F1 history, eclipsing Sebastian Vettel by nearly two years; he withstood an early Ferrari charge and won the main race by five seconds over Russell, further becoming the second-youngest Grand Prix winner and the first Italian victor since Giancarlo Fisichella in 2006. Since then, quite like his junior championships, Antonelli has continued to extend his lead over George Russell, and hasn’t looked back. 

Emerging out of the European leg of the season, racing on tracks he was familiar with, Antonelli led his teammate by 81 points. It was natural for any seasoned Formula 1 fan to anticipate that his lead would degrade over the course of the next few races, especially when he was going to be driving at tracks where he had never driven before. Now, with the ‘Americas’ leg of the season about to culminate, Kimi has wrapped up the Championship at Mexico City, and Ascari—finally—has his heir.

Kimi’s victory also serves as a reminder that within the objective and machinist nature of Formula 1, it is a sport that is unforgivingly poetic and rhapsodic.

How else do you explain Kimi Antonelli being born on the same weekend when Sebastian Vettel made his F1 debut in 2006, from whom he’s taken the mantle of the youngest-ever Formula 1 World Champion by 3 years and 66 days?

How else do you explain that his championship podium consisted of Max Verstappen—the man he was modelled after—and Lewis Hamilton—the man whom he was so casually asked to replace?

How else do you make sense of the Italian flag being mirrored on the red, white, and green present in abundant ubiquity at Mexico City, almost as though to celebrate him?

Antonelli’s juvenile burst of tears over the team radio after his championship win may endear audiences and remind them of his innocence off the tarmacs of Formula One. But on it, he’s an absolutely ruthless and consistent talent. Not having completed two full seasons in Formula 1 yet, Kimi Antonelli already has more victories than late-braking wizard Daniel Ricciardo, his teammate George Russell, and as many wins as the ultra-talented Charles Leclerc, as well as the man who almost won last year’s championship, Oscar Piastri.

Kimi Antonelli may have lowered the age of an average F1 World Champion; in 2026, however, he has been the gold standard—he has been the one raising the bar.