Antonelli Turned Monza, His Worst Venue, Into the Win That Put the Title Within Reach

The venue that humbled Kimi Antonelli twice ended up paving his road to the title. Monza gave the teenager a wrecked car on his practice debut in 2024 and a ninth-place finish in 2025 that drew Toto Wolff's first public criticism. In 2026 it gave him a win from 19th on the grid, and with it the momentum that made the title a matter of when rather than if. Third place in Mexico City on Sunday made him, at the age of 20, the youngest world champion the sport has produced.

The easy version of this story is a prodigy fulfilling his billing. The more interesting one is that the billing nearly collapsed, and that the recovery owes something to how Mercedes handled the wreckage.

A gamble made by a team that had just lost Hamilton

In February 2024, Lewis Hamilton stunned Mercedes by revealing he was off to Ferrari for the following year. He had delivered six of his seven titles while at the team. Wolff now had to find a partner for George Russell, and the names in circulation were heavyweight ones: Max Verstappen looked like the prime objective, with Fernando Alonso and Carlos Sainz as seasoned fallback options.

The outsider was Antonelli, spotted by Mercedes during a dominant run in European karting and tied to the team in 2019 at 12 years old. Mercedes sent him past Formula 3 and into Formula 2 in 2024, where he ended up sixth, a season Sky Sports calls slightly underwhelming. Whether Wolff first planned to lend him to another outfit, as with Russell and his first three F1 seasons at Williams, is unclear. Hamilton's departure took that route off the table.

Antonelli was given a testing programme with no precedent, covering big chunks of mileage in Mercedes cars from recent seasons. My reading is that those runs, far more than the F2 results, are what won Wolff over. Some also suggested Wolff did not want to repeat the miss with Verstappen, whom he failed to sign as a teenager a decade earlier, but that is speculation.

The task was unusual in scale. Antonelli stepped into the seat of the sport's most decorated driver, and the one close precedent was Verstappen's promotion from Red Bull's junior squad. Even then, Verstappen already had 23 Grands Prix behind him.

The year the doubts arrived

Mercedes built the announcement around the 2024 Italian Grand Prix. Antonelli would take part in F1 practice for the first time on Friday, and the contract news would follow on Saturday. That is how it played out, but only once he had spun into a barrier at speed 10 minutes into the session and wrecked the car.

His first F1 qualifying, in Melbourne six months later, finished with a Q1 knockout. He recovered with a composed wet-weather run to fourth and a broadly sound opening to the campaign, while Sprint pole in Miami gave an early taste of the pace people had been promised. His first Grand Prix podium arrived in Canada in June.

After that, things went sideways. Antonelli triggered a collision with Verstappen in Austria and tangled with Ferrari's Charles Leclerc in the Netherlands. In Belgium, following an early exit in qualifying, he was pictured wiping tears away with a tissue while still doing his media work. Over five races he took only one point, and Monza then brought a practice crash that upset his build-up before he came home ninth.

The comparison inside the team made it worse. The Mercedes W16 was far from the class of the field, yet Russell had still placed it in the top five at five of those six races.

Wolff, who had stood by his driver all season, then went public with criticism for the first time. "Underwhelming this weekend, underwhelming," he said, adding that a driver cannot park the car in the gravel and expect to be competitive. He insisted his faith remained, but his words prompted questions over how long Mercedes would wait without improvement.

Improvement came. Antonelli produced a stronger last stretch of the year, topped by another wet-weather drive in Brazil that earned a season's-best second place. That was the point at which a promising rookie started to look like a proper racing driver rather than a project.

Regulations reset the grid, and Antonelli arrived with it

Fresh chassis and power unit rules for 2026 wiped the competitive slate. Mercedes had not been title contenders through the 2022 to 2025 regulations, and they began the year as favourites, with paddock chatter that they had nailed the new engine just as they did in 2014.

Team-level change was predicted. Driver-level change was not, and Russell was seen as the obvious pick for the drivers' crown. He supported that view with pole and victory at the opening race in Australia. Antonelli, in contrast, rescued second place after a needless crash in final practice had put him at risk of starting last, a result Sky Sports views as possibly more significant over the long run.

Then the run began. Russell hit technical trouble in qualifying for the Chinese Grand Prix, Antonelli claimed pole and won a day later, and further wins followed in Japan, Miami, Canada and Monaco. That made five in a row, the first five victories of his career. By Monaco, where Antonelli was dominant and Russell took 12th at a venue few expected Mercedes to win, it was plain to everyone that Antonelli had truly arrived. Russell was initially in denial and pointed to outside factors, and was left dumbfounded by what was happening to his title hopes.

Wolff admitted his own surprise. After 30 or more years spent trying to work out how racing drivers think, he said, he still could not explain what changed in Antonelli over the winter.

The summer wobble, then Monza

The run was not free of setbacks. An engine failure cost Antonelli a podium in Barcelona, and a wheel-guard failure robbed him of a possible win at the British Grand Prix a few weeks later. Russell closed to within 25 points, with Hamilton a further seven points back, and Mercedes were no longer as commanding as they had been in the early rounds.

Antonelli replied with victory in Belgium and podiums on both sides of the summer break, rebuilding his advantage. Compare that with last year, when Oscar Piastri looked set for a first title before a sharp decline left him third in the standings. Antonelli seemed to improve under pressure.

Then came Monza. Considering what had happened to him there before, there appeared to be a psychological angle to the choice for him to take an engine penalty, which sent him to 19th on the grid and may have eased the burden he had carried at his home race. That is Sky Sports' reading rather than a confirmed motive. The outcome, though, is beyond dispute: he sliced through the field and won with ease, in a performance Sky Sports ranks next to Verstappen in Brazil in 2024, Hamilton in Germany in 2018 and Michael Schumacher in Belgium in 1995.

Two other consequences raised its value. It deflated Russell, who had begun the race second, and changed the title question from if to when. It also won over the tifosi: many Ferrari supporters ended up cheering for Antonelli and singing the Italian anthem while he stood on the top step.

The pattern is tidy enough to seem scripted: a crash on debut, a ninth place that drew Wolff's first public criticism, then a win at the same track from the back. The point is not poetry. Monza was where his flaws had shown most clearly, and he took it off the list of problems on his own terms.

Austin completes the case, Mexico City confirms it

Austin showed a different strength. Antonelli coped with Mercedes' difficulties around their new upgrade package, took pole away from an in-form Verstappen, and then won comfortably in a race that proved unexpectedly one-sided. Sky Sports notes that this suggests the development direction Mercedes have chosen has promise, which matters because Red Bull and Verstappen look ready to challenge again in 2027.

Wolff labelled it Antonelli's "best race" in F1, until someone mentioned Monza seven weeks earlier. He conceded he might have been a little forgetful but argued the two drives deserved to sit together.

After Austin the arithmetic turned Mexico City into something close to a title parade. Antonelli nonetheless fought through illness and nerves to take third, and the podium delivered the picture of the weekend: winner Verstappen and runner-up Hamilton, the two most successful drivers currently racing, hoisting him onto their shoulders. Sebastian Vettel, whose record Antonelli took, sent his congratulations.

Why the rest of the grid should worry

The unsettling thought for rivals, and for Russell above all, is that Antonelli should in theory keep progressing. Wolff said in Austin that "the work of nine years" and more than £10m had gone into his development. Mercedes have also allowed him to behave like someone his age, with clips of him playing pranks on engineers, and being targeted in return, posted on the team's social channels all season.

His father Marco, a former racing driver, has been a regular presence in the paddock while holding back enough not to cause the team too many headaches. Antonelli is almost universally liked, and even McLaren's Andrea Stella spoke of pride and excitement as an Italian.

There are commercial consequences too. Sky Sports suggests Antonelli may be on the verge of becoming Italy's most popular sportsman, given the slump of the men's football team and Jannik Sinner's injury problems. The same assessment says the question of whether he follows Hamilton from Mercedes to Ferrari probably will not fade until it happens, whether in five, 10 or 15 years.

Formula 1 next goes to the Sao Paulo Grand Prix, from 6 to 8 November. Brazil, where he took second last year, is a decent place to start the defence of a title he has already won.