Mercedes believes the challenges Andrea Kimi Antonelli endured in Formula 2 in 2024 have better prepared him to deal with tough moments in his rookie Formula 1 campaign.
Having missed out on an audacious move to sign Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, Mercedes elected to promote Antonelli to the seat that Lewis Hamilton has vacated to go to Ferrari.
The news that Hamilton would be departing almost 12 months ago triggered Mercedes to put Antonelli through a rigorous F1 testing schedule last term to assess his credentials.
The Italian dovetailed his sole F2 season with trips to various European venues to run previous Mercedes cars, amounting to an estimated 9000 kilometres in total mileage.
Meanwhile, Antonelli also participated in two FP1 sessions using the 2024 Mercedes, showing scintillating speed at Monza until he crashed the W15 on his second push lap.
Mercedes announced Antonelli will partner George Russell later that weekend, though, capping a meteoric rise that has seen him not spend longer than a season in a series.
But while the pressure will be greater as he embarks upon his F1 debut with a team harbouring title aspirations, Mercedes is certain Antonelli has the attributes to excel.
Among those traits are his adaptability, an asset he will need to depend upon in F1 and one that made him stand out to Mercedes Driver Development Advisor Gwen Lagrue.
“With Kimi I noticed quite quickly he was already a bit different than other kids in karting,” Lagrue told Autosport.
“But back then my thought was: ‘Okay, he’s the best one I can have in go-karts’, not even thinking about Formula 1.
“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 Formula Renault Eurocup – to F3 or F2; they were performing, and they were most of the time the ones winning.
“So, when Kimi did perform that well in FRECA, I was not super convinced at that time that first going to F3 will develop him more, and I wanted also to put himself In a situation where eventually he could face more challenges, and sending him to F2, of course, it required a bit of preparation.
“But it was also to put him into an environment where he had to find some personal limit he never faced before. I’m not saying that he won always easily, but kind of.
“He was always dominating, and he was always the one to beat, rather than the one chasing someone, even if we had some good competitors, like [Ferrari Junior Rafael] Camara, for example, or a few others, he was on top of everything.
“So by doing that, we were making sure that first he will learn the new F2 with the idea of eventually doing another year of F2 if it was challenging, or depending on the situation in F1, make sure that at least we will accelerate his preparation to Formula 1. Of course, he was confirming what we were thinking series after series, let’s say.”
Antonelli’s character-building F2 campaign
Despite skipping Formula 3, Antonelli was tipped to hit the ground running in F2 with Prema, a team which has helped several drivers to F1 with the title in the second tier.
But the Italian marque struggled with the all-new F2 car introduced in 2024, leaving Antonelli and Oliver Bearman, now in F1 with Haas, powerless to log the results expected.
Antonelli’s standalone season in the series at least comprised two wins, enough to see him place sixth, three spots above team-mate Bearman in his sophomore campaign.
However, it was Antonelli’s response to the setbacks that impressed Mercedes more and assured the German marque that he can survive the hardships to come in F1.
“I would say that normally you have a certain consistency in terms of teams leading F2, so we know that Prema, ART, Carlin, or a few others are the teams you have to work with if you want to deliver in F2,” Lagrue explained. “But the new F2 actually brought some new challenges, and we have seen that the big teams were not adapting that well to F2.
“Prema was performing super well and had top engineers. We put Kimi in there thinking, we will put him in a very strong environment, and we will normally deliver strong results. And it appears that we struggled a little bit.
“But in a way, it was also very interesting because having Kimi dealing with such challenges made us discover part of him we haven’t seen before. We had to help him to deal with difficult weekends, which never happened before. He was used to winning all the time, or to fighting for the win, and this year was the first time actually he had to deal with not winning and not performing, and sometimes even have really, really tough weekends.
“And I have to say that I was very impressed with his maturity and his leadership in such a difficult situation. And at the end of the day, he has still done a very, very strong season in F2 considering all we had to deal with this year.”
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