{"id":30305,"date":"2025-07-29T15:54:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T15:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/30305\/"},"modified":"2025-07-29T15:54:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T15:54:08","slug":"antonelli-entering-an-f1-rookie-spiral-isnt-unexpected-now-is-the-time-for-mercedes-to-back-him","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/30305\/","title":{"rendered":"Antonelli entering an F1 rookie spiral isn&#8217;t unexpected \u2013 now is the time for Mercedes to back him"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Up until 2024&#8217;s British Grand Prix weekend, there was only a concept of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.autosport.com\/driver\/andrea-kimi-antonelli\/953410\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Andrea Kimi Antonelli<\/a> among the majority of those in the Formula 1 media. An image. There was, among the more learned journalists in the paddock, knowledge of his results &#8211; ADAC and Italian F4 titles, followed by the Formula Regional European Championship crown &#8211; but few had seen him race.<\/p>\n<p>And when they did, as Antonelli emerged on F1&#8217;s undercard in 2024 with a Prema drive in F2, few had heard him speak. That was largely by design; knowing that Antonelli had been touted as the next generational talent in F1, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.autosport.com\/team\/mercedes\/36495\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Mercedes<\/a> wanted to ensure that the young Italian was kept protected from the more capricious side of publicity. This was understandable; the jump from FRECA to F2 was already sizeable and came without the intermediate step of F3, as Mercedes presumably felt that a year in &#8216;The Series Formerly Known as GP3&#8217; would be a wasted expense.<\/p>\n<p>In this article<\/p>\n<p>Be the first to know and subscribe for real-time news email updates on these topics<\/p>\n<p>    Subscribe to news alerts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Up until 2024&#8217;s British Grand Prix weekend, there was only a concept of Andrea Kimi Antonelli among the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30306,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[12295,64,63,814,815,817,813,816,945,85],"class_list":["post-30305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-andrea-kimi-antonelli","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-belgian-gp","tag-circuit-de-spa-francorchamps","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-mercedes","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30305\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}