Kimi Antonelli has conceded he “lowered the intensity” too much after a strong start to the Austrian Grand Prix weekend.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
That error in judgment meant the Mercedes driver headed into qualifying at the Red Bull Ring feeling “a bit tense”, and his grid-setting session failed to live up to the early promise of the weekend in Spielberg.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Ultimately only able to qualify fourth for the 71-lap race, that was predominantly due to another mistake the 19-year-old made, when he incorrectly believed double-waved yellow flags had been flown after Max Verstappen’s heavy crash at the end of Q3.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
In actuality, it was only a single-waved yellow flag, but Antonelli had already bailed out of his lap, whilst George Russell went on to snatch pole position.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
That misunderstanding consigned the Italian to the second row of the grid, but he did not feel his aborted effort would have been enough to better his Mercedes team-mate anyway, despite having had the measure of him up to that point.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
“It was a weekend where I started very strong, and I think because of that, I kind of lowered the intensity a bit too much,” Antonelli told media, including RacingNews365. “And coming to qualifying, I just felt a bit tense, driving-wise.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
“We were still up there, but I felt like I wasn\u2019t driving that well and not as free. Of course, the last lap, it went like that, but I was a tenth behind George, so it probably would have been P2, very close, but P2. Of course, it went like that.”\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Antonelli’s failure to capitalise on his impressive pace cascaded from there, and a messy start to the grand prix denied him the chance to fight for victory.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
He twice went off on the first lap, at Turn 1 and Turn 3, respectively, before going wide again at the first corner at the start of Lap 2 for good measure.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
But after that, the five-time grand prix winner displayed the levels of performance he had successfully extracted from his W17 on Friday, falling tantalisingly close to beating Verstappen to second in a last-lap dash to the chequered flag.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
“And obviously, starting from P4, first lap was really bad for me,” he added. “And then I really struggled with brakes, and I just lost a lot of time because I started to make mistakes.\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
“But then the second stint was a bit better, and then the third stint was really, really strong. The pace was just there, but of course fell a bit short.”\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kimi Antonelli has conceded he “lowered the intensity” too much after a strong start to the Austrian Grand…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":768297,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,827,830,828,831,829,826,813,823,825,806,805,824,803,804,822,85],"class_list":["post-768296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-daniel-ricciardo","tag-f1-calendar","tag-f1-live","tag-f1-results","tag-f1-standings","tag-ferrari","tag-formula-1","tag-lewis-hamilton","tag-max-verstappen","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motorsport","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-racing","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768296","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=768296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768296\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/768297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=768296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=768296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=768296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}