You win world championships on your bad days as much as you do on your good ones.<\/p>\n
Kimi Antonelli’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix weekend, which he rightly described as “the worst by far” of the season, was proof of that as he passed a test he would inevitably face at some point with flying colours. In doing so, he avoided a fate that befell Oscar Piastri in last year’s unsuccessful pursuit of the Formula 1 title.<\/p>\n
Minimising such performances is part of the title-winning equation, but it’s essential to limit the damage when things go wrong. We knew Antonelli had the comfort of a gargantuan 81-point lead heading into the weekend, but what he demonstrated in Baku was he understands how to use it. That’s something Piastri failed to do with the more slender, but still healthy, 31-point lead he took to Baku in 2025.<\/p>\n
Piastri crashed in qualifying, moved before the start and knew a penalty was inevitable despite plummeting down the order, then crashed at Turn 5 on the first lap. The only saving grace was that McLaren team-mate and title rival Lando Norris didn’t make the most of his opportunity, but even so this represented the start of Piastri’s campaign unravelling.<\/p>\n
I asked him during that year’s Brazilian GP weekend about his struggles and it was Azerbaijan that he mentioned as a weekend when “you could argue there were some other things that maybe crept in” and compromised him. It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that he was pointing to the hangover of the ‘papaya rules’ incident from Monza where he was ordered to let Norris past after his team-mate’s slow pitstop.<\/p>\n
Even without the complicating factor of such team-orders bafflement, Antonelli could so easily have let something similar happen, especially given he’s still so inexperienced, after hitting the wall needlessly in Q1.<\/p>\n
That was a significant error given there was no reason to take risks so early in qualifying. That blunder was perhaps the consequence of overreaching to close the pace deficit to Mercedes team-mate George Russell, perhaps because of his longstanding tendency to flirt a little too much with the extremities of the track this year, but while ideally he wouldn’t have made the error he took exactly the right mentality into the race.<\/p>\n
His recovery to fifth was aided by the safety car, but it was a steady, well-executed drive in which he deliberately left a margin and kept his head after sustaining floor damage through no fault of his own after contact with Ollie Bearman in the Turn 1 chaos of the first safety-car restart.<\/p>\n
“I was driving a bit like my grandmother, just damage-safe mode, just didn’t take a risk,” said Antonelli. “Before making a move, I was making sure that I could go for it.”<\/p>\n
This showed wisdom that belies his inexperience that is often hard-won and at great cost by drivers who aren’t such fast learners. He later elaborated on his reasons for this, as well as indicating that he quickly set aside any pretensions of a Monza-style recovery early in the grand prix. While he suggested he had “nothing to lose” after qualifying, when he spoke following the race he explained why that wasn’t really the case.<\/p>\n
“If I had the same pace as at Monza or in previous races, it would have been different,” said Antonelli. “It would have been full attack. But I realised very early that, first of all, it was a lot harder to overtake with a train of cars all in overtake mode. And then I didn’t have the same pace as I had previously. So the mindset changed very quickly.<\/p>\n
“And also seeing so many people doing mistakes, you kind of pulled back a little bit. I just took advantage of everyone else’s mistake and just moved forward.”<\/p>\n
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff and others around him will have drummed that approach into him, but only Antonelli himself could lock into a mindset at odds with the attacking one that usually serves him so well. The result was losing 15 points to Russell in the championship rather than 25. A big hit, but not as big as it could have been.<\/p>\n
Had he been too aggressive and crashed or collided with a rival and retired, the points loss would be multiplied by the mental scars he would carry into the run-in. Instead, Antonelli could finish a race he described as driving at 80% satisfied with his approach and able to lay down the gauntlet to Russell for the coming race in Malaysia.<\/p>\n
“I’ll make sure next week I re-establish the order and just make sure that I will be back at my usual level because this weekend I was driving more like a grandmother,” he said. “So it wasn’t the usual Kimi. But, luckily, we have another race coming up and I’m really looking forward to it.”<\/p>\n
Antonelli has showed his class time and again during 2026 with his pulverising pace and relentlessness. In Baku, he showed a different aspect that’s just as important in the make-up of a champion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You win world championships on your bad days as much as you do on your good ones. Kimi…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":907461,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[573],"tags":[64,63,817,813,816,85],"class_list":["post-907460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-formula-1","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-f1","tag-formula-1","tag-formula1","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907460","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=907460"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907460\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/907461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=907460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=907460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=907460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}