A little bit of history was made in Shanghai on Saturday, when Kimi Antonelli became the youngest driver to take a pole position for a Grand Prix. (Notwithstanding the fact that he beat the same bunch of guys to take pole in the Miami sprint race 11 months ago.) On Sunday, he followed up by becoming the sport’s second-youngest winner after Max Verstappen, when he took advantage of a bad start by Mercedes teammate George Russell to pull away, having overcome initial leader Lewis Hamilton.
He couldn’t have asked to stand atop the podium alongside two more appropriate guys than Russell and former Mercedes man Hamilton, whose shoes he had the near-impossible task of filling. They were also joined by engineer Peter “Bono” Bonnington, who accompanied Hamilton on his run of world championships with the team.
His first win could easily have come last year, had Mercedes been more consistently competitive in a season dominated by McLaren and Red Bull. It then became nearly inevitable in 2026, given the form shown by the team in testing and in Australia. Nevertheless, beating Russell fair and square in only the second race with the new cars was a very impressive effort.
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It was also redemption for Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff, the man who scooped up Antonelli for the manufacturer’s junior program when he was still in karting and made the bold call for him to jump from Formula Regional to F2 in 2024 without that near-standard extra year of education in F3. And it was Wolff who insisted that he would be ready at the end of that season to replace Hamilton at Mercedes for 2025, essentially on the basis that he could do his rookie year under the old rules and thus be ready to win when the 2026 regs came in and Mercedes believed it would have a winning package.
And the plan has worked perfectly, despite some ups and downs in that first year. There were mistakes, notably one that also took Verstappen out at the start of the Austrian GP last year. There was a patch where Antonelli struggled with a suspension package that the team later rolled back on, and a period when he lost a bit of confidence. At one point, Wolff publicly chastised him by calling his performance “underwhelming.” But through the whole journey he remained refreshingly honest, always open with the media about where he could have done better. And crucially, he banked that knowledge and improved. He thus came into 2026 a much stronger package, ready to take advantage of a much better car.
And we saw signs of that maturity in Australia. He had a heavy crash in FP3 on Saturday, which was not ideal, but he was not the only one to be caught out by these tricky new cars. The crucial thing was the way he put that behind him, jumped in a rebuilt machine that was finished so late it was barely set up, and went out and qualified a close second to Russell. For Wolff, that was a sign of how much he has grown in the last year or so.
“Massively, I think,” said the Austrian. “From a personality [standpoint], you can already see that the way he digests failure is much better. When he went off in on Saturday morning [in Melbourne] was not like he carried that whole thing into the briefing. He came in and said, that wasn’t good, but he can compartmentalize. And he said, okay, let’s move on. And then it wasn’t there anymore.”
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And Wolff says that ability is a key element of success. “I think this is a feature that I’ve seen with great sports people: that you make the mistake, you analyze, you look at the data, you find your answers, and then you put it in a box. And that’s what he’s doing. And the interaction in the engineering room, that’s just so much maturity that that he has learned over the last 12 months.”
Shanghai provided further proof of his progress, although he gave the team a scare with a brake-locking moment that sent him briefly off track as he pressed on in the late stages. If that was a wake-up call, it worked, and he crossed the line safely ahead of Russell. “I said to him that sometimes it’s not necessary to push it all the way to the edge when we’re in a free practice session, like a little bit the end of the race,” Wolff said after the flag. “And for a young driver, that is key—to just align the driving, to not make any mistakes at all. And that needs a certain calibration. Like the massive up and downs we had last year. We’re going to have other moments this year where there will be mistakes, because he’s just still a very young man.”
For Wolff, the first win was a form of redemption, as he made clear in team radio comments in which he addressed those who’d criticized Mercedes for taking on such a young and inexperienced guy. “When things go bad, there are the people that come out and say that was a bad decision, and Mercedes took too much risk,” said Wolff after the race. “It was never really harsh criticism, because people recognize the talent that he has. But there were many voices within the sport and outside that said that was a mistake to do. So it [was] nice to have a little remark.”
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Having followed Antonelli from his karting days, he knew that the youngster had what it takes, and the rest of the world had to catch up. “As a driver, you can learn a lot,” Wolff noted. “If you drive many laps in whatever category, in go-karting or junior Formulas, you will come to a certain level, but you can never learn raw speed.”
He says that natural ability is the real key to success, although ultimately, a top driver needs to have the whole package—both the things you can learn and the things you can’t. “He has that, and there’s not many that have that,” the Austrian went on. “You can be a grand prix winner without having it. You can maybe even fight for a world championship, if the odds are in your favor with a good car. But to become a really big champion, that is necessary.”
“Having said that, that’s not enough to become a great champion. It needs the maturity, the personality, it needs the humility, the intelligence, the empathy around the team, there are like 20 factors that matter to become a great world champion. But that one you can’t learn, he has—and that’s the talent.”
Wolff is now trying to keep the pressure off Antonelli as expectations rise further, with the inevitable suggestion he will be in a title fight with Russell. “You can kind of see the hype that it’s going to start now, especially in Italy—I see already the headlines, “World Champion,” “Grande Kimi,” and whatever. And that’s really not good, because those mistakes are going to come. And he’s just a kid, so it’s too early to even think about a championship.”
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