Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes, 2025

Half-a-dozen races into Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s Formula 1 career, Mercedes’ decision to hasten his arrival at the top flight appeared to be vindicated.

Antonelli only missed out on the points places once over those first six races – in Bahrain, where the team made a questionable strategy call and he was bundled off the track by Carlos Sainz Jnr. He took the chequered flag stuck behind his former Formula 2 team mate Oliver Bearman and probably should have gotten past the Haas driver.

That aside, Antonelli made an impressive start to life in F1, despite the odd rookie error. He rode his luck in the rain at Melbourne but came away with a fourth-place finish.

Sixth place in China was a decent return given the damage he picked up early on. Over the following races he narrowed the gap to team mate George Russell: finishing on his tail at Suzuka and showing strong pace in Jeddah.

Antonelli clicked immediately with the Miami car park track, taking a surprise pole position for the sprint race, though he was muscled out of the way at the start by the front runners. He qualified well for the grand prix too but suffered pit lane misfortunes in both races.

But from his home race in Imola, where Antonelli admitted he over-committed himself off-track, things began to go awry. He dropped out in Q2 as he struggled to master Pirelli’s new C6 tyre compound and his race ended due to a technical problem. Crashing in qualifying at Monaco ruined that weekend and another car fault claimed him in Spain.

Andrea Kimi Antonelli

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A superb run to third in Canada, where Russell won, gave cause for optimism that Antonelli had drawn the line under a poor triple-header of results. But in Austria he slipped up badly on the first lap, wiping out Max Verstappen, and in Britain he was too quick to follow his team’s disastrous call to fit hard tyres early in the race. That dropped him towards the back of the midfield where he was taken out by Isack Hadjar.

After a grim weekend at Spa, which moved him to tears, a return to Mercedes’ earlier suspension specification gave Antonelli some encouragement. Although he slipped up in qualifying, he ground out a points finish in a race where gaining positions was difficult. But as Russell scored another podium in Hungary before the summer break, Antonelli was knocked out of Q2 and only just took the final point in the race in tenth.

Antonelli has already done enough to prove he belongs at F1 level despite his youth. But he needs to sustain this apparent step forwards into the second half of the season.

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