Runaway Formula 1 championship leader Kimi Antonelli admitted in an exclusive interview with Autosport this week that he was left fearing for his future by a mid-season slump during his rookie campaign.
Now, though, he says those doubts are behind him – but the future remains laden with unknowns. Antonelli is now into a five-race winning streak, and no other grand prix driver in history has followed their maiden victory with four more consecutively.
The question is how long this streak can last as Mercedes team-mate George Russell seeks to recover, having dropped to third place in the world championship standings.
Antonelli now insists that last year – where he made a number of high-profile mistakes and was the subject of rumours linking him with a ‘demotion’ to a Mercedes customer team – was a vital learning experience.
“Last year was definitely a big feature,” he said on Thursday ahead of this weekend’s Barcelona Grand Prix. “I would doubt a lot about myself, especially during that period, that difficult period in Europe.
“But this year it’s been a different story. Obviously you mature a lot after one year of Formula 1, not only as a driver, but also as a person. I think also last year, during the difficult period, I got to know myself better.
“So definitely, considering how bad it was in the moment, actually, I’m very grateful that it happened because it made me grow a lot and it taught me a lot about myself as well.”
Race-ending shunt in Austria was among several low points last season
Photo by: Guenther Iby/SEPA.Media /Getty Images
For Antonelli the wheels very much came off his 2025 season after the Canadian Grand Prix, where he became the youngest-ever driver to finish on an F1 podium.
As the F1 circus returned to Europe, he qualified poorly and raced scrappily while trying to claw back ground, reaching a nadir in Belgium when he failed to make it out of Q1 for both the sprint race and grand prix.
Mercedes attributed this to a new rear suspension geometry introduced in Canada, which offered greater theoretical performance but came at the cost of a lack of feel for where the limit of adhesions was under braking.
The outlier nature of the Canada result persuaded the team to persist with the new geometry until Hungary, where in the words of team boss Toto Wolff, it was consigned “to the bin”.
But by that point Antonelli’s confidence was shot and he had what Wolff described as an “underwhelming” race on home ground at Monza before recovering to take two podium finishes during the championship run-in.
This season Antonelli has presented as being more confident but there have still been occasions where he has become flustered and this has sapped his concentration. In China he fluffed his start from the front row in the sprint race, spinning after contact with Isack Hadjar, then in the grand prix he again made a slow start, fought his way into the lead, then nearly dropped it with a heavy lock-up three laps from the chequered flag.
Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes
Photo by: Lintao Zhang / LAT Images via Getty Images
In Miami, he again made a tardy getaway from the front row of the sprint race, ultimately being demoted from fourth on the road to sixth by a time penalty for multiple track-limits violations.
But in Monaco he led imperiously from pole to the chequered flag, despite a highly pressured race around one of the most challenging tracks on the calendar. If he can operate at this level at every race, he may prove unbeatable.
“This year, so far, I haven’t been questioning or doubting myself,” he said. “However, there are questions that still need to be answered on my side, on how much further I can go in a short period of time, how much I can push myself even further, and how can I grow, how much more I can grow, and how big is the potential.
“So there are still many questions that need to be answered and I know it will still take a bit of time.”
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– The Autosport.com Team
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