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Kimi Antonelli sealed the Formula One world championship at the Mexico City Grand Prix on Sunday, finishing third to claim a title that makes him the sport’s youngest world champion at 20 years old. He crossed the line behind Red Bull’s four-time champion Max Verstappen and Ferrari’s seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton, who lifted his protégé aloft as celebrations swept through the paddock.
“This is just the beginning,” Antonelli said after the race. “This win is just going to mark a beginning, a new point to build on and keep improving and keep trying to win a championship.” He described sharing the podium with Verstappen and Hamilton as “truly incredible” and said he was looking forward to future battles with both men.
Antonelli is Italy’s first world champion since Alberto Ascari in 1953. His race engineer Peter Bonnington, who has worked with Michael Schumacher and Hamilton across their combined fourteen world titles, called it “a very special day” and said he felt “privileged” to work with the young Italian — including, he noted with evident affection, enduring his water-pistol pranks in the garage.
A childhood steeped in motorsport
Antonelli grew up inside the sport. His father Marco, a former driver and team principal, smuggled him into an F1 paddock for the first time at age eight, concealed inside a stack of tyres with an umbrella placed on top. By ten, the boy was sitting on his father’s lap in a competition Lamborghini, changing gears while Marco worked the pedals around a racetrack.
“Sometimes we may look like lunatics because we just talk about racing,” Antonelli said before the United States Grand Prix last month. “Racing is always in our minds. We have a lot of fun together, and racing is our passion. It’s what I live for.” He added that his father had initially opposed a career in the sport, warning that motorsport “can be very cruel at times, especially financially,” but had since become his closest adviser at race weekends.
At eleven, Antonelli was recruited into the Mercedes junior driver programme by Frenchman Gwen Lagrue, the programme’s head. Hamilton became his mentor. “He’s incredibly impressive and deserves to be world champion,” Hamilton said after the title was confirmed.
A rapid ascent through the junior ranks
Antonelli dominated karting in 2020 and 2021, won the Italian and German Formula 4 championships in 2022, and took the Formula Regional title in 2023. He skipped Formula 3 entirely and moved directly into Formula 2 in 2024, finishing sixth. When Hamilton departed Mercedes for Ferrari ahead of the 2025 season, the seat opened and Antonelli stepped in.
His rookie F1 year brought early incidents alongside genuine pace — a second place in São Paulo and two further podiums left him seventh in the championship. Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff said he had always believed in the talent but acknowledged the adjustment required. “He was catapulted into F1, and it wasn’t easy,” Wolff said. “He had to handle the pressure, the media and the expectations.”
Six races that settled the championship
The title campaign was built on a run of dominant performances. Antonelli became the youngest driver ever to take pole position and, still 19 at the time, won his first grand prix to become the second youngest F1 race winner behind Verstappen. He then won four consecutive races, including a first victory at Monaco on the tight street circuit. After those six races he led Hamilton and teammate George Russell by 66 and 68 points respectively.
A rare stumble came at Baku, where Antonelli hit a wall in qualifying and failed to reach the podium, finishing fifth. But Russell’s retirement from third place in a subsequent race — a battery and power unit failure on lap 30 — widened the gap to 84 points and effectively ended the internal Mercedes challenge. Russell had also been forced to retire from a race in which Antonelli started nineteenth due to an engine penalty, only to charge through the field and win — the first Italian to take that victory in sixty years, echoing Ludovico Scarfiotti’s triumph in 1966.
Paddock favourite and national hero
Beyond his results, Antonelli has become a popular figure in the paddock. Drivers from rival teams regularly join in the banter at news conferences, and his cheerful, joke-laden presence has drawn comparisons to the sport’s most charismatic champions. Congratulations arrived from Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, multiple football clubs and Grand Slam tennis champion Jannik Sinner, with whom Antonelli has shared several triumphant weekends as both men won titles concurrently this year.
Wolff, reflecting on the season, said the young champion had grown precisely as the team had hoped. “I said from the start that he had tremendous talent and a great personality but that he would need a season in F1 to grow and learn through both great moments and setbacks,” the Austrian said. At twenty, with a first world title secured and Hamilton and Verstappen already promising more battles ahead, the assessment appears well-founded.