The 18-year-old Mercedes driver leads the 2026 World Championship with 72 points after a dominant victory at the Japanese Grand Prix
Kimi Antonelli has rewritten the history books at Suzuka. With his victory at the 2026 Japanese Grand Prix, the 18-year-old Mercedes driver has become the youngest driver ever to lead the Formula 1 World Championship, breaking a record previously held by Lewis Hamilton, who led the standings at 22 years, 4 months and 6 days.
Antonelli has beaten that mark by more than four years.
He now sits at the top of the drivers standings with 72 points, following back-to-back wins in China and Japan. In doing so, he has become the first Italian driver to win consecutive Formula 1 races since Alberto Ascari at the 1953 Belgian Grand Prix, a gap of 73 years.
The scale of that achievement demands context. Ascari is the greatest Italian driver in the history of the sport. He won nine consecutive championship races across the 1952 and 1953 seasons, a record that has never been beaten. He remains the only Italian driver to win back-to-back World Championships, and the last Italian to win the World Drivers’ Championship at all. In the 73 years that followed his 1953 title, no Italian driver came close to matching what Ascari built. The nation produced 15 Grand Prix winners across those decades but not one of them strung consecutive victories together, not Giancarlo Fisichella, not Jarno Trulli, not Vitantonio Liuzzi, not Antonio Giovinazzi.
Then came Kimi Antonelli.
The Bologna-born 18-year-old has achieved in three races what no Italian driver has managed in over seven decades. Back-to-back wins. Back-to-back poles. Five fastest laps in a single afternoon at Suzuka. A 13-second winning margin. And now, the youngest championship leader in the history of Formula 1.
For Italy, this is not just a sporting result. It is the end of a 73-year wait. Ascari’s ghost has finally been answered, not by a grizzled veteran, but by a teenager who has been in Formula 1 for only 1 season and three races.
When the chequered flag fell at Suzuka, the question was no longer whether Antonelli belongs at the front of Formula 1. The question is how long everyone else can keep up.
Mercedes is leading F1 Constructor’s Championship
