12
MercedesKimi Antonelli is an Italian Formula One driver racing for Mercedes. He replaced Lewis Hamilton for the 2025 season, becoming the third-youngest driver to start a Formula One race at his debut. In 2025 he became the youngest Formula One polesitter of any kind in 75 years of the sport's history. He scored three podiums and 150 points in his rookie season, helping Mercedes to second in the Constructors' Championship.
He is 19 years old and in his second F1 season.
| Full name | Andrea Kimi Antonelli |
| Date of birth | 25 August 2006 |
| Birthplace | Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy |
| Height | 171cm |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Current team | Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team |
| Car number | #12 |
| Father | Marco Antonelli, sportscar racing driver and team owner |
| Mother | Veronica Antonelli, motorsport operations |
| Lives | Serravalle, San Marino |
Antonelli was born in Bologna and grew up in a household where motorsport was not a hobby but an occupation. His father Marco is a sportscar racing driver who founded Antonelli Motorsport in 1993, winning the 2018 Italian GT Championship, and who has operated the San Marino-based AKM Motorsport team in the Italian F4 Championship since 2022. His mother Veronica has worked in motorsport since 1997, helping Marco run the operation. There was never a version of his childhood that was not built around racing.
In 2014, when Antonelli was seven years old, his father was competing in the Porsche Supercup at Hockenheimring. The F1 paddock was adjacent. Marco did not have the credentials to bring his son inside. He placed the boy inside a stack of tyres on a trolley and covered the top with an umbrella, pushing him through the access checkpoint. Once inside, a family friend secured a temporary pass. The young Kimi spent an hour walking the Formula One pit lane.
He describes the experience as "cool." He was looking at a world he would return to through the front door eleven years later.
Antonelli's first name is Andrea. He is universally known as Kimi, his middle name. The name was suggested to his father by Enrico Bertaggia, a family friend and former racing driver, who proposed it on the grounds that it offered phonetic fluidity when paired with "Andrea" and "Antonelli" that a more traditional Italian name would not. It was not given in honour of Kimi Räikkönen.
The connection to Räikkönen became real after the fact. Antonelli met the 2007 world champion in 2018 as a child karting prodigy. In later years he has spoken about his appreciation of Räikkönen's emotionally detached approach to media and competition, a manner he has come to understand more fully since experiencing the pressure of Formula One himself.
He chose the number 12 for his Formula One car as a tribute to Ayrton Senna, his idol. He had carried it through his 2022 and 2023 junior championship seasons before bringing it into F1.
Antonelli was signed to the Mercedes Junior Team in April 2019 aged twelve, having attracted the programme's attention through his karting results. In 2020 he won the FIA Karting European Championship in the OK category. He won it again in 2021. Back-to-back senior European karting titles by the age of fourteen.
Antonelli moved to single-seaters with Prema Racing in 2022 and won both the Italian F4 and ADAC F4 championships in the same season, also winning a gold medal for Italy at the FIA Motorsport Games. The Italian and ADAC F4 double in a single season was the same feat Oliver Bearman had achieved the year before with Van Amersfoort, and in both cases it was the result that accelerated their respective programmes dramatically.
Antonelli competed in the Formula Regional European and Middle East Championships in 2023 with Prema and won both. Mercedes and the paddock now faced a decision: the conventional path pointed toward Formula 3 in 2024. Mercedes concluded that Formula 2 would better serve what they had.
He skipped Formula 3 entirely.
Antonelli joined Prema for the 2024 FIA Formula 2 season, the youngest driver in the field. The first half of the season was a period of understanding the new car, with consistent points but no podiums. Then the series came to Silverstone.
In wet conditions at Silverstone he won the Sprint race. At Budapest he won again, the Feature race this time. He became the youngest multiple winner in FIA Formula 2 history. He also made his first Formula One weekend appearance, running FP1 at Monza for Mercedes in September, two weeks after his 18th birthday.
Shortly after his birthday, at the Italian Grand Prix, Mercedes announced that Antonelli would be their race driver for 2025, replacing Lewis Hamilton.
The announcement came at Monza, Hamilton's home circuit in terms of fans and Ferrari's home track, in front of a crowd that was simultaneously processing the news that their favourite team's new driver would be the teenager who had grown up in Bologna 35 kilometres away.
Antonelli said he did not want to be seen solely as Hamilton's replacement. He wanted to write his own story at Mercedes. Within a few months he would be sitting the Italian school leaving examinations online from hotel rooms across the world, while also preparing for his first Formula One Grand Prix.
He passed his regular road driving test six weeks before his F1 debut. He was not yet legally permitted to drive on public roads in Italy at the time of his first Grand Prix.
Antonelli made his Formula One debut at the 2025 Australian Grand Prix, starting from the pit lane after a problem in qualifying. He recovered to fourth in changing conditions. He was 18 years, six months, and 20 days old: the third-youngest driver to start a Formula One race in the sport's history.
At Miami he took pole position for the Sprint Race, becoming the youngest Formula One polesitter of any kind in 75 years of the sport. He was eighteen.
At Canada he finished third. His first Formula One podium. The third-youngest driver to stand on an F1 podium.
Then the season stalled. Across seven races at European circuits, Antonelli scored three points. The speed that had produced the Miami pole and the Canadian podium became elusive. He was trying to deliver what the team expected and instead finding that the harder he pushed the further the results moved away from him.
He described it in his own words: "I was trying to fulfil the team's expectation. But it just was a snowball effect, and I felt like I wasn't going anywhere."
His Mercedes race engineer Andrew Shovlin theorised publicly that Antonelli may have been trying too hard at circuits he already knew, creating pressure in the wrong direction. After the Italian Grand Prix, Shovlin gave him what Antonelli himself called a "wake-up call." The second half of the season that followed was different.
At the Qatar Grand Prix, in the final stages of the Norris versus Verstappen championship battle, Red Bull's race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase and advisor Helmut Marko publicly accused Antonelli of allowing Norris to pass him, influencing the title fight in Norris's favour. The accusation was made loudly, at a moment of maximum championship tension, directed at a nineteen-year-old in his first season.
The online abuse that followed was severe. Antonelli received death threats. Red Bull subsequently backed away from the accusations.
Max Verstappen, the driver whose title interests the accusations had been framed as protecting, contacted Antonelli personally to tell him to ignore the trolls. The championship finished with Norris winning by two points. Antonelli had been placed at the centre of its final chapter without his involvement and had handled the aftermath with a composure that most experienced adults would have struggled to manage.
Antonelli closed the 2025 season with back-to-back podiums at Interlagos and Las Vegas. His Las Vegas drive was described by multiple paddock observers as one of the drives of the season. He finished his rookie year with 150 points and three podiums.
He also beat his teammate George Russell in Brazil. After that race, he said publicly: "My relationship with George is definitely changing. It's natural that he isn't happy finishing behind me, just as I'm never happy when I'm behind." It was a measured and honest observation. It was also the first clear signal that the 2026 season at Mercedes would not simply be a continuation of the 2025 mentorship dynamic.
Lewis Hamilton, now at Ferrari, had been seen at Spa during the mid-season period comforting Antonelli after a difficult session. The driver whose seat he had taken crossed the paddock between rival teams to check on the person sitting in his former car. The gesture said something about both of them.
Antonelli enters 2026 contracted to Mercedes until at least the end of the year. Mercedes arrived at pre-season testing as one of the early favourites under the new regulations, with multiple paddock observers noting that the Silver Arrows had done what they did at the last major regulation change in 2014: arrived best prepared.
Ralf Schumacher publicly named Antonelli as a potential surprise world champion of 2026. He is 19 years old. George Russell, his teammate, is no longer simply a mentor. Toto Wolff, who made the call to replace Hamilton with a teenager who had not yet passed his driving test, is watching both of them.
The 2026 cars are new to everyone on the grid. Antonelli has been studying online while racing them.
Antonelli was appointed ambassador of Italian sport for San Marino by the Congress of State, an unusual honour for a teenager, and served as a torchbearer ahead of the 2026 Winter Olympics.
He co-founded the kart racing team AKM Motorsport by Kart Republic alongside his father in 2023 and serves as a driver coach and chassis tester for the operation. The work keeps him connected to the karting world he left only recently and reflects the same technical engagement with racing machinery that began in a Melbourne backyard with a radio-controlled car, except that analogy belongs to a different driver. For Antonelli, it began in a stack of tyres at Hockenheimring when he was seven, looking at the thing he intended to do.
A Netflix documentary called "The Seat" documents his journey from karting to Formula One, following him and his family from the beginning.
He appeared as a child actor in the 2016 Italian sports drama film Italian Race, which won four Nastro d'Argento awards. He was nine years old. He had a smaller role in that production than he has in the one currently in progress.
Antonelli lives in Serravalle, San Marino, with his family. He completed his Italian maturità school leaving examinations online during his 2025 Formula One season, finishing what he had started. He received a Mercedes-AMG GT 63 PRO from the team in January 2026 and crashed it near his home the following month. He was unharmed. Italian police confirmed he temporarily lost his road driving licence as a result.
He supports Bologna FC and Virtus Bologna. He describes himself as calm and somewhat introverted off-track, though people who have seen him in the middle of a title-fight controversy might note that the description is more complicated than it appears.
| Year | Team | Races | Wins | Podiums | Points | Position |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Mercedes | 24 | 0 | 3 | 150 | 6th |
| 2026 | Mercedes | — | — | — | — | In progress |
Career totals: 0 wins, 3 podiums, 24 race starts
Last updated March 2026
