The attribute that Mercedes feels makes Antonelli "special"

The youngest of Formula 1's rookie class, Andrea Kimi Antonelli is facing the daunting task of replacing Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes, but the team is confident some of the attributes that made him stand out in karting will help him ease into the seat.

Born in 2006, the year Fernando Alonso won his second world championship, Antonelli will be F1's youngest driver on the 2025 grid after being prepared to replace Ferrari-bound Hamilton.

Antonelli was picked up by Mercedes as an 11-year-old in go-karting and, under the guise of Mercedes' driver development advisor Gwen Lagrue, the Italian continued his march through the European karting scene.

Soon after his 15th birthday, Antonelli switched to cars in the 2021 Italian F4 championship, leading to dual titles the following year in Italy and in the German F4 championship. His rookie year in Formula Regional Europe or FRECA also yielded a championship crown, and instead of progressing to F3 for 2024, Mercedes decided to immediately drop him into F2 in just his third full-time junior formula year.

Hamilton's decision to leave for Ferrari then prompted Mercedes to accelerate his development even further, ramping up a private testing programme to prepare the youngster to eventually replace the seven-time world champion.

It is an enormous weight to be placed on a teenager, especially with Antonelli's relative lack of single-seater experience, and the jury is still out on whether the 18-year-old will be ready for it. But if anything, the adaptability Antonelli will need to succeed in his rapid rise to F1 is the very attribute that Mercedes felt made him so special to begin with.

"With Kimi I noticed quite quickly he was already a bit different than other kids in karting," Lagrue told Autosport. "But back then my thought was: 'Okay, he's the best one I can have in go-karts', not even thinking about Formula 1.

Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes-AMG F1 Team

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

"Then when we did the first test in single-seaters, the way he adapted himself so quickly to pretty much every situation you started seeing that you have someone very special.

"Of course, that doesn't mean he has everything. You still need to work a lot to help him to grow, to guide him, to also let him make mistakes. It's part of the learning process. And then, to me, Formula Regional has developed quite well recently in terms of driver preparation and we have seen over the years that all the kids coming from it - or before when it was called Formula Renault Eurocup - to F3 or F2; they were performing, and they were most of the time the ones winning.

"So, when Kimi did perform that well in FRECA, I was not super convinced at that time that first going to F3 will develop him more, and I wanted also to put himself In a situation where eventually he could face more challenges, and sending him to F2, of course, it required a bit of preparation.

"But it was also to put him into an environment where he had to find some personal limit he never faced before. I'm not saying that he won always easily, but kind of. He was always dominating, and he was always the one to beat, rather than the one chasing someone, even if we had some good competitors, like [Ferrari junior Rafael] Camara, for example, or a few others, he was on top of everything.

"So by doing that, we were making sure that first he will learn the new F2 with the idea of eventually doing another year of F2 if it was challenging, or depending on the situation in F1, make sure that at least we will accelerate his preparation to Formula 1. Of course, he was confirming what we were thinking series after series, let's say."

Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Prema Racing

Photo by: Andrew Ferraro / Motorsport Images

If it was Mercedes' goal of throwing new challenges Antonelli's way, then his sole year in F2 certainly did that. On top of adapting to new machinery, his team and famed Italian powerhouse Prema struggled with the new F2 car compared to its own lofty standards, and both Antonelli and team-mate Oliver Bearman initially struggled for results.

Having missed several rounds due to his F1 cameos with Ferrari and Haas, Bearman eventually dropped back to 12th but showed the potential to earn a 2025 F1 drive with the latter. Antonelli ended sixth in points, collecting one sprint and feature race win apiece, while also withdrawing from the Abu Dhabi season finale due to illness.

According to Lagrue, Antonelli's rollercoaster F2 season, which only yielded one further podium, actually helped develop a part of his skillset that hadn't been used much before, and that will stand him in good stead in F1.

"I would say that normally you have a certain consistency in terms of teams leading F2, so we know that Prema, ART, Carlin, or a few others are the teams you have to work with if you want to deliver in F2," Lagrue explained. "But the new F2 actually brought some new challenges, and we have seen that the big teams were not adapting that well to F2.

"Prema was performing super well and had top engineers. We put Kimi in there thinking, we will put him in a very strong environment, and we will normally deliver strong results. And it appears that we struggled a little bit.

"But in a way, it was also very interesting because having Kimi dealing with such challenges made us discover part of him we haven't seen before. We had to help him to deal with difficult weekends, which never happened before. He was used to winning all the time, or to fighting for the win, and this year was the first time actually he had to deal with not winning and not performing, and sometimes even have really, really tough weekends.

"And I have to say that I was very impressed with his maturity and his leadership in such a difficult situation. And at the end of the day, he has still done a very, very strong season in F2 considering all we had to deal with this year."

Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes F1 W15, leaves the garage

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images