Why Alfa's ousted F1 driver can be "happy" despite losing his drive

Antonio Giovinazzi's Formula 1 career has reached a crossroads as the Italian heads out of the Alfa Romeo exit door for Formula E. While disappointed to have lost his drive to Guanyu Zhou after what he believes was his best of the three years he spent with the team, he's mostly glad to have reached the hallowed F1 grid at all...

Updated May 25, 2022, 7:24 AM

People like Antonio Giovinazzi don't really make it to Formula 1 nowadays. A native of a small South Italian town Martina Franca, he's one of the few of the series' debutants in recent years who don't fit the mould of what Lewis Hamilton famously described as a "billionaire boys' club". Forget buying his son an F1 team - Giovinazzi's father couldn't afford to pay for a season in Formula Abarth.

So did the now former Alfa Romeo driver believe 10 years ago, at the end of his karting career, that he would one day make it to F1 and spend three seasons on the grid, partnering Kimi Raikkonen?

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Author Oleg Karpov

After attempting to study engineering, Oleg was thrown out of his Moscow university for spending more time at the racetrack as a junior press officer for the national Lada racing series than attending lectures. His first job as a journalist was at the Soviet Sport newspaper, and in 2011 he moved to Berlin to pursue a freelance career in Formula 1. He joined Motorsport.com in 2015 and became a contributor to GP Racing magazine in 2021. When it's not race week, he plays squash every Wednesday and Sunday and likes to procrastinate by playing chess, with his Elo peaking at 2069 on one of the biggest online chess platforms.