Mercedes is enacting a plan to manage the media frenzy surrounding its Formula 1 junior Andrea Kimi Antonelli, which will advance whether or not he's promoted from F2 for 2025.
Antonelli’s career has famously progressed at considerable pace, while the 17-year-old Italian’s close relationship with Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff after joining the manufacturer’s junior scheme in 2019 has long marked him out at as a future F1 star for the Silver Arrows squad.
But expectations surrounding Antonelli were raised massively in the fallout of Lewis Hamilton’s decision to leave Mercedes and join Ferrari for 2025 – in part because the seven-time champion had signed a two-year, 1+1 contract in 2023 that Wolff admitted had been so arranged in case Mercedes felt it needed flexibility to promote another of its juniors with Hamilton’s career potentially winding up.
Indeed, when Hamilton made his shock announcement in February, Antonelli was quickly touted as his most likely replacement even as other candidates, including later a surprise Mercedes swoop for Red Bull’s Max Verstappen that still remains possible, were assessed.
Things have swung back and forth in the months since, with Antonelli’s lack of headline F2 results in the early part of the season – including his pitstop stall the day after his Prema Racing team-mate Ollie Bearman had won the Austrian sprint race – seemingly giving Carlos Sainz renewed hope of joining Mercedes for 2025, based on Wolff’s comments to Spanish media.
But that was before Antonelli impressively scored his first F2 win in the tricky wet Silverstone sprint race.
After this, he faced the F1 press corps – gaining respect for admitting his victory “was needed” in his first answer of a session where he went from guarded (his arms crossed, shield-like underneath holding his microphone) to open.
His explanation of how an F1 car “gives you a lot of confidence when you drive it because it has so much downforce that you can really push it” was revealing in the context of how younger drivers are more regularly being rapidly promoted to the top single-seater categories.
These are expected to “swim”, as Wolff had repeatedly said in the same press conference room the day before.
That appearance in the official F2 press conference was only Antonelli’s second of the season, after he’d finished second in Melbourne qualifying.
Aside from the three-and-a-half-month time gap between those two sessions highlighting again that this F2 season has been rather a struggle for Antonelli and his Prema squad, it also showed two other elements.
The first was how he appeared much more confident following his Silverstone win - where, of course, the joy victory provides cannot be understated. This feeds directly into the second – in how Mercedes has been preparing Antonelli to face the media while also shielding him from it.
Aware it had to carefully manage Antonelli’s 2024, as well as needing to consider his young age in what can be a brutal sphere, Mercedes moved to tightly control his appearances.
Instead of allowing its junior to interact with and, to a certain extent, deal with media interviews and conversations in the F2 paddock directly as is typical – and how this writer dealt regularly with then Ferrari rising star Charles Leclerc in his rookie F2 title-winning season in 2017 in person and on the phone – Antonelli has been kept at arms’ length from those covering the junior category beat.
But Mercedes has also been working in parallel behind the scenes with Antonelli – giving him in-house media training. As Wolff says, pressure on Antonelli is “going to get bigger” if his career progresses as expected.
Mercedes is also keenly aware that, if he is promoted to its F1 team, Antonelli will immediately be required to make regular appearances with its blue-chip sponsors and also interact directly with senior figures such as Mercedes-Benz Group CEO Ola Kallenius and INEOS boss Jim Ratcliffe.
The thinking behind Mercedes’ strategy is two-fold: in controlling Antonelli's F2 media requirements, he could focus on adapting to a new category and his high-stakes season, and shielding him also additionally shuts out what can be a ferocious media market in his home country.
Autosport understands that Mercedes is likely to make Antonelli available for more media appearances as the 2024 season progresses, while further F2 successes will automatically get him more airtime.
His F1 future remains undecided, with Mercedes’ options, if it doesn’t feel he is quite ready to join George Russell and replace Hamilton at its works F1 team, including placing him at another squad further down the grid (say, Williams or Alpine) or indeed keeping him in F2 for 2025.
But it’s clear from another of his Silverstone press conference answers – “not always do I cope really well with pressure” – why Wolff is impressed with Antonelli’s wider abilities and not just his speed.
“What I like in terms of his attitude – generally his family, who has been always close to him – is the objective assessment of a situation, and that is ‘good or not good enough’,” Wolff replied when Autosport asked for his opinion on how his charge is coping with all the frenzy surrounding him in 2024.
“And I don't think that the pressure harms at all the way he performs in the car and how he drives.
“You can clearly see it's a good benchmarking with Ollie Bearman. They are pretty close. Ollie had an obviously very good race in Austria, and Kimi on the Sunday had a clutch release issue in the second race.
“So, you've got to swim. That's clear. It was a rapid career progression. He's 17. Hasn't got even a driving licence for a road car.
“And the best ones will be able to cope with that, with the amount of scrutiny and the pressure, and it's going to get bigger.”
