Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s spectacular 45G crash at Parabolica may not have been what Mercedes wanted, but his brief outing has actually served to further convince the team about his brilliance.
In fact, digging into the data of his handful of laps and trying to get to the bottom of how he ended up losing control at the final corner of the Monza track has highlighted both his tremendous natural speed and his inexperience.
Rather than be worried that the session ended with a badly damaged W15, Mercedes engineers and senior management have taken huge encouragement from what they saw in the minutes prior to the off.
And the team's preliminary analysis of what caused the accident has prompted a bizarre conclusion that it was the result of Antonelli’s car and tyres not being able to take the speed that he was taking it to.
As Mercedes boss Toto Wolff said: “What he did, the car couldn’t take...”
Wolff is referring to Antonelli’s second flying lap of the session, having earlier put in a lap of 1m23.955s to briefly top the timesheets.
His second flying lap was on course to go even better – as he delivered a best personal first sector for himself, and then went purple in the second sector – before it all went wrong at Parabolica.
A closer look at the telemetry data highlights some fascinating details that Mercedes has picked up on. It shows where he proved to be so much faster than any other driver – as well as offering an explanation for how it all went wrong.
The key moments played out from Lesmo 2 on his final lap, where Antonelli swooped through at a pretty impressive speed.
His minimum speed through there was 184km/h – which is 7km/h faster than Max Verstappen managed on the fastest lap of the session.
Things are even more impressive through the Ascari Chicane, as Antonelli went through there at 190km/h – with Verstappen only managing 176km/h on his fastest lap.
Other front runners were a similar margin behind Antonelli on their fastest laps at the end of the session – Lewis Hamilton’s minimum speed was 177km/h, Charles Leclerc was 178km/h and Lando Norris 179km/h.
Comparing data from all the drivers at the end of the session – despite how much track improvement there had been – Antonelli’s speed through Lesmo 2 exit and through the first segment of Ascari early on was not surpassed by anyone.
But the tremendous speed that Antonelli took through both the Lesmos and Ascari was not without consequence – as it pushed his tyres beyond their limit.
This meant that as he exited Ascari, the rears in particular were overheating hugely. So, when he turned through Parabolica, the rear grip had basically gone – which explains why the car turned around so quickly on him.
As Wolff later explained: “I guess he was just bitten. Everyone suffered from the temperature, especially rear temperatures around Ascari at these kinds of speeds – that is why the rear stepped out.”
Of course, some of Antonelli’s speed advantage through the corner can be explained by his inexperience of tyres – because he pushed too hard and that triggered the overheating that was behind his demise. Other more experienced drivers knew they had to manage their pace to be sure to keep the tyres alive.
But, if Mercedes wanted some evidence that Antonelli has the talent needed to push F1 machinery to its limit, then the squad got everything it wanted on Friday at Monza.
“We would rather have a problem in slowing him down than making him faster,” said Wolff. “What we have seen in one and a half laps is just astonishing.”
Antonelli's Friday media commitments were cancelled after he complained of feeling dizzy, but he did take part in Formula 2 qualifying and was classified sixth, 0.214s off pacesetter Zane Maloney. Furthermore, the Italian still commented on his day in a video sent to the media by Mercedes.
"What a day," he said. "First FP1 done. Unfortunately it ended quite quickly because of the crash. It was quite a big one, around 52G. Really sorry to the team and George for making them work afterwards.
"Just a mistake by my side, just pushing a bit too much for the conditions. I should have built the run a bit more progressively, but definitely lesson learned for next time.
"Still really thankful to the team for making this possible, and still great to see all the tifosi out there, and to get the first laps with all the drivers on track.
"Not feeling super well at the moment, just going to go back and try to rest, and try to focus for the rest of the weekend, because there's still some races to go, and we're going to still try to get a good result."
