Andrea Kimi Antonelli was the third youngest driver in history to make his debut. Still only 19 years old in his second season and now in a highly competitive car, the records were always likely to tumble.
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In China he got his first, becoming the youngest grand prix driver in history to take pole position.
“Many said the kid was too young,” Toto Wolff reflected to Sky Sports. “The kid did good today.”
At just 19 years, 6 months and 18 days old, Antonelli has eclipsed the previous record by a considerable margin — prior to this weekend, Sebastian Vettel had been the youngest ever to start from pole when he lined up for the 2008 Italian Grand Prix from P1 aged 21 years, 2 months and 11 days old.
With debutants restricted to 18 years and over, the pole has secured Antonelli a piece of history unlikely to be bettered.
It earns Antonelli a piece of history unlikely to be bettered.
“I’m very happy,” he said. “I’m very happy because at the end it’s just the beginning, so obviously there’s a lot more to come.
“I’m really looking forward to tomorrow. The car is feeling really good, the car is strong, so there’s a lot to play for tomorrow.
“I’m just super happy with today.”
If he were to convert to victory on Sunday, he’d become the second youngest winner in the sport’s history, behind only Max Verstappen.
But there’s a long way to go to the chequered flag.
MERCEDES IS (ALMOST) FALLIBLE
There was a moment, spanning just a few minutes, when Mercedes’s weekend seemed to be falling apart.
George Russell, the pole favourite, had somehow broken his front wing at the end of Q2, and when he attempted to get Q3 underway, an electrical problem forced him to stop on track.
He was able to limp home in first gear, where in his garage the car was power cycled — effectively restarted — three times before it started working normally again.
He rejoined Q3 with just enough time to set one lap, and he was fast enough to secure the front row behind Antonelli.
“I had no battery starting my lap and my tyres were cold,” he said. “I’m very grateful to be sat here right now. It was more a case of getting a time on the board.
“I knew Kimi’s been really strong and things were far from optimised my side, so it was more a case of get the car across the line and make sure I’m starting in a sensible position.
“P2 was much better than I expected … I was expecting to be further down the order. So, as I said, just really glad to be here.”
There’s no string of unreliability to point to yet, and rivals would recognise that hoping for such a thing would be extremely ambitious. But it’s also interesting that the team didn’t solve the problem per se; it just restarted the car a few times, changed the steering wheel and hoped it would sort itself out.
It’s a reminder that we’re very early in this set of regulations and reliability can still play a role, even for a team as dominant as Mercedes.
Russell wins Sprint, Piastri 6th | 00:56
VERSTAPPEN IN SURVIVAL MODE
Everyone was having a bad day relative to Mercedes — notwithstanding Russell’s problems — but some teams were having worse days than others.
Red Bull Racing was having a very day indeed.
Max Verstappen qualified eighth for the sprint, a massive 1.734 seconds off the pace. He had a terrible start that dropped him to 20th, and then he recovered to a scoreless ninth at the end of the race.
“I have not a lot of words at the moment, to be honest,” he told Sky Sports after the 100-kilometre race. “Everything that could go wrong went wrong.
“The start is one problem that we have to fix, but then after that the balance was of course all over the place.
“Probably the highest degradation for everyone out there — it was just uncontrollable — plus some other bits on the car that were not well prepared. We just need to get our stuff together.”
The team attempted to revitalise the car in the three hours between the sprint and grand prix qualifying, but Verstappen qualified eighth again and an improved but still painfully distant 0.938 seconds off the pace.
He was far enough off the pace that even Pierre Gasly in the unfancied Alpine will start ahead of him on the grid.
“It’s the same,” Verstappen said of his recalcitrant car. “We turned it upside-down, and it was exactly the same.
“I’m expecting exactly the same as tomorrow — not much, where we are, P7, P8.
“We’ll probably fighting a bit with Pierre, but that’s it. There’s not more in it.”
The Dutchman then launched into a laundry list of problems with his car.
“It’s incredibly tough to drive. There’s no balance. I cannot lean on the car. Every lap is a fight. It’s just very difficult.
“Every time I did another lap on a tyre set it felt awful. I honestly think it’s going to be quite tough tomorrow.
“In the past sometimes we’d throw it upside down and it would work. Now nothing works. It’s just not nice.
“I cannot push. Every lap is honestly survival for me. I’m not enjoying it at all.
“It’s just very inconsistent. I cannot build a reference through qualifying. Whatever lap I do, I’m like, ‘All right, that’s it’.
“Can I go 0.4 seconds faster? Maybe. Can I go 0.4 seconds slower? There’s a big chance as well, because it’s just all over the place. It’s just incredibly difficult.”
It’s quite the assessment just months on from Verstappen’s improbable title charge, but Red Bull Racing looks locked into a lonely fourth place in the order.
Russell claims sprint pole in Shanghai | 01:08
PIASTRI’S AWKWARD SPRINT ENCOUNTER RILES UP EX-DRIVER
Oscar Piastri got his first racing laps under his belt on Saturday in the sprint, though he was good for only sixth place at the flag, earning him three points.
He’d shadowed Lando Norris closely through the opening phase of the sprint, but the late safety car, triggering a flurry of pit stops, cost him places when he had to double-stack behind his teammate.
One the places he lost was to Antonelli, who had been having a rough morning. The Italian had suffered an atrocious start and then punted Isack Hadjar, earning him a 10-second penalty.
Piastri jumped the Mercedes at the safety car restart, but he was shortly afterwards told by his team to hand the position back — Antonelli had complained that Piastri had passed him before the finish line, which is the point at which racing resumes after the safety car. Passing behind the safety car is a serious offence, and the stewards had opened an investigation.
Piastri complied, and the investigation was dropped, but he didn’t have another chance to pass the faster Mercedes.
What exactly happened?
Though there’s no passing allowed before the finish line, the regulations make an exception when “any F1 car slows with an obvious problem”.
Antonelli was slow exiting the final corner because he ran wide, though his car was still in contact with the white line.
But he also didn’t have an obvious problem, which is why Piastri was told to give the place back.
It was an awkward encounter. The finish line is close to the exit of the final corner, and it’s almost certain that the leader is up to racing speed by then — as was clearly the case here.
As Jacques Villeneuve, the 1997 world champion, said on the Sky Sports broadcast: “What should Piastri have done? Hit the brakes and create mayhem behind? Something has to be looked into there.”
Villeneuve was mistaken, however, to say Antonelli had also committed a foul by falling more than five car lengths behind the car ahead — the regulations mandate a maximum of 10 car lengths between drivers before the resumption. It’s an imprecise measurement, but footage suggests Antonelli was at least roughly within that distance.
This exact scenario almost falls into a little grey area in the regulations, and it might have been interesting had the matter made it to the stewards, who may have found a way to show some leniency and set a precedent for future similar circumstances. Instead the matter ended with Piastri giving back the place.
The Australian brushed off the incident anyway, instead pointing out that McLaren wasn’t really in the race with Mercedes anyway.
“I think we just need to find a lot more lap time,” he told Sky Sports. “I think it’s pretty clear that we just didn’t have the pace to match the Ferrari or Mercedes, and we were quite a lot quicker than everyone else [behind], so that’s probably the biggest thing.”
‘Absolute no no’ Piastri has to relent | 04:04
CAN FERRARI’S STRONG STARTS WIN THE RACE?
A Ferrari car started fourth in Melbourne and again in the Shanghai sprint, and both times they made a play for the lead.
In Melbourne, Leclerc got into first place at the first corner.
In Shanghai, Hamilton took first place by lap 9 thanks to his great start.
On neither occasion, however, could they hold that place.
Whereas in Melbourne we never got to see how the Russell-Leclerc duel might have played out thanks to the virtual safety car, in Shanghai we saw the Mercedes driver figure out how to get a move done and make it stick within the confines of the regulations.
It was all about getting it done in the braking zone on the back straight — the old-fashioned way, some might say — without overusing the battery so that he had some electrical charge left to use defensively into the first turn, where Hamilton had been easily taking back the place with an around-the-outside move.
Mercedes’s superior pace eventually paid out.
But the picture has changed a little bit over the course of the weekend.
Mercedes clearly has a fast qualifying car, but in race conditions the Ferrari looks close — close enough to be a hassle at least.
And rather than having just one car starting on the second row, on Sunday both Ferrari drivers will start directly behind the Mercedes teammates.
Would having two Ferrari cars in the lead be enough of an advantage for the Italian team?
“Absolutely,” Russell said when asked if Ferrari was a genuine threat. “The race pace, it looks really close between us.
“We saw this last week and said it in Melbourne — I think if they were on the same strategy as me, I’m not convinced I would have won the race.
“Today [in the sprint] it was a real tussle between us, and I was pushing at the end of those last three laps and Charles finished the race 0.7 seconds behind me. With one more lap, it would have been a fight.
“It’s not a walk in the park for sure.”
Ferrari’s problem, though, is twofold.
One is it’ll have to make the right strategy calls on Sunday — always a challenge for the Italian team — and this weekend the tyres are wearing out, enough that most drivers pitted during the sprint.
The other, though, is that the team must understand what’s making its car work so well in the race but not in qualifying.
“There’s a big part I don’t think we can explain just yet,” Leclerc said. “This is something we are working on to understand from where it’s coming.
“But it’s a huge difference in qualifying, and there’s nothing in our car that kind of explains it, and it’s strange also that in the race we are then suddenly back in the game.
“I don’t know. These rules are quite complex, so there are many things we need to look at and try to connect the dots, but at the moment I don’t think we have the full explanation.”
It’s not exactly the ideal condition in which to enter a race, but if it works, it works.
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