Merc young gun’s first win was eight years in the making. Is the title next?

Some things just sound better in the voice of Mercedes boss Toto Wolff.

The Viennese accent does much of the lifting, but Wolff himself loves to rise to the occasion and his always deliberate sound bites never miss.

“He’s too young. We shouldn’t put him in a Mercedes. Put him in a smaller team. He needs experience. Look at the mistakes he makes,” Wolff said in a short monologue to his driver, Andrea Kimi Antonelli, on the cool-down lap at the Chinese Grand Prix.

“Here we go, Kimi. Victory.”

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It wasn’t a surprise that Wolff had been keeping receipts throughout Antonelli’s inconsistent first year, and his willingness to redeem them the moment Antonelli made good on his promise and won his first race is indicative of the Austrian powerbroker’s personal investment in this outcome.

Wolff had backed Antonelli throughout his junior career and created the circumstances that precipitated his rapid promotion to Formula 1. He was the one taking the risk, mortgaging not only the results of his ambitious title-winning team but also the potential of the teenager he was putting in the seat, knowing any fumble in execution could cost both dearly.

When Antonelli took the chequered with a practically flawless performance on Sunday, Wolff’s gut instinct was vindicated.

PIT TALK PODCAST: Andrea Kimi Antonelli becomes Formula 1’s 116th winner after claiming his maiden grand prix victory in China at the weekend, but it’s disaster for McLaren — and for Oscar Piastri, who’s now yet to start a grand prix in 2026 after a technical problem on the grid.

THE NEXT VERSTAPPEN?

Wolff has experienced the highs and lows of Formula 1 during his long stint as an investor and team boss, but one defeat appears to have haunted him more than any other.

In 2013 Jos Verstappen visited Wolff to see if Mercedes was interested in signing 16-year-old karting phenom Max Verstappen.

The Verstappen camp, meanwhile, was also meeting with Red Bull and its then motorsport adviser, Helmut Marko, who controlled the brand’s young driver roster.

Red Bull had a key advantage over Mercedes: it had two teams and could offer the Dutchman a seat immediately. Mercedes, with only its works team, which was already fully subscribed, couldn’t match the bid.

Verstappen became a Red Bull driver with Toro Rosso in 2015 and was promoted to Red Bull Racing the following year, where he won his first race.

By 2021 he was world champion, defeating Lewis Hamilton in a bitter battle.

“Do I regret missing out on Max? Certainly. But it wasn’t an option back in the day,” Wolff admitted to ESPN, though he has assuaged that disappointment by pondering that Hamilton and Verstappen may not have made for harmonious teammates.

But that regret has stung more keenly as the Verstappen era dawned and as Wolff began contemplating the future of his Mercedes team.

It had young gun George Russell locked in, but Hamilton was hurtling towards his 40s;

“We’re in a sport where cognitive sharpness is extremely important, and I believe everyone has a shelf life,” Wolff said in the book Inside Mercedes.

Hamilton was offered only a short-term contract, to which the Briton responded by announcing at the beginning of 2024 that he would quit for Ferrari.

Aided by the boiling over of internal tensions at Red Bull Racing, Wolff attempted to woo Verstappen to his team for much of the year.

It was only when he was forced to concede defeat that he pulled the trigger on the plan he’d been percolating since 2019 — on his homegrown Verstappen substitute.

He fast-tracked Antonelli’s arrival to Formula 1.

ALL EGGS IN THE KIMI BASKET

Mercedes signed Antonelli to its junior driver program in 2018, when he was only 11 years old and still in karts. He moved up to cars full-time in 2022 and won a pair of Formula 4 titles, which he backed up with a pair of Formula Regional titles the following season before rising to Formula 2 in 2024, bypassing Formula 3.

After a patchy start, he came home strongly in the F1 undercard series, scoring two victories and finishing sixth in the standings, ahead of Ferrari-bound teammate Oliver Bearman.

Reportedly more impressive, however, was Antonelli’s speed in Mercedes private tests in previous-spec F1 machinery, with stories that the Italian was several seconds faster than more experienced drivers.

It all contributed to Mercedes and Wolff having immense faith in his potential — but perhaps too much too soon.

Antonelli was famously given his F1 practice debut at his home Italian Grand Prix in 2024, where he suffered a 52g crash at Parabolica on his first flying lap. His 2025 contract was confirmed the next day regardless.

Rather than the celebratory weekend the team had hoped for, it turned out to be a scarring experience.

Antonelli, then just 18 years old, admitted later that he’d cried after his crash, a sign of how intensely Mercedes had allowed the pressure to grow on its much-hyped protégé.

The team said it believed the hangover from that incident affected him deep into his rookie season, sapping his confidence and artificially limiting his potential.

“I think we have put Kimi under maximum pressure, to be honest,” Wolff said last year.

“At the time, I felt it was a great idea to have him in FP1 in Monza and present him there, but that was maybe a mistake.”

It took a crisis meeting between Wolff, Antonelli and race engineer Peter Bonnington at the end of the European season to force a reset.

“They told me straight to my face what they thought of my performance,” Antonelli told Autosport. “But it was constructive criticism that I took on board in a positive way and that helped me reset.

“I had lost my direction a little. There was a lot of frustration … every time I got in the car I put a lot of pressure on myself and didn’t focus on driving well.”

His results immediately improved, and by the end of the season he’d finally arrived on the right trajectory, highlighted by a pair of mature drives onto the podium in Sao Paulo and Las Vegas.

The Antonelli project was back on track.

‘HERE WE GO, KIMI. VICTORY.’

Promoting Antonelli as Wolff’s homegrown answer to Verstappen wasn’t enough to prevent Mercedes from having another pass at the Dutchman last year.

Notable, though, is that had Verstappen made the switch, it likely would have been Russell who was axed, with the Briton being the one to reveal in the media that Wolff was talking to Verstappen about the possibility of a drive.

Antonelli, despite nominally having been out of contract, also subsequently revealed he was on a long-term deal that would have kept him safe.

Of course any team should want Verstappen, the greatest of his generation. Even if you estimate Russell extremely highly, he’s yet to prove himself in the crucible of a championship fight.

Antonelli looked like even less sure of a bet last year, during contract negotiations, but even as he struggled, the signs of greatness were evident.

“I read a book about the 10,000-hour rule many, many years ago,” Bonnington, his race engineer, told Sky Sports. “I started to really strongly believe it, thinking if we all had enough practice, we’d be good enough.

“Then I met the likes of Michael [Schumacher], I met the likes of Lewis, then you realise actually, no, there is the extra step, the extra 0.1 or 0.2 seconds.

“That’s what Kimi has got. He’s got that extra 0.1 or 0.2 seconds.

“It shows up a lot in the data. There are the balance traces that we look at. When you look at it, you think, ‘I don’t know how he’s driving a car so neutral yet keeping it all together, keeping the temperatures under control, yet the thing is ready to pivot on its own axis’. It’s a thing to watch. It’s great to see.

“They always come back with feedback that you think, ‘Hmm, you’re able to adapt to a lot of things’, so rarely do they come back and say it needs to be turned on its head. They can adapt to stuff.”

It’s an old truism of motorsport that a fast and reckless driver can be tamed but a slow driver can never be quickened.

Antonelli, so obviously green but equally clearly fast, simply had to have his talent harnessed.

Even so, Wolff didn’t expect it to come together so quickly.

“I think it’s maybe come earlier than I thought,” Wolff told Sky Sports. “Last year we said it was going to be a difficult year with many ups and downs and mistakes, and then bang, second race, he’s controlled it at the front.

“He’s probably a little bit better than the trajectory I thought.”

It’s not just that he won in China.

So far this year — albeit on the evidence of only two rounds — he’s a much better match for Russell.

Their qualifying averages spanning Melbourne and Shanghai have Russell ahead by just 0.035 seconds. Race pace is difficult to be definitive about given the circumstances of each Sunday, but Antonelli has looked like the quicker Mercedes driver, if only marginally, in race trim too.

That’s not to say he’s on Russell’s level yet.

His Shanghai sprint performance, for example, lacked polish — though even if his scrappy recovery was precipitated by the sort of bad start any driver not in a Ferrari is liable to have this season, you can’t help but think that Russell would have made plainer sailing of the comeback.

But the China result is important as more than just a demonstration of Antonelli’s improved execution.

His Mercedes car is clearly an easy race winner, and right now it’s hard to see anyone other than a Mercedes driver winning the title.

Had Russell been able to accumulate wins unanswered, the pressure Antonelli relieved at the end of last year would have returned. He would have been forced to answer questions about why he wasn’t able to with his teammate and what that means for the internal dynamic.

Instead that question has already been answered. The pressure valve has been pre-emptively opened.

It means Antonelli has some space to get his head down and focus on himself and the elements of his game he needs to improve.

‘IT WILL COME’

But his steepening trajectory will inevitably beg a different question.

Can he contend for the title?

Russell is the unbackable favourite to claim the championship, a status reflective of his class-leading car as much as it is his fine 2025 form.

With equal machinery, however, Antonelli has the same potential.

But that’s exactly the sort of pressure Mercedes mistakenly put the teenager under last year, and after victory in China, it’s clear not just the team but Antonelli’s entire support network is determined to shield it from him this time around.

“Kimi is young, and I think that he’s not perfect in this moment,” his father Marco Antonelli, told Sky Sports. “He’s a good driver of course, but the experience is very important, and I think that George is a very super driver with a lot of experience. It’s difficult to beat him.

“The championship is long, and this race Kimi did a good job, but George was blocked behind Ferrari, and Kimi had a lot of gap. We need to see when they are very close and understand what happens.

“We have to be realistic, because Kimi is at the beginning of his career and needs to stay calm and understand what happens step by step.”

Wolff unsurprisingly agreed.

“You have to keep your feet on the ground now,” he said. “He will make mistakes and he will have great days like today, and all of that is going to add to being hopefully a world champion one day.

“But we shouldn’t be carried away now with world championships and so on. It’s not good for him and not good for the expectations of anyone.”

Bonnington, however, was less cautious. After all, he guided Hamilton to all six of his Mercedes championships. He’s been here before.

“I am kind of teaching him, taking him step by step, through the process of how you become a champion, and he’s just ticked off the first step,” he told Sky Sports. “We need to just keep chipping away.

“It’s going to take a lot of endurance. To win one race, that’s great. To win a championship, it’s exponential the effort that goes into it.

“It’s taking it a step at a time, following the procedures, just thinking about the process, and not getting ahead of yourself.

“If you tick all the boxes and you get all your ducks in a row, it will come to you. Just focus on the task at hand and don’t worry about the championship.

“It will come.”

Russell is clearly and rightly Mercedes’s leading man. He was exemplary last year and is only getting better, and even if Antonelli has looked closer, there’s no sign Russell is about to be suddenly overpowered.

Confident and complete, the Briton has even suggested that he has contract concessions that will effectively prevent Verstappen from taking his seat as long as he’s performing.

Perhaps that will mean the end of Wolff’s years-long Verstappen obsession.

But perhaps Antonelli’s rise is poised to do that anyway.