Kimi Antonelli lifts lid on bruising mid‑season wobble: “It felt like everything was falling apart”
Kimi Antonelli has never lacked speed or composure, but even the most polished rookies discover the sport can bite. Midway through his first Formula 1 season, the teenager who stepped straight into Lewis Hamilton’s old seat at Mercedes admits he hit a wall — and for a while, he wasn’t sure he’d find a way through it.
“It felt like everything was just falling apart,” Antonelli said of his summer slump, a raw admission from a driver who began 2025 looking every bit the prodigy Mercedes had banked on. He started brightly — that cool, clipped performance in the chaos of Australia didn’t go unnoticed — but as Europe arrived, so did a slow grind that stripped away confidence, pace and, briefly, conviction. “I was also afraid that I wouldn’t have been able to get out of it,” he conceded.
The story behind it is as old as F1’s rulebook: an upgrade that promised lap time but delivered turbulence. Mercedes arrived at Imola in May with a new rear suspension aimed at cleaning up the W16’s aero platform. On paper, it was tidy. On track, it let something nastier in.
“We tried to solve a problem with a mechanical upgrade,” team boss Toto Wolff explained at the time. “That may not have solved the issue but it let something else creep into the car — an instability that took all confidence from the drivers.” There was even a false dawn. “We were misled a little bit by the Montreal win,” Wolff added, believing the result masked a platform that still wasn’t right.
Six races after Imola, Mercedes ripped the change back off the car. The immediate bounce was telling: the W16 returned to a more predictable window, and George Russell banked P6 in Hungary to steady the ship.
For Antonelli, the damage in the middle phase was more personal. Expectations had ballooned after a strong run up to Canada; then came the heavy weather. The rookie’s underperformance became a talking point, and Wolff didn’t sugarcoat it during Monza week. Those remarks, well-intended or not, piled on to a driver already wrestling the spiral.
“Because I had a very strong start, up until Canada, expectation got higher and higher,” Antonelli said. “Then the European season came, and it felt like everything was just not working… Of course, Mercedes were already fighting back then for P2. We were losing points and obviously then also the team started to put a bit of pressure. That added up. That is normal. That is how it is.”
The reset came after Monza. Antonelli sat down with Wolff and his race engineer, Peter “Bono” Bonnington, and reframed the task. Fewer grand conclusions. Less fixation on the final result. More process. More bite-size progress. “I was just getting more and more frustrated because I was thinking too much about the final result,” he said. “It was a snowball effect, and I felt like I wasn’t going anywhere.”
Baku was the first sign of daylight — a clean, confident P4, his best result since Canada and a sorely needed reminder that his speed hadn’t gone anywhere, it had just been stuck behind a car he couldn’t trust. Points followed in Singapore and Mexico, and then came the moment that felt like closure: a hard-earned podium at Interlagos, where Antonelli rebuffed a charging Max Verstappen in the late laps with a composure that spoke louder than any press conference.
Las Vegas added another trophy — third after both McLarens were disqualified — and the numbers at year’s end told the rest of the story. Three podiums, 150 points on debut, and a significant role in Mercedes securing third in the Constructors’ standings alongside Russell’s steady haul.
Strip away the headlines and the arc makes sense. No other rookie faced Antonelli’s blend of expectation and context: taking Hamilton’s seat, stepping into a team desperate to haul itself back toward the front, and doing it while an upgrade unsettled the car under him at precisely the point the calendar turned unforgiving. He came out of it looking more hardened than jaded.
“This year has been a massive learning curve,” Antonelli reflected. “Being able to overcome that difficult period made me stronger — a small victory. I’m quite happy with the season, but mostly I’m happy with how much I grew and how much I matured as a person. Next year, I’m much more prepared and much more in control of the situation.”
There’s the crux. Results matter, of course, but so does trajectory. The W16 ended the season back in a workable window; the driver who’ll be steering its successor sounds like he’s found one, too.
