Antonelli lifts the lid on his “spiral” — and the meeting that saved his rookie year
Andrea Kimi Antonelli has been refreshingly blunt about the roughest stretch of his debut Formula 1 season. After a bright opening run with Mercedes, the 19-year-old admitted he sank into a “negative spiral” once the calendar swung to Europe — and says a “big meeting” after Monza reset everything.
The numbers tell the story. Antonelli banked 48 points across the first six rounds, then scraped just three points through the European leg, failing to score in seven of nine races on the continent. The noise around him grew loud: was Mercedes’ prodigy thrown into F1 too early?
He concedes the slump was real and explains where it began. A suspension update arrived, and while the team ultimately felt it cost performance, George Russell adapted quicker. Antonelli didn’t.
“Since we put on the new suspension, I struggled quite a lot, especially to adapt,” he said. “George, even though we lost performance with it, was able to adapt — I struggled more. I just entered this negative spiral where it kept getting worse and worse, and frustration was taking over.”
Spa was the low point. “My darkest moment,” he said, admitting he started to question whether he was “good enough” as results refused to land despite the effort.
The turnaround came only after a hard reset. Post-Monza, Antonelli and Mercedes sat down for what he calls a “big meeting” — part debrief, part intervention. “I did a big reset mentally and tried to refocus on the process,” he said. “That really helped. A big learning.”
From there, the trajectory flipped. He scored in all but one of the final nine races to finish seventh in the Drivers’ Championship, a tidy recovery that won’t make many highlight reels but matters inside a team still measuring itself against titles. Mercedes, for its part, wound up runner-up in the 2025 constructors’ standings — a result Toto Wolff publicly labelled “painful,” and the kind that sharpens focus across Brackley and Brixworth for the winter.
Inside the garage, there was clarity on what tripped him up. Trackside engineering chief Andrew Shovlin suggested Antonelli’s own expectations — especially on familiar European circuits — contributed to the slide.
“There may have been an element in Europe where he had unrealistic expectations,” Shovlin said in Abu Dhabi. “He thought he knew the circuits, the results were going to come, and they didn’t. Whereas on tracks he doesn’t know, he doesn’t have that expectation, and the weekends have seemed to flow quite smoothly.”
The personal progress was equally important. “We’re starting to understand him a lot better,” Shovlin added. “He’s comfortable in the team, comfortable in his own performance. We’re excited to see how he does next year, and adapting to next year’s rules — that is really about practice.”
It wasn’t all whiteboards and wisdom, either. Race engineer Peter Bonnington kept it old-school with a line only “Bono” can deliver — joking that, amid the rut, the kid sometimes needed “a size nine up the you-know-where.” A nudge, a laugh, onto the next run plan.
Strip it back and the picture is familiar: a rookie driver found himself on the wrong side of an update, his teammate made it work sooner, the results dried up, the doubt crept in. What mattered was what followed. Antonelli didn’t hide from the mental side of it, and Mercedes put the structures around him to work — recalibrating driving tools, expectations, and the weekend rhythm.
There’s also a subtle dynamic worth noting. Russell’s adaptation curve gave the team a benchmark and kept the garage from chasing ghosts; Antonelli’s resurgence, meanwhile, restored the second reference point Mercedes needs every Friday to make the right calls. That’s how teams mount campaigns, not just win Sundays.
For Antonelli, the sophomore brief is straightforward: second time around, with fewer unknowns and fewer ghosts on the European swing, the baseline should lift. The bar, naturally, will rise with it.
He summed it up without fluff: refocus on the work, reduce the noise, let the lap times come to you. The teenager who wobbled in July looked a very different proposition by November. If that’s the floor he’s moving from, Mercedes has every reason to feel bullish about the ceiling.
