Kimi Antonelli’s build-up to his first proper taste of Mercedes’ 2026 machinery has had an entirely unnecessary jolt, after the Italian was involved in a single-car road accident in San Marino on Saturday night.
Mercedes confirmed Antonelli was “completely unhurt” after the incident near his home, with police attending the scene after being called by the driver himself. A report from the crash said Antonelli hit a guardrail in Serravalle, damaging the vehicle, but there were no other cars involved.
It’s an awkward bit of noise to have hanging around a driver five days out from a headline moment in his winter. Antonelli is due to take over the Mercedes W17 for the afternoon session on Day 1 of pre-season testing in Bahrain, stepping out of the car for George Russell earlier in the day. With 2026’s new-generation regulations coming into view, those early test laps matter — not just to the engineers trying to make sense of correlation, but to a young driver trying to settle into a rhythm before the season even begins.
The team’s statement was blunt and deliberately calm: this was a traffic accident, police were called, only one car was involved, and Antonelli walked away without injury. In other words, no drama — and no appetite from Mercedes to let it become one.
Antonelli was driving a Mercedes AMG GT 63 PRO 4MATIC+ ‘Motorsport Collectors Edition’, a limited-run model with 200 cars produced. The irony, of course, is that while the road car world loves exclusivity, Formula 1 teams love predictability. The last thing any outfit wants in late winter is an avoidable distraction, particularly when it involves a driver’s fitness and readiness so close to running a brand-new car for the first time in public.
The incident also inevitably brings back a tangential family footnote from last year, when Antonelli’s father, Marco, made headlines after being investigated by prosecutors in Bologna following an incident near Imola. That case was later dismissed, with a judge ruling that “the fact does not exist” regarding resistance of a public official, and the policeman did not file an injury complaint.
None of that has anything to do with Saturday night’s crash, but F1 rarely allows context to stay neatly in its box. For Antonelli, the priority now is simple: keep the focus on Bahrain, get through the first day cleanly, and start building mileage — for himself, and for Mercedes’ 2026 project.
Because while a guardrail scrape on a Saturday night doesn’t change a season, the sport has a way of testing how quickly you can shut out the noise and get back to the job. In a week’s time, nobody at Mercedes will care about a dented road car if Antonelli’s first W17 outing is tidy, measured and productive.
