Eliska Babickova has confirmed she and Kimi Antonelli have ended their relationship, saying she wanted to shut down what she described as “false, disgusting narratives” that have been circulating online.
Babickova, a Czech karting racer who had become a familiar face around the paddock during Antonelli’s rise, addressed the situation directly to her followers on Instagram. The timing is hard to miss: it lands on the eve of the 2026 Formula 1 season, with Antonelli set to start his year in Melbourne when practice begins on 6 March.
The pair were reported to have begun dating in October 2023, and Babickova’s first visit to an F1 weekend came at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix the following year. Since then, she’d often been spotted in the background of the Antonelli story — a young driver stepping into the kind of spotlight that doesn’t do privacy, patience, or nuance particularly well.
She’d hinted in late January that things were not straightforward, writing that she’d been “super inactive” and that the month had been “tough”, adding she was focusing on “figuring some of my personal things out.” A few weeks later, she put a full stop on the speculation.
“This is quite recent because all throughout February, me and Kimi were trying to figure stuff out,” she said, explaining that even they weren’t certain “at what point the relationship was” while they were trying to work through it. She added that she hadn’t spoken publicly earlier despite rumours persisting for some time.
What clearly pushed her to go public, though, was the way the internet had started doing what it does. Babickova said she had seen “so much speculation and fake narratives and news,” and wanted to “set the record straight” so there “doesn’t need to be any more false, disgusting narratives.”
The key point, she insisted, is that the split isn’t rooted in scandal.
“Yes, we did break up,” Babickova said. “I was the one to end the relationship because I felt that we no longer aligned in our personal lives and in what we wanted for our future.
“Also, our values towards the end of the relationship were very different. That’s why the relationship ended. There’s no massive drama. Nothing like this.”
In a line that will likely be read and re-read given the kind of stories that tend to swirl around young drivers with suddenly global profiles, she also said: “Although we did have issues towards the end of our relationship, other people were never the problem.”
For Antonelli, the uncomfortable reality is that personal news like this doesn’t arrive in a neat little box marked “off-track”. It bleeds into the week-to-week grind, and F1’s attention economy has a way of turning any sliver of private life into something to be picked at. That Babickova felt the need to go on record — explicitly to kill off narratives she says are untrue — says as much about the environment around the sport as it does about the relationship itself.
It also drops into the middle of what’s shaping up to be a heavily scrutinised start to Antonelli’s season. He’s 19, driving for Mercedes, and already being talked about as one of the favourites heading into 2026 after the team’s impressive pre-season testing form. That kind of noise can be helpful if you’re leading on Sunday. It can be suffocating if you’re trying to build momentum, learn a new car, and handle the relentless expectation that comes with wearing that badge.
None of this is to suggest a breakup determines lap time — drivers aren’t machines, but they’re also professionals who compartmentalise better than most people realise. Still, it’s another reminder that modern F1 doesn’t give rookies (or near-rookies) the luxury of growing up out of frame. Every wobble becomes content, every silence becomes “evidence”, and every rumour gets to masquerade as reporting somewhere online until someone involved is forced to stamp it out.
Babickova’s message was, in that sense, less gossip fodder than boundary-setting. She framed the decision as a personal one, rooted in diverging futures and values, and asked — as plainly as anyone can in 2026 — for the story not to be rewritten by strangers.
Melbourne will arrive quickly. And once the helmets go on and the lights start cycling through their ritual, Antonelli’s world will narrow to the usual things: tyre temps, brake balance, sector deltas. Off-track noise has a habit of returning the moment the visor comes up again. But for now, at least, the people involved have said what needs saying.
