Kimi Antonelli is saying the quiet part out loud now: last year got to him.
It’s easy to forget, watching Mercedes’ teenage sensation carve up the opening stretch of 2026 like it’s a private test, that there was a point not so long ago where the paddock chatter wasn’t about “how many titles?”, but whether Mercedes had pushed him into Formula 1 a season too early. Antonelli admits that noise didn’t just exist around him — it seeped in.
“Last year was definitely a big feature,” he said, reflecting on the doubts that followed a difficult mid-season run through the European rounds. “I would doubt a lot about myself, especially during that period… Considering how bad it was in the moment, actually I’m very grateful that it happened, because it made me grow a lot and it taught me a lot about myself.”
That’s not the kind of quote you expect from the driver currently turning the championship into a formality.
Antonelli arrives at this point as the dominant force of the season and the runaway leader in the standings, having won the last five races. Monaco last weekend was the statement piece: peerless control, clean execution, and the sort of weekend that makes even hardened rivals look like they’re waiting for something to happen rather than making it happen. He beat Lewis Hamilton on merit, on a track where you can’t fake it, and did it with the calm of someone who’s been doing this for a decade rather than a year and a bit.
The collateral damage has landed squarely in the other side of the Mercedes garage. George Russell began 2026 as many people’s favourite for the title; six races in, he’s 68 points behind his teammate. That gap is big enough to change the internal atmosphere at any team, and at Mercedes it’s now a weekly subplot: Russell isn’t losing to a steady veteran in his prime — he’s being outpaced, outscored and outshone by the kid the team backed early.
What’s striking is that Antonelli doesn’t talk like someone living in a highlight reel. He sounds like someone who’s learned what a bad spiral feels like and has decided not to go back there.
Asked whether he still questions his potential, the answer was immediate. “Not really, to be fair,” he said. “This year, so far, I haven’t been questioning or doubting myself.”
He’s not claiming invincibility, though, and there’s a hint of someone trying to keep the emotional needle steady. Antonelli knows exactly what Mercedes has put on the table for him this season — and what he can take from it — but he’s resisting the temptation to drive with the championship constantly in view.
“I know what’s the opportunity, the opportunity that is on the table,” he said. “Of course I want to make the best out of it and try to maximise it. But at the same time I don’t want to drive or race thinking about that.
“I just want to try to really focus on the process… and try to enjoy as much as possible… and just trying to drive as fast as possible, and then we’ll see where we end up at the end of the year.”
There’s a maturity in that which maps onto what you see on track: the absence of frantic laps, the way he seems to keep something in hand for when it matters, the refusal to let a compromised session become a compromised weekend. Antonelli himself puts it down to experience — not just in the obvious “I’ve done these tracks in F1 now” sense, but in the more personal understanding of what works for him and what doesn’t when the pressure builds.
“The year of experience itself has been playing a massive role,” he explained. “Just making your own experiences and understanding what’s good and what’s not good for you during the weekend and outside the weekend.
“Also coming back into the weekend and having done it the year before, plays already a massive difference. You know better the track evolution during the session, you know better how the weekend is structured as well, so you’re also able to balance your energies in a better way.”
That last part matters more than drivers tend to admit. F1 now is as much about managing the week as it is managing the tyres — the media churn, the simulator deadlines, the engineering detail, the constant expectation to be ‘on’. If Antonelli did lose himself in that grind last year, it would explain the slump, and it would explain why he sounds so pragmatic about it now.
“You get to know even better the team, so the bond just gets stronger and stronger,” he added. “It’s all little things that, at the end of the day, they play a massive role.”
In other words: the speed was always there, but the platform around it — routines, trust, self-knowledge — has finally caught up. And once that happens with a driver of this calibre, the rest of the field tends to discover an uncomfortable truth: you weren’t racing the finished product yet.
Now they are.
