Everyone loves Kimi Antonelli, but Toto Wolff has a big fear
Andrea Kimi Antonelli has been so far the big revelation of 2026 for Formula 1, winning consecutively his first three career races by hoisting himself to the top of the drivers’ world championship and setting a long series of precocious records. It was a winning bet for Mercedes and especially for Toto Wolff, who has been betting big on the Bolognese driver for years and has also defended him without qualms in his most difficult moments. But now that the whole world has started to bully the not-yet-20-year-old talent into the spotlight, his boss has decided to start protecting him.
“Kimi is doing an outstanding job. All the recognition he is receiving is absolutely deserved. Having said that, however, we have to keep a sense of proportion. Formula 1 is not based on individual successes, but on consistent performance. And now he needs the right space to continue to grow, writing his own story without dealing with too much pressure,” Wolff said in an interview with the ‘Gazzetta dello Sport’ in which he framed Antonelli’s magical moment.
Wolff, in fact, fears that the high praise for Antonelli could turn into criticism should he or Mercedes be called upon to face more problems in the weeks and months ahead. “That’s exactly what scares me. Kimi is young and charismatic, even now he is a small, big star. But after a really beautiful start some bad moments might happen. And I don’t want the public to wonder what’s going on and maybe start saying they were wrong about him. We all want Antonelli to become a Formula 1 great, in Mercedes and otherwise. But his career is just beginning, we have to treat him like a diamond in the rough,” Wolff added.
A concept that the Mercedes team principal has reiterated on other occasions as well, broadening the discourse to the Italian media context. “It is important at this time that Kimi keeps his feet on the ground. In the team we know this very well and his parents have also played a key role in this. Obviously, however, the big Italian public is now all about him. We only talk about Sinner-Antonelli, Antonelli-Sinner, they are the two superstars also because the national soccer team did not qualify for the World Cup,” explained Wolff, who also pointed out that the demands of media and sponsors have become more and more numerous and difficult to handle. The comparison with Jannik Sinner is now recurring: two very young Italian stars who find themselves simultaneously at the top of their respective sports, at a time when national soccer is struggling to keep the public’s passion fired up.
Wolff’s concern is moreover confirmed by the words of Ezio Zermiani, Rai’s longtime Formula 1 correspondent, who in a recent interview with Corriere della Sera drew a lucid and rhetoric-free portrait of the young driver. “He is very young, maybe too young. At 19 you can’t have all the necessary characteristics you need to tame a single-seater. He certainly has talent. He makes mistakes of youth, that’s normal. But he has an important attitude: when he makes a mistake, he learns and does not repeat the mistake. That’s the key thing,” said the journalist, who also pointed out that comparisons with the greats of the past are hardly applicable to the modern era of Formula 1, where cars are now worth 70 percent of the final result.
On a purely sporting level, the numbers speak for themselves. Antonelli leads the World Championship with 100 points to his credit, twenty more than teammate George Russell, who has struggled to keep up with the young Bolognese especially in Miami. The three consecutive pole positions – a record shared only with Ayrton Senna and Michael Schumacher – tell of a driver already capable of making a difference in qualifying, while the three wins in a row show just as much solidity in the race. It is no coincidence that former driver David Coulthard has already warned that cohabitation in Mercedes is bound to become more tense: “The friendship is over, George now knows that there is a real threat to the world title.”
A testament to the magnitude of the Antonelli phenomenon are also the ratings figures, which Sky Italia released on the occasion of the renewal of its agreement with Formula 1 until 2032. The Italian driver’s first win at the Chinese Grand Prix was watched by 1.2 million viewers live on Sky, with a further 1.4 million choosing deferred viewing on TV8. Numbers that contributed to an overall increase in ratings of 25 percent compared to the start of the previous season-an unmistakable sign of how Antonelli’s talent is dragging the entire movement to an increasingly large audience. Managing all this, for Toto Wolff, is perhaps the most delicate challenge of all.
