Kimi Antonelli ready to close a circle in Barcelona: there's a precedent that smiles on him
Kimi Antonelli arrives in Barcelona with the awareness of someone who is experiencing a season, that of the 2026 F1 World Championship, that is definitively consecrating him. Yet, among the many circuits that have marked his path, Montmeló retains a special significance. Here he has not yet won among the ‘big boys,’ but he left one of the first important imprints of his career, in 2023.
At the time, the Bolognese of Mercedes was racing in the European Formula Regional with Prema Racing: in both races of the second round of the season, run precisely on the Catalan circuit, Antonelli took a double second place, in both cases behind Tim Tramniz (then a member of the Red Bull Junior Team and now involved in the GT World Challenge Europe).
They were 36 points (18 plus 18) very heavy, decisive in the race for the title that Antonelli would later make his own, beginning to make himself known at only seventeen years old as one of the purest talents of the new generation. The 2006-born driver is the only Italian, even today, to have won a title in Formula Regional, not only in Europe but also, again in 2023, in the Middle East.
That Catalan weekend represented one of the first signs of his ability to maximize every opportunity, stay sharp, build a championship even on the days when victory does not come. Today, three years later, Antonelli returns to Barcelona with a completely different baggage: results, maturity, management as a pilot already formed. Yet the thread linking that past to the present remains clear.
To seek victory on this track is to try to close a circle, to turn a happy memory into a new chapter in its history. If 2023 was the starting point, 2026 could be the moment when Montmeló stops being just a symbolic place and becomes the theater of a definitive consecration.
