The risks of Mercedes signing its first F1 rookie in 70 years

It’s finally been announced: Andrea Kimi Antonelli will race for Mercedes as a replacement for Lewis Hamilton, who is moving to Ferrari, in the 2025 Formula 1 season.

By signing for the Silver Arrows team, Antonelli breaks with a long tradition that dates back 70 years to 1954, the season in which Karl Kling made his Formula One World Championship debut for Mercedes, alongside the legendary Juan Manuel Fangio and co.

Their career paths are very different. Kling’s early successes in motorsport – achieved at a later age, given the early days of motorsport – were interrupted by the Second World War, and so he was nearly 44 when he made his debut in the F1 World Championship. Antonelli is a fresh-faced 18-year-old. They are both products of very different ages.

The better comparison for Antonelli is of course Red Bull’s Max Verstappen. Once a target for Mercedes during a rapid rise through the junior ranks, it was his brilliant, emerging potential as a teenager that forced Toto Wolff here. He simply did not want to miss out a second time with a highly regarded youngster.

PLUS: Why comparisons between Antonelli and Verstappen go beyond their driving talent

But such a decision is not without risk for Mercedes, Antonelli, Wolff and George Russell. For the latter, while memories of his breakthrough BRDC Formula 4 title in 2014, the 2CV Oulton Park race that year and his hard-fought rise through successive GP3 and Formula 2 titles are still fresh, Russell is suddenly no longer Mercedes’ star in the making.

It is now up to him to lead the team, a team that is still trying to climb back to the dominant position it once held in Formula 1, with all the dangers that entails, such as possible sudden dives off the mountainsides in the battle between the compact constructors in the championship.

Russell simply needs to convincingly beat Antonelli in 2025 to ensure his stock remains high, as Wolff will not stop openly courting Verstappen. On some level, this could be a smart tactic to keep the pressure on Mercedes’ Red Bull rival, who still appears to be struggling with the fallout from the early 2024 scandal and design flaws.

Russell knows beating Antonelli will be important to keep his stock high

Photo by: Mercedes AMG

But if Wolff feels there is an opportunity to finally make progress on what he sees as a relationship that “has to happen at some point” with the Dutchman, as he said earlier this year, even before Verstappen’s current Red Bull contract expires in 2028, then three-in-two simply isn’t going to happen.

And this is where Wolff’s emotional attachment comes in. He is very close to the Antonelli family and if the fledgling Italian’s reputation in Formula 1 does not rise as quickly as Mercedes clearly hopes, then questions will arise about Wolff’s judgment.

After all, he has already admitted that the way he structured Hamilton’s latest contract, with a view to one day promoting Antonelli, contributed to the seven-time world champion deciding he would rather make a sensational move to Ferrari.

Antonelli making his debut in the Formula 1 weekend in front of his home crowd at Monza inevitably increased the pressure, but Wolff is again convinced that “he has to swim” in such challenging conditions

History may judge Wolff’s moves here harshly. But if Antonelli were sinking rather than swimming, in the Austrian’s favourite metaphor, and Verstappen was available when it was clear a break was needed, it wouldn’t matter.

Of course, this is all still hypothetical, but it reflects the constant, ever-later chess moves being made all over the Formula 1 paddock.

Mercedes personnel will now get to work on perfecting Antonelli for his second FP1 rookie session of the 2024 season, likely to take place in Mexico in October. The team does not want a repeat of its Monza FP1 shunt.

That highlighted the risk-reward trade-off most in this promotion. Mercedes is quick to point to data showing Antonelli passing Lesmo 2 and Ascari quicker than Verstappen went through them in the top 1 on Friday as evidence of his full potential. But the decisions to push in those places ultimately led to his Parabolica crash, when the overheated tyres couldn’t take it anymore.

Antonelli’s early FP1 crash at Monza will serve as a lesson in how far he can push without going over the limit

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

This is the conundrum of the F1 rookie. Finding the limit and then working just enough under it to beat the rest and not destroy a car is the key to success at the top level. But it is simply most likely that the early stages of 2025 will see more high-profile crashes – and thus a blow to a cost cap era that wasn’t the case a decade ago – as Antonelli goes through this process.

Questions are already being asked about the wisdom of his F1 weekend debut in front of his home crowd at Monza, which inevitably added to the pressure, but Wolff is once again convinced that “he has to swim” in such challenging conditions.

The question that remains unanswered is why Mercedes chose to give Antonelli his outing on a weekend when he also races in F2, which poses a challenge for drivers who jump between categories. Then Ferrari junior Charles Leclerc found this out the hard way in 2016 when he raced in GP3 while regularly doing F1 practice for Haas.

He began to think that such changes were making his GP3 title challenge more difficult than necessary, so much so that he requested that Ferrari not hold any more F1 practices until he had secured his debut F2 title in 2017. Haas insiders, on the other hand, were less than impressed with his first performances in their car.

Mercedes’ announcement on Saturday morning has more to do with the Monza FP1 decision than anything else. But conveniently, F2 isn’t racing in Mexico, where Antonelli needs to quickly put the Monza crash behind him.

If he does, it will regress to footnote territory in his future career assessment, but these kinds of things can snowball. And if they do, the pressure on him mounts in a very different way and he risks having his confidence dented to the point where Mercedes clearly see the potential in his F1 test outings and that early Monza FP1 data – to the extent that they don’t really care about his F2 results this season – could be wasted.

However, it is just as likely (because otherwise we cannot know) that Antonelli will make good on his promise and become a successful Formula 1 driver who will quickly surpass Kling’s career of two podium finishes.

Good luck Kimi, the F1 world is watching.