Antonelli seals historic F1 title in Mexico: the story behind his rise
Mercedes driver Kimi Antonelli became Formula One's youngest world champion in Mexico, completing a turnaround from a difficult rookie year to become Italy's first title winner since 1953.
Kimi Antonelli clinched the Formula One world championship in Mexico with four rounds of the season still to run, becoming the sport's youngest-ever champion at 20 years old, Guardian Formula One reported.
The triumph also made him Italy's first world champion since Alberto Ascari in 1953.
Before the season began, the paddock consensus held that Mercedes had built the fastest car but that George Russell, rather than his teenage teammate, would be the one to make use of it.
That expectation held for barely a race. By the sixth round, Antonelli was already firmly on course for the title, combining raw pace with an aggression, judgement and composure well beyond his years.
The season had not started smoothly. At the Australian Grand Prix, Antonelli suffered a 25G crash in final practice, Yahoo Sports reported, forcing Mercedes mechanics into a rebuild completed only just in time for qualifying.
Despite being unable to fine-tune the car's set-up afterwards, he still qualified second behind Russell. A loss of battery power produced a poor start in the race that dropped him to sixth, before Mercedes' pace advantage carried him back to second by the flag.
Antonelli later reflected on how differently he handled that setback compared with his rookie campaign. "If something like that had happened to me last year, the rest of the weekend would probably have been very compromised," he said, as quoted by Yahoo Sports in Austin.
"When you have one year of experience, one full year in Formula 1, you come back the next year and you just feel better," he added. "Things happen a bit more easily, let's say, also because you're not forcing them to happen as much."
He also pointed to the value of continuity within his team. "Especially when you've been working with the same group of people for one year, going into year two is a big difference as well. You know how to move on together as a team, especially from difficult situations," Antonelli said.
His first season had been far harder. Antonelli struggled to adapt to Formula One's ground-effect cars in 2025 and endured a mid-season run of poor results that raised questions over whether Mercedes had promoted him too early.
The crash in Melbourne briefly revived those same doubts, echoing the pattern of his rookie year, with the bookmakers' favouring of Russell for the title appearing, for a moment, to be vindicated.
Yahoo Sports pointed to his composed response that weekend as the first evidence of a driver no longer resembling the "insecure rookie" of 2025.
When the title was finally sealed at the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, the emotion of the moment overwhelmed him. Antonelli crossed the line in tears in the circuit's atmospheric stadium section, before his mother, father and sister embraced him, all in tears themselves.
"We did it," Antonelli said. "I wouldn't be here without Mercedes, without my family. This moment is one that will live for ever. I am speechless. I am just trying to process this moment."
With the title secured four rounds early, Antonelli heads into the remainder of the season as Formula One's youngest world champion, having turned a shaky start in Melbourne into a year that reshaped expectations of what a second-season Mercedes driver could achieve.