Kimi Antonelli ‘massively fed up’ as Mercedes figure makes honest admission

Mercedes technical director James Allison revealed the team takes full responsibility for Kimi Antonelli’s slump in form.

Allison gave an honest assessment of the situation, stressing that Antonelli, like George Russell, is paying the price after some missteps with the W16; Allison hoping his words of reassurance register with Antonelli.

Kimi Antonelli slump: A Mercedes W16 problem?

Antonelli made a strong start to his rookie Formula 1 season, picking up regular top 10 results as Russell became a common face on the podium.

Results have since tailed off. Both Russell and Antonelli have scored one podium each in the last seven races; Russell won the Canadian Grand Prix, where Antonelli finished third.

The latter’s form has been of particular concern. Another frustrating outing in Belgium saw him finish the Sprint in seventeenth – he was the slowest driver in Sprint qualifying – before another exit at the first qualifying hurdle ahead of a 16th in the Grand Prix.

Mercedes is working to take the pressure off its young star, Allison revealing that the internal message has been one of ‘it’s us, not you’.

“I think he’s, like the rest of us, massively fed up with a string of results that are well below what we were collectively achieving earlier in the year,” Allison said of Antonelli.

“I hope he takes some solace from the fact that we tell him, and it’s demonstrably a fact, that we have taken the wrong steps with the car, making our team less competitive, and that he is paying the price for that, as is George.

“If the car isn’t where it needs to be, then it will be a struggle getting through the qualifying stages in your rookie season in F1. And it’s utterly clear to all of us that the thing we need to do is make the car better, and then Kimi’s fortunes will reverse with that.

“And hopefully, he’s listening to us as we say those reassuring words, because we absolutely know that he is putting in the effort on his side of that bargain.”

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Allison expanded on Mercedes’ drop in performance, with the comparison made to Ferrari; Charles Leclerc has scored four podiums in his last six grands prix at the wheel of the SF-25, which in Belgium sported its long-awaited rear suspension upgrade.

“Well, not just the Ferraris, but others too,” said Allison to the suggestion of a faster Ferrari in recent rounds.

“I mean, it’s a guessing game, complete guessing game, when you try to say what maybe other teams have done to improve themselves.

“But when you have a situation where seemingly everybody’s improved by the same amount, everybody, and you’ve just slipped backwards, more often than not when that happens, it’s because you have made yourself worse by that amount. It isn’t that everyone magically has put on the same size upgrade and crept up around you through that.

“And even if you ignore the lap times completely, you ignore the points that we are not getting anymore, like we did earlier in the year, and you just focus on what the drivers are telling us about the car, they’re telling us that the car of today, and of the last handful of races, is a car that is suffering from instability under braking in high speed, and turning in high speed, in a way that it wasn’t doing earlier in the year.

“Earlier in the year, it was a relatively easy car to set up, relatively easy to sort of pitch it up in qualifying for it to do okay. It was not enough to be championship competitive, but it was a whole sight easier to deal with than the one we have to do today.

“The downside of that, of course, is it’s dispiriting when we’ve made a lot of effort to improve the car, and we have not. The upside of it is that if you’ve done it yourself, which we have, it is comparatively easier to unpick that, because you just have to retrace your steps a bit, understand which of the steps you took that was in the wrong direction, and then move forward from there.

“It hurts, but it hurts less than, let’s say, if you launched a car with gremlins inside it, and you just had no idea what it was.”

Mercedes sit third in the Constructors’ Championship, 28 points behind Ferrari, with one more round to go before the summer break.

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