How Kimi Antonelli found Mercedes breakthrough after Baku reset

Mercedes has offered a theory as to when Kimi Antonelli figured out what was needed from him in order to turn his potential into tangible performance.

Antonelli is the runaway championship leader in only his second year in the sport, and has shown relentless form throughout the season after a mixed rookie year in 2025.

Bradley Lord explains how Kimi Antonelli turned his 2025 season around

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The 19-year-old arrived in Formula 1 as the successor to Lewis Hamilton’s recently vacated cockpit, as Mercedes plumped for talent from its own junior programme to slot in alongside the known quantity George Russell.

Antonelli immediately delivered upon his potential as he finished fourth in a treacherously slippery Australian Grand Prix at the first time of asking, but his season became trickier around the Miami Grand Prix – the race weekend in which he secured his first pole position, in the Sprint race.

His performance level became inconsistent, with the Italian struggling for speed and form as he admitted to overdriving and chasing laptime with conscious thought, having fallen out of a comfortable window with the W16. At the Belgian Grand Prix, Antonelli was visibly emotional as the enormity of his situation struck him on a weekend in which he was knocked out in Q1 and raced to 16th place.

But after the summer break, Antonelli’s form returned: starting with a fourth place in Azerbaijan that was followed up by a second-place finish in Sao Paolo a few weeks later, and a third-place finish in Las Vegas.

With his confidence rebuilding, this continued on into 2026, where he finished second to Russell in Melbourne in the new W17, before his first race victory at the Chinese Grand Prix unlocked an unprecedented run of form that has seen the youngster open up a 50-point lead over Hamilton to make him the title favourite at the summer break.

Looking back over Antonelli’s turnaround from what was undeniably a serious slump, one that could have devolved into a serious crisis of confidence without the right approach from Mercedes, deputy team principal Bradley Lord explained where and when the resurgence appeared to have kick-started.

“I think he’s found the method that worked for him in order to get the most from the team, understand the effort that is needed ahead of the weekend in order to arrive prepared, because track time is such a scarce and valuable commodity,” Lord said in a mid-season review with select media, including PlanetF1.com, at the Hungarian Grand Prix.

“Particularly in a calendar where we’re seeing ever more Sprint races, and therefore it’s an FP1, and then you’re straight into a timed, competitive session as such, rather than a free practice session.

“So it was a really useful reset around sort of Baku time [in 2025] for him to really double down, redouble his efforts with Bono [race engineer Pete Bonnington], with the rest of the team around him, with the regularity of the visits to the sim and the intensity and depth of the work there, for him to see that the opportunity that was there for him to grab and to take, and so he’s taken that with both hands.”

With Antonelli going from a season of promise into one where he has become the benchmark performer almost every weekend, Lord said the young Mercedes talent had almost expedited his learning process through his tumultuous 2025.

“I’ve been asked a few times if we are surprised [by his performance],” he said.

“I guess no and yes is the answer, in that we signed Kimi and we took the decision to bring Kimi into the team because we believed in his potential.

“But I think it’s also undeniable that, to see a driver in just his second season in Formula 1 performing with so much consistency and with a real sort of calm maturity is incredibly impressive.

“It seems like he, through that difficult first season, it sort of happened in thirds, didn’t it? A strong start, a difficult middle, and then working out what he needed to work out of that slump and into the strong races at the end of the year.

“It’s almost like he managed to do multiple seasons’ worth of learning in one, and then that’s all consolidated over the winter, and I’m sure there’s also, to some extent, the reset factor of new regulations. That means every driver is on a steep learning curve with new cars and new power units.

“That seems, over the field I think, to have seen almost a rebalancing between newer drivers in the sport and older drivers as well in the teams, where you can see those pairings.

“Kimi’s obviously done and continues to do an incredible job, and you can just see his confidence and his self-confidence building from weekend to weekend, not in a way that he’s getting carried away with anything.

“His feet are very firmly on the ground and kept very firmly on the ground by his family and inside the team as well. But you can just see the self-belief growing, and that’s really, really impressive.”

Through Antonelli’s mid-season slump in 2025, it would have been very easy for the situation to spiral out of control, had the likes of Lord, team boss Toto Wolff, and then-Mercedes driver development coach Gwen Lagrue not been able to keep their driver calm. For instance, it’s a situation that has occurred at Red Bull on numerous occasions, but with the team’s former head of the junior driver programme, Helmut Marko, taking a ‘tough love’ approach in offering little by way of public platitudes or reassurances – an approach that seemed to do little to inspire a young driver’s confidence in themselves or their position.

With Mercedes taking a more encouraging approach, and Antonelli rebounding, Lord explained how the Brackley-based squad has tried to temper the extremes of F1’s demands for the young Italian.

“We’ve been very careful and very judicious with how we’ve tried to support Kimi’s introduction to Formula 1,” he said.

“It’s a huge step for any driver, particularly with the expectation that comes with driving with a Mercedes, and so helping him not be overworked and overloaded with the marketing commitments or PR stuff at the track and other events, but managing that in as smooth a way as possible.

“We often say to the drivers, “Look, we can’t make you faster with this stuff, but, if we get it wrong, we can definitely slow you down’.

“So making sure we haven’t been doing anything that can potentially slow him down, helping him understand how to navigate those things that can be distracting in the smoothest way possible. But always, every single person in the team, whether they’re in the comms team, marketing, commercial, or engineering, the priority is performance, and the priority is lap time, and that always comes first.

“Now, Formula 1 – it’s a broader thing than just doing the engineering. That’s a luxury that you have in junior formulae, but Formula 1 brings other demands as well. Our job is to help him to balance that.

“It’s worth saying as well that he not only sets very high standards for himself, but his dad and his family expect the very best from Kimi too. Obviously there’s an amazing relationship with Bono and with the team, the car crew around Bono that has been really, really important for Kimi’s growth and development, and just that building of that bond of trust.”

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But, while Antonelli has unquestionably taken a step forward in his own personal development, how much of a factor has the change of regulations been? After all, the switch from a late-cycle ground-effect car, a concept Russell had been driving since 2022, is markedly pronounced with a change to a more traditional over-body downforce concept.

“I don’t think either of the drivers has been set in their ways or anything other than completely open-minded about how to get the best out of these cars,” Lord said of the challenge to Russell and Antonelli.

“We know that the ability to adapt and to be agile and versatile is always a key strength of any top driver, and both Kimi and George have that ability and capability as well.

“I think these are cars where this is a formula where you can get a little bit lost sometimes in some of the complexities of it. And we have certainly seen that at different points. The input and the advice has been just to keep it simple, concentrate on the driving, getting the tyres in the right place, doing the bits that every racing driver always needs to do well, and the systems then do the learning they need to do and support and deliver in an optimal way as well.

“Obviously, when things aren’t quite working right, that can get pretty complex and pretty complicated. But I think Kimi’s been able to strip away a lot of the noise, actually, and really focus on the essentials, focus on the core parts of what he needs to do, and then that creates the space for the engineers to focus on the setup and the optimisation of all the other systems as well. So it’s been a really, really good balance of effort between those different things.”

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