Toto Wolff plays down Kimi Antonelli title talk after Chinese Grand Prix win

Toto Wolff says it’s “too early” for Kimi Antonelli to think about a world championship, with the 19-year-old needing to grow further without excessive pressure.

The Italian driver became the second-youngest race winner in F1 history on Sunday, taking victory in the Chinese Grand Prix.

Toto Wolff: Kimi Antonelli must avoid pressure after Chinese Grand Prix win

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Antonelli took a historic pole position on Saturday at the Shanghai International Circuit, becoming the youngest polesitter in the sport’s history in the process.

On race day, he overcame a lightning start from Lewis Hamilton to overtake his Mercedes predecessor, and scampered off up the road to take victory and lead a Mercedes 1-2 as George Russell recovered to second after a slow start.

With Antonelli scoring his maiden win, he is four points behind Russell after two rounds, with the championship looking as though it may become an intra-team battle as Ferrari appears to lack a small amount of pace compared to the Brackley cars.

Both Antonelli and Russell are products of the Mercedes junior driver programme, with Russell signed to the programme in 2017, and Antonelli a year later, while still in karting.

In-house rivalries are nothing new at Mercedes. 10 years ago, Hamilton and then-teammate Nico Rosberg became hostile teammates through the 2014-16 seasons, with the hostilities only ending when Rosberg retired from F1 after winning the title in 2016.

Team boss Toto Wolff had trouble keeping a lid on the hostilities of the time, which boiled over into occasional on-track contact and retirements.

With Russell the title favourite given his greater experience and likely greater consistency, Wolff said he’s eager to ensure the hype around his young driver doesn’t become too much for Antonelli after joining the pantheon of race winners.

“You can kind of see the hype that is going to start now, especially in Italy,” he said.

“I see the headlines already, ‘World Champion, Grande Kimi’, and whatever.

“That’s really not good, because those mistakes are gonna come. He’s just a kid, so it’s too early to even think about a championship.

“We have a good car that, at this stage, is capable of winning. Let’s see what kind of political knives are going to come out in the next few weeks and months.

“But, at the moment, it is a car that is capable of winning. Both have equal opportunity, but so long to talk about winning championships.”

The W17 is clearly the car to beat at the start of this season, and the realisation of the opportunity in front of the two drivers is something that Antonelli acknowledged after crashing in FP3 in Melbourne.

“It’s hard because you know you have such a great opportunity, you know, having such a quick car,” he said before the weekend.

“You don’t want to miss the opportunity, so you go for it but, in my case, I’m still learning how to improve the risk/reward ratio, especially in sessions where the result doesn’t really count, such as FP3, for example.

“So it’s up to then be able to keep the momentum going. It’s about [putting] things together, even in a qualifying session, having a clean run from Q1 all the way to Q3, I’m still trying to find my way to see how I can achieve that, because still, at the moment, I feel like maybe I do a good Q1 and Q2, then maybe Q3 is not good enough. So just need to find some improvements in there.”

With Antonelli aware that he is still on his learning curve at the start of what is only his second season in Formula 1, Wolff said the dynamic between Antonelli and Russell is completely different to Hamilton and Rosberg, who were of a similar age and had been rivals and friends throughout the junior categories.

“I think, as a young person, Kimi just needs the maturity to grow, and he has a fantastic driver as a teammate who is eight years longer in that spot,” he said.

“[The relationship] is completely different. I mean, Nico and Lewis knew each other from karting, from the early days being friends, but also having this social fight that was always ingrained in there.

“And then it got, what was a friendship became a rivalry, then animosity, and it was two very different characters.

“But, having said that, you just need to appreciate that drivers are here and are like they are in order to win races and championships. The moment you sniff that, obviously, then the elbows come out.

“That’s something that the team needs to manage. But both of them are Mercedes juniors. We’ve been responsible for their trajectory since they came into single-seaters, Kimi even in karting.

“I feel that we were in a totally different situation.”

More on Kimi Antonelli

Toto Wolff told Kimi Antonelli to ‘stop nonsense’ in China win

Pete Bonnington makes Schumacher, Hamilton comparison after Antonelli win

Kimi Antonelli ‘digests failure much better’

Antonelli is coming off the back of a maiden season that saw him come out of a very difficult phase through the middle part of the year.

After a strong start, a series of misfortunes saw him spiralling into a situation in which he readily admitted to not driving on instinct and was, instead, overthinking and overdriving in an attempt to steady the ship.

But, despite the pressure, Antonelli recovered his form by the end of the season to earn another year with the team, with Mercedes having been aware of the fact that mistakes and inconsistency were always likely to happen with a rookie driver.

With expectations growing in his second season, albeit not to the extent where beating Russell is the target, Wolff said he’s seen clear progression from Antonelli over the last 12 months, but says he still expects imperfections.

“I said to him that sometimes, it’s not necessary to push it all the way to the edge when we’re in a free practice session or, a little bit, at the end of the race,” he said.

“For a young driver, that is key to just align… They align the driving, to not make any mistakes at all, and that needs a certain calibration.

“The massive ups and downs we had last year, we’re going to have other moments this year where there will be mistakes, because he’s just still a very young man.

“I think from personality, you can already see that the way he digests failure is much better.

“When he went off on Friday, it was not like he carried that whole thing into the briefing. He came in and said, ‘That wasn’t good, but he compartmentalised, and said, ‘Okay, let’s move on’.

“And then it wasn’t there anymore, you know? I think this is a feature that I’ve seen with great sportspeople, that you make the mistake, you analyse, look at the data, find your answers, and then you put it in a box, and that’s what he’s doing.

“The interaction in the engineering room, there’s just so much maturity that he has learned over the last 12 months.”

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