The Mercedes F1 Team confirmed Saturday that highly rated Formula 2 rookie Andrea Kimi Antonelli would step up to F1 to partner George Russell and replace seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton from 2025 onwards. Feeder Series tells you all about the 18-year-old Mercedes junior’s career and how he rose from karts to F1 in just three years. 

By Martin Lloyd and Michael McClure

It was almost exactly three years ago that we first introduced our readers to Andrea Kimi Antonelli. Freshly 15 and just out of karting, the Mercedes junior was preparing for his highly anticipated F4 debut with Prema after a glittering karting career.

Three years later, Antonelli is F1’s newest confirmed driver, taking over a seat at eight-time constructors’ champions Mercedes vacated by Hamilton, by many statistical metrics the most successful driver in F1 history.

The 18-year-old has gigantic shoes to fill – but for a driver rated by many as the most exciting talent in junior single-seaters since Max Verstappen a decade ago, stepping into the Mercedes race seat has been a long time coming.

Having clinched four single-seater titles – two in F4 and two in FRegional – between 15 October 2022 and 15 October 2023, Antonelli leapt up to F2 for the 2024 season, a jump attempted by few drivers previously. In his rookie year, he has taken two wins in the first 10 rounds and sits seventh in the standings, with more than double the points of sophomore Prema teammate and fellow 2025 F1 graduate Ollie Bearman, who will race for Haas.

Ahead of his F1 debut, he took part in his first official F1 session on Friday, replacing Russell in the Mercedes W15 for free practice 1 at Monza. He completed just five laps before suffering a 52G crash at Parabolica and finished 20th in the order, 2.279 seconds off pacesetter Verstappen.

Antonelli, who has been supported by Mercedes since 2018, first became widely touted as a serious candidate for a 2025 F1 drive when Hamilton announced on 1 February his decision to leave Mercedes after the 2024 season, shocking the motorsport world. The 39-year-old Briton, who had raced for Mercedes since 2013, had signed a two-year contract extension with the team in August 2023, but the deal involved a clause that allowed either party to exit the contract after the 2024 season. 

Wolff told Austrian broadcaster ORF in February that the deal had been designed with Antonelli in mind but that he did not expect Hamilton to choose to trigger the exit clause in the winter.

“Precisely because we have a junior on the horizon who is really driving at a very high level, I simply wanted to keep this option open,” he said about the deal.

Feeder Series understands that one of the impetuses to push Antonelli through the ranks was Hamilton’s talks with Ferrari, which began in the summer of 2023. It was around then that rumours began to swirl in junior paddocks about Antonelli’s possible leap from FR Europe to F2.

Mercedes and Wolff had also reportedly tried to pry three-time and reigning F1 champion Verstappen out of his contract with Red Bull Racing, which goes to 2028. But he did not succeed in doing so, making it the second time he lost out on the Dutchman’s services after Red Bull snapped him up to their junior team in his first and only junior single-seater season, a European F3 campaign, in 2014.

Antonelli and Verstappen’s youth career trajectories have often been compared, and both come from families with motorsport involvement. Antonelli – born in Bologna, Italy, on 25 August 2006 – is the son of Marco Antonelli, who runs the AKM Motorsport team that competes in Italian F4 as well as Antonelli Motorsport. The eponymous outfit has run Lamborghini and Mercedes entries in a variety of GT series, often with the now 60-year-old at the wheel.

The younger Antonelli already established his reputation as a star in karting, beginning with his Trofeo Easykart title in Italy in the 60cc class in 2015 despite having missed the first two rounds.

He became utterly dominant in his final years in karting, completed with the support of Mercedes’ junior programme. He took junior titles in the WSK Super Master Series and Euro Series in 2019 as a protégé of Nico Rosberg, who has a long affiliation with Mercedes that included seven years in F1 and a championship title in 2016. Senior karting titles in the Italian karting championship and the WSK Euro Series in 2020 followed, as did back-to-back FIA European karting championships in 2020 and 2021, all with Kart Republic.

That last campaign came after he had broken his leg in an accident at the 2020 FIA Karting World Championship final at Portimão in November, meaning he spent much of the winter recovering.

Despite the late disruption to his karting career, Antonelli and his father were keen to move up to single-seaters at the first opportunity, and he had already been testing various cars privately for years before his single-seater debut. That step up finally came in September 2021 at Italian F4’s Red Bull Ring round, held two and a half weeks after he turned the series-mandated minimum age of 15.

Racing for Prema, the team that took him through his entire junior career, Antonelli finished the 2021 season 10th with three podiums at the season finale in Monza, an already impressive showing for a rookie. But his utter domination of both the Italian and German F4 championships the next year – with a combined 22 wins and 675 points from 35 entries – gave him his first two single-seater titles and a level of hype rarely, if ever, seen at the F4 level.

He also took two victories in a two-round F4 UAE appearance over the winter, and he ended the year by winning the gold medal in the FIA Motorsport Games’ F4 class despite racing with a broken wrist.

A move to Formula Regional Middle East followed in 2023, and he took his third title on the bounce while racing for Prema affiliate Mumbai Falcons. The three wins, three poles and four further podiums he took there set him up for his FR Europe campaign in the main season, which he likewise won a round early with five victories, four poles and six further podiums.

The announcement that Antonelli would be promoted to F2 came 23 October, a day after his FR Europe campaign concluded. He turned out to be the series’ youngest driver by more than a year as well as one of two, alongside AIX Racing’s Joshua Dürksen, to have skipped the F3 level entirely.

In October 2023, Mercedes Junior Team manager Stéphane Guérin told Feeder Series that moving Antonelli up “was not a decision that we took impulsively” and that he had “reached or exceeded” the targets set out for him at the start of 2023.

F2 in 2024 was somewhat of a tabula rasa with the adoption of a new car, the Dallara F2 2024 – the series’ first new chassis in six years. Despite the steep jump from the FR-spec Tatuus F3-T318, which has half the horsepower of the F2 car, Antonelli took little time to adapt, qualifying sixth at round two in Jeddah and second at the next round in Melbourne. 

His first podium and win came in the Silverstone sprint race, in which he delivered a masterful wet-weather performance to best second-placed Zane Maloney by 8.7 seconds. 

In the Budapest feature race, multiple safety cars played havoc with strategy, but Antonelli made the most of the alternative strategy to take his first feature race win in his most impressive F2 showing yet. He was the quickest of the drivers starting on medium tyres, meaning that when he switched to softs, he could scythe through those who had pitted earlier and romp to victory with an eventual margin of 12.6 seconds over Victor Martins. 

While Antonelli is not in F2 championship contention, Wolff has attributed his young charger’s volatile results to Prema’s struggle with the new Dallara F2 machinery. The team sit seventh in the teams’ points, a far cry from their championship-contending form in three of the past four seasons.

There is an alternative trajectory Antonelli could have taken all the way back in 2018. He told Feeder Series in 2022 that his decision to join the Mercedes Junior Team came after he learned that, at 11, he was too young to join the Ferrari Driver Academy, the headquarters of which were based about an hour’s drive down the road from his home.

“Suddenly, after me and my dad were coming back from a go-kart race, we got the call from Mercedes asking if I wanted to join their programme instead (of Ferrari), and of course we didn’t say no. We decided to go with Mercedes straight away because it was a big opportunity.”

Antonelli is only the sixth driver to sign for Mercedes in its current F1 guise, joining world champions Rosberg, Hamilton and Michael Schumacher and multiple race winners Russell and Valtteri Bottas.

He is set to be the first Italian on the grid since Antonio Giovinazzi, who last raced for Alfa Romeo in 2021, and the third-youngest driver to race in a grand prix, behind only current F1 drivers Verstappen and Lance Stroll.

Presuming he takes the start of the season-opening Australian Grand Prix, he will make his F1 debut at 18 years and 203 days old. Current F2 teammate Bearman debuted in the 2024 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix aged 18 years and 305 days.

The promotion of both Antonelli and Bearman to F1 marks the first time in the combined history of GP2 and F2 that two drivers from the same team have received full-time F1 berths for the following year. Prema Racing’s 2016 GP2 line-up of champion Pierre Gasly and runner-up Giovinazzi both raced in F1 in 2017 as replacements for regular drivers.

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency