Who slept best last night: Kimi Antonelli

November 2, 2026 · Yahoo Sports

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Where do you start when trying to digest Kimi Antonelli's championship? What do you say about it? Perhaps start with the numbers. This victory is historic. He's not just the youngest to win the F1 title; he's beaten the previous record by more than three years. He's done it with an almost perfect season, just his second in F1. And right now, at this very moment, he's ahead in the championship of two multiple world champions and generational talents themselves, Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, both of whom have lost even a mathematical chance of challenging him with four rounds still to go.

You've got to talk about an incredible talent. At 20 years of age, and with barely five years of experience racing cars, that exceptional talent alone was enough to deliver a championship victory - even though everything suggests there's still plenty of room for growth. There just has to be, as with anyone so young.

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Inevitably, there will be talk about the car as well, but no one can deny the numbers. A brief look at the standings after the Mexico Grand Prix is enough to understand that it's not just Mercedes - it's Antonelli making the difference.

There's his attitude to racing and life, too. How dedicated he is to his passion, how rigorously he works on himself, and how he manages to remain a normal kid outside the paddock.

And then there's his personality. Kind, humble, polite, generous, respectful of others. Kimi Antonelli is a racer every team principal would kill to have - and a son every parent would dream of having. In today's insane world, it's a story about how you can achieve everything you want while remaining all those things - and it's a fantastic, heartwarming story. You just can't help liking him - and the way he goes about things.

Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes

But it's not just a story about talent. It's also a story about how you make that talent shine.

Having talent is a gift, after all. Spotting it and making it flourish is a skill.

And you've got to hand it to Toto Wolff: he's shown everyone how it's done. The way he and the whole Mercedes team managed not only to spot Antonelli, but to turn it into success - so quickly and so brilliantly - is a textbook example of how you nurture talent.

It should be taught in management schools. It should be a case study - and a playbook for those aspiring to be leaders.

There's no reason to go over it all again, but there have been enough moments when Wolff could have hesitated or let doubts take over. Antonelli's difficult F2 campaign. That Monza crash. That horrendous middle part of last year - and the subsequent storm in the media. Those are just the moments we've seen. There are probably more we don't know about. Yet Wolff and his team navigated through all of it with one principle in mind: they backed him, they supported him, they continued to believe in him - because they knew what they had. They committed. And he has repaid that faith in full. There's no doubt he'll deliver more.

When, minutes after the race had finished, Toto's deputy Bradley Lord was handed a microphone for an F1 TV interview, that's exactly what he talked about.

"The day Lewis told us he was leaving, Toto came into the office and Kimi, and we phoned Kimi and said, can you come to the factory?" he recalled. "He happened to be at Silverstone, testing. And we sat in Toto's office and Toto told him, 'it could be you'. Here's this news from Lewis. 'This could be you, Kimi'.

Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes, Toto Wolff, Mercedes

"And Toto has believed that from the first second, from the very first moment that the opportunity came to put him in a car, he has believed we will do this and it will be a success.

"And that conviction has carried us through the difficult moments. And so this is Kimi's success first and foremost. But also, yeah, as I said, it goes back to the top and it goes back to Toto's determination and belief that we had a little, we had a diamond that we needed to polish a little bit, but we had a diamond.

"And today shows that's true."

They surrounded him with the right people. Most notably Peter Bonnington, of course. We'll probably never know how serious the temptation was for Bono himself to follow Hamilton - the man he'd achieved so much with - and pursue the dream in red. Was there a moment when he thought about leaving? Maybe there wasn't. But entrusting the task of polishing that diamond to him, and to the whole group around the driver, was another great move by Wolff. Because they didn't just help Antonelli grow. They managed to keep him enjoying himself - and not crumbling under pressure.

"I mean, Kimi's working with the most successful race engineer this sport has ever seen," Bradley said. "So Bono's an incredible, calm, guiding character.

"And he would be the first to say he's the tip of an iceberg around Kimi with Stephane, with Marcelo, the performance engineer, controls engineer, with Georgios on the PU side, with Danny, who does all his scheduling, Sofia doing the travel, Rosa doing the PR, Sergi is his coach. There's a whole group and a whole bubble that we've built and put together.

"And the result is a young man who is just loving life and, you know, yes, dealing with the pressure of F1, but not overwhelmed by it and able to enjoy himself.

Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes

"And I loved [seeing] after Baku, there was a lot of talk, is this the moment where he crumbles? He flew to Malaysia and went to a water park with Sergi. And that's all you need to know about Kimi. You know, he's 20 and he's living his best life. And that's what we wanted for him. Just enjoy the ride, enjoy the adventure, let the talent flow."

And it's Bradley himself, together with Rosa Herrero Venegas, Adam McDaid and many others from the Mercedes communications team, who played their part in shielding Antonelli from media scrutiny and making him comfortable with the pressure of the outside world. And while those of us on the other side - the journalists - were often left frustrated by denied requests, especially early on, they knew exactly what they were doing.

Because Wolff didn't just believe in Antonelli's talent himself - he made sure the whole team did, too.

"I mean, yeah, it starts from the top and it starts from Toto," Lord said. "It starts from Ola [Källenius, CEO of Mercedes-Benz Group] and all the board in Stuttgart and it goes through James [Allison] and his technical team, Show [Andrew Shovlin] and Ron [Meadows], the guys on the pit wall, [Darren] Howell in Brixworth and all the amazing engineers at HPP as well. And, you know, since we last won a championship, this team is over half the people are new since 2021.

"So we've had a huge period of change, new, fresh blood, fresh ideas, fresh talent come in. And it's very, very special to have a difficult period and then bounce back to the top as well. But it all starts from the top and from Toto and his incredible leadership and his absolute refusal to not win.

"And he keeps pushing us and he pushes everybody so hard, but this is the result and it's worth it."

Mercedes didn't just need to spot Antonelli's talent, nurture it, polish it and help it flourish on the way to its first drivers' title since 2020. It needed to reinvent itself after a difficult spell under the previous regulations - and the true number of right decisions made along the way is known only to those on the inside. That surely required nurturing and bringing out the best in hundreds of other talented people, too, even if Antonelli's case is the most visible.

Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes

But it's also a reflection of the culture Wolff and his team have managed to build on their way back to the top. What has happened now is the ultimate proof of how you can create your own success by trusting those you believe in - and giving them everything they need to deliver.

And there's nothing more to say, really. Apart from congratulations - and well done.

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