Antonelli admits he was “pushing too much” when he crashed in practice · RaceFans

Andrea Kimi Antonelli accepted responsibility for his crash in first practice and apologised to Mercedes for the damage he caused.

The team’s junior driver had his first run in an official F1 session today. He set a rapid pace to begin with, briefly heading the times, then spun into the barrier at the last corner on his sixth lap.

“What a day,” he said afterwards. “First FP1 done, unfortunately it ended quite quickly, because of the crash, it was quite a big one, around 52G.”

Antonelli took over George Russell’s car for the session. Mercedes weren’t able to complete repairs to the W15 in time for the start of second practice, but Russell was able to join in later on.

“I’m really sorry to the team and George for making them work afterwards,” said Antonelli. “It was just a mistake from my side, just pushing a bit too much for the conditions, I should have built the run up a bit more progressively. But definitely lesson learned for next time.”

Antonelli did his run in between the Formula 2 practice and qualifying sessions. He took sixth on the grid for Sunday’s F2 feature race.

He said he was “really thankful to the team for making this possible and still great to see all the Tifosi out there and to get the first laps with all the drivers on-track.” However he admitted he was “not feeling super-well at the moment” afterwards.

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“I’m just going to go back and try to rest and try to focus for the rest of the weekend, because there’s still some races to go and we’re going to still try to get a good result.”

Andrea Kimi Antonelli — Antonelli qualified well for this weekend’s F2 races

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff, who is expected to confirm Antonelli as Lewis Hamilton’s replacement for next year, said the crash will have “zero effect” on his choice of drivers for 2025.

“I think most important is to hire based on ability,” he said. “And an FP1 that’s gone wrong is not the reason why you decide for or against the driver.”

Antonelli is likely to make another appearance for Mercedes at the Mexican Grand Prix in two months’ time. Wolff said he will not consider bringing that forward to give Antonelli a confidence boost.

“No, I think a strong driver needs to recover from these things and cope with the pressure,” he said. “And obviously this weekend wasn’t easy for him because he still needs to compete in F2.

“You have all these shenanigans around you in Monza – an Italian kid that’s being hyped for the first time in a Mercedes. And that must be a heavy burden. If he wants to be a champion one day, he needs to cope with that, and I have no doubt that he can and he will.”

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However Wolff said the circumstances of Antonelli’s first practice run, given the attention around him, may have contributed to his crash.

“In our industry we perfectly understand who is capable and not,” he said. “And I think how it’s all panned out here: He’s jumped F3, he’s pretty much won everything beforehand then it’s clear you start to become a Mercedes driver, you test in FP1, and at the same time you’re under the magnifying glass because it all happens in Monza. And it has been a while that an Italian driver was in a top team.

“So I’m sure that this can be a lot for an 18-year-old. But as I said before, he needs to swim. And these days that are so difficult, like it is for him at the moment, it feels certainly terrible and that’s part of the development curve.

“I don’t want to be the one who picks out great moments and say ‘well, did you see that sector, did you see that lap time?’ Or ‘we could have been third or first’ or whatever.

“But what we see is… there’s performance. And we’ve even seen that in the few laps that we’ve seen, but what he tried to do, the car can’t take.”