The risks in Mercedes signing its first rookie F1 driver for 70 years

Finally, it’s out: Andrea Kimi Antonelli will race for Mercedes as Ferrari-bound Lewis Hamilton’s replacement in the 2025 Formula 1 season.

In signing with the Silver Arrows squad, Antonelli breaks a long tradition, which stretches back 70 years to 1954 and the season Karl Kling made his world championship F1 debut for Mercedes alongside the legendary Juan Manuel Fangio and co.

Their career paths are starkly different. Kling’s early motorsport successes – achieved at an older age anyway given how things went back during motorsport’s infancy – were interrupted by the Second World War and so he was nearly 44 by the time he made his world championship F1 debut. Antonelli is a fresh-faced 18-year-old. Each is the product of very different ages.

The closer comparison for Antonelli is, of course, Red Bull’s Max Verstappen. Once a Mercedes target during a rapid run up and across the junior ranks, it was his making good on brilliantly burgeoning potential as a teenager that in effect forced Toto Wolff’s hand here. He simply didn’t want to miss out a second time with a highly-rated youngster.

But such a decision doesn’t come without risks for Mercedes, Antonelli, Wolff and George Russell. For the last named, although memories of his breakthrough 2014 BRDC Formula 4 title, that year’s 2CV Oulton Park race and then hard-fought later rise through successive GP3 and Formula 2 titles are still recent, Russell is suddenly no longer Mercedes’ star in waiting.

It’s now up to him to lead the team – one which is still climbing back towards the dominant position it once occupied in F1, with all the peril of possible sudden plunges down the mountain face of the championship’s compact constructors’ battle.

Russell simply must beat Antonelli convincingly in 2025 to ensure his stock remains high because Wolff just won’t stop publicly courting Verstappen. On one level this could be a shrewd tactic to keep the pressure on Mercedes’ Red Bull rival, still seemingly flailing from the fallout of its early 2024 scandal and design missteps.

Russell knows that beating Antonelli will be important to keep his stock high

Photo by: Mercedes AMG

But equally, if Wolff senses that there is a chance to finally make good on what he views as a relationship that “needs to happen at a certain stage” with the Dutchman, as he said earlier this year, even before the 2028 expiry of Verstappen’s current Red Bull contract then three into two just doesn’t go.

And here Wolff’s emotional attachment comes in. He is very close with the Antonelli family and so if the rookie Italian’s F1 reputation were not to soar as is clearly hoped at Mercedes, then questions about Wolff’s judgement will swell.

After all, he’s already admitted that the way he structured Hamilton’s final contract, with a view to one day possibly promoting Antonelli anyway, contributed to the seven-time world deciding he’d rather make a sensational Ferrari switch.

Antonelli making his F1 weekend bow in front of his home crowd at Monza inevitably jacked the pressure up, but again Wolff is adamant “he needs to swim” in such challenging circumstances

History may come to judge Wolff’s moves here harshly. But if Antonelli were to sink rather than swim, in the Austrian’s favourite metaphor, and Verstappen was available at the stage it was clear a break had to be made then this wouldn’t matter.

Of course, all of this is hypothetical right now, but it reflects the constant ever-later chess moves deployed across the F1 paddock.

Mercedes staff are now going to work on how to hone Antonelli for his second FP1 rookie session of the 2024 season, which is likely to come in Mexico in October. The team won’t want a repeat of his Monza FP1 shunt.

That highlighted the risk-reward balance most starkly in this promotion. Mercedes is hurriedly pointing to data that showed Antonelli taking Lesmo 2 and Ascari quicker than Verstappen went through in topping FP1 on Friday as evidence of his full potential. But making those decisions to push at these places ultimately led to his Parabolica crash, when the overheated tyres couldn’t take any more strain.

Antonelli’s early shunt in FP1 at Monza will serve as a lesson in how far he can push without overstepping the limit

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

This is the F1 rookie conundrum. Finding the limit and then working back under it just enough to beat the rest and not mangle a car is the key to top-level success. But it’s just most likely that there will be more high-profile crashes in the early stages of 2025 – and so a hit in a cost cap era that wasn’t the case a decade ago – as Antonelli goes through this process.

There are already questions being asked about the wisdom of him making his F1 weekend bow in front of his home crowd at Monza. That inevitably jacked the pressure up, but again Wolff is adamant that “he needs to swim” in such challenging circumstances.

The question that hasn’t been addressed yet is why Mercedes chose to give Antonelli his outing on a weekend where he is also competing in F2, which creates a challenge for drivers jumping between categories. Then Ferrari junior Charles Leclerc found this out the hard way in 2016 when racing in GP3 while making regular F1 practice appearances for Haas.

He came to view this chopping and changing as making his challenge for the GP3 crown harder than it should’ve been – to the point where he requested Ferrari didn’t organise any F1 practice outings until after he’d secured a rookie F2 title in 2017 – while Haas insiders were less than impressed with his initial showings in their car.

Mercedes making its announcement on Saturday morning has more to do with the Monza FP1 decision than anything else. But handily, F2 isn’t racing in Mexico, where Antonelli will need to quickly put the Monza crash behind him.

If he does, it’ll drop towards footnote territory in his future career assessment, but these things can snowball. And if they do, the pressure increases upon him in a very different way and risks hitting his confidence to the point the potential Mercedes clearly sees in his F1 test outings and that early Monza FP1 data – to the extent of not really caring about his F2 results this term – may be wasted.

Just as likely right now because we can’t know otherwise, however, is that Antonelli will make good on his promise and become a successful F1 pilot who quickly eclipses Kling’s career haul of two podium finishes.

Good luck, Kimi, the F1 world is watching.