Wolff “fully conscious” of pressure Mercedes is placing on rookie Antonelli · RaceFans

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff says his team understands the pressure it is putting its 2025 rookie driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli under.

The team confirmed last weekend in Monza that their 18-year-old junior driver will be promoted into Lewis Hamilton’s race seat for 2025 when the seven-times world champion moves to Ferrari at the end of the current season.

Antonelli made his first appearance in a grand prix practice session at last week’s Italian Grand Prix, driving George Russell’s car. However, Antonelli lost control of his car at the final corner, Alboreto, at the end of his second push lap and crashed heavily.

Despite Antonelli’s accident so soon into his first outing in an official F1 session, Wolff insisted that his team is mindful of the pressure they were asking their young future driver to contend with.

“At the end, it’s the team that takes the decisions whether to hire a driver or not and who to put in FP1 and not,” Wolff said.

“We are running fully conscious into these driver decisions, fully conscious of what can happen, what to expect and managing the expectations. Clearly with everything piling up on him in Monza, that’s very difficult to cope with. Is that the reason why he put it in the wall? Maybe. I look at driving performance. Like I said before, I’d rather slow somebody down than make him fast, because the second one is impossible.”

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Antonelli has been promoted into Formula 1 after 20 races in his first Formula 2 campaign with Prema having jumped from Formula Regional level past Formula 3 and directly into F2. Despite his relative lack of experience compared to many rookies who have joined the F1 grid in recent years, Wolff is adamant that Mercedes have seen enough from their junior driver to give them confidence he will perform next season.

“In our industry, we perfectly understand who is capable and not,” he said.

“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. And I don’t want to be the one who picks out great moments and says, ‘well, did you see that sector? Did you see that lap time?’ Or that 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.”

Aside from his Monza outing, Antonelli has also driven Mercedes F1 cars several times this year under the ‘testing with previous cars’ programme allowed under the regulations. Wolff says Antonelli’s tests have revealed his strengths as a driver as well as areas for development.

“Certainly his raw speed that is there,” Wolff said. “He’s able to sit in the car and then put in quick laps.

“The tyre management is a work in progress and is a learning curve. So that is going ahead. So it’s exactly how the objectives that have been set for a 17-year-old to develop and to finally be ready one day to make it into a race car.”

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