Kimi Antonelli can wrap up his maiden world title in Austin this weekend should he prove victorious and other results go his way.
With six races to go, whether the wait stretches to another grand prix is immaterial, with his rivals conceding the 2026 title is already his in only his second Formula 1 season.
The 20-year-old Italian has exceeded the pre-season expectations of even his biggest allies, including Mercedes deputy team principal Bradley Lord, who still remembers the wide-eyed 11-year-old entering the team’s garage in Monaco for the first time.
Despite having long primed the driver for championship success, Lord concedes: “To call it a meteoric rise is completely appropriate.
“He’s performing at a level we believed he had the potential to perform at, but I don’t think anyone being completely honest would said they expected to see this in his second season in the sport.”
At the start of 2026, George Russell was the overwhelming favourite to win a first world title while his teammate was only 10-1 with bookmakers to seal the championship.
Sports commentator Alex Jacques has written an exhaustive history of the sport and cannot in the championship’s seven decades remember a performance like this.
“I’ve never known a more cast-iron favourite,” he says. “All the assumptions were Russell would win 15 grands prix and it would be a cake walk. But what followed is the most assured maiden title win since Fernando Alonso in 2005.
“You’re not meant to win first world titles like this. You’re meant to see the pressure affect the quality of the driver – that hasn’t happened.”
Mercedes had always known Antonelli’s talent, having wrestled with Ferrari for his signature and, having been previously burned by losing out on a young Max Verstappen to Red Bull, were determined to avoid the repeat.
With that in mind, they fast-tracked him, skipping the usual F3 route to go straight to F2 and then onto F1 after just one season. It seemed a risk that looked to be backfiring as Antonelli struggled to the point where team principal Toto Wolff publicly called his Monza performance in the latter part of last season “underwhelming”.
For Lord, that is where the title march this season began. “He sat down after Monza with Toto and Bono [race engineer Pete Bonnington], expectations were clearly expressed to him and he doubled down, and started understanding how to draw all the resources of the team to build his performance each race weekend.
“The method he has found, the commitment he has brought and the desire to keep improving, refining and honing that has ben the signal of someone who has the work ethic to match the obvious talent he’s been born with.”
The whispers of that obvious talent were heard in the F1 paddock long before he made an appearance there but so often in motorsport top talent does not always reach its full potential.
For Jacques, the moment he realised a star had been born was during the wet race in Silverstone in F2 in 2024. Antonelli and teammate Ollie Bearman had struggled all season long as their Prema Racing team failed to get the set-up on their cars right. With the field levelled by the wet, Antonelli shone.
“When you take away the grip and the set-up differences in the wet, you start recognising talents like a Hamilton, Schumacher or Senna, and you saw it there,” Jacques recalls.
“At Silverstone in the wet, he just tore away from the pack at a second a lap. That was the reassuring moment for Mercedes and the Antonelli camp, the moment to mark him out as different from the rest.”
Unpicking what makes Antonelli so good, Jacques says it is the raw pace combined with a lack of errors, having broken the shackles of a mistake-prone inaugural season on the F1 grid. The errors in 2026 have arguably been confined to one in practice and one in qualifying.
For Lord, what impresses him more about Antonelli is the person out of the car, the sense of fun and mischief – shown in the pranks he likes to pull – as well as the warmth he brings in the hugs with “Bono”, which come less naturally to the British engineer. The positivity has been infectious within the team and well beyond.
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For Wolff’s deputy, the standout moments on track have been obvious – the weekend-long dominance in Monaco and the win from towards the rear of the grid in Monza. Off track, it’s the good grace with which he was attacked by his mechanics on his birthday, the other when he came face to face with a group of children with an autism charity, PizzAut Onlus, in Austria.
“I remember the guy telling me the people they work with in the restaurant often are left feeling in life and society that they’re sort of at the back of the grid and they don’t matter,” he says. “And Kimi gave them the feeling of being on the front row, being on pole and being winners.”
It is a place he has cemented himself for much of 2026.