Kimi Antonelli: A Rising Star in Formula 1

Kimi Antonelli is starting to look alarmingly familiar.

The way he sliced through the field at Monza. The relentless race pace. The sense that, no matter where he starts, the win is still on. It all feels like a rerun of the early Max Verstappen years—only this time in silver, not blue.

There is, for now, one crucial difference. But we’ll come to that.

From P19 to the top – shades of Verstappen

Starting 19th on the grid and still winning a Grand Prix used to be Verstappen’s party trick. Grid penalties, technical issues, rain chaos—it never seemed to matter. If Verstappen was in the race, the rest of the field knew the story wasn’t over.

Monza belonged to Antonelli in exactly that way.

He launched from P19 and cut through the pack with a calm, ruthless efficiency that looked nothing like a teenager in only his second Formula 1 season. The red flag and restart certainly helped reset the race, but nobody in the paddock walked away thinking the result hinged on that alone. With the pace he showed, the Italian GP always felt like it was drifting inexorably towards the 19-year-old.

For one man, it was brutal.

Russell humbled in his own house

George Russell ended 2025 talking like a man on the brink of a title challenge. He had the experience, the speed, the status inside Mercedes. He had, for long stretches, the measure of the rookie beside him.

That version of Russell has vanished in 2026.

At Monza, he was dismantled. Outpaced, outmanoeuvred, outclassed. The kind of afternoon usually reserved for designated number twos like Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas. The sort of race Lewis Hamilton or Max Verstappen simply never allowed to happen to them.

Russell wasn’t just beaten by Antonelli. He was exposed by him.

And that says a great deal about Russell’s ceiling—but even more about the level Antonelli is already operating at. In only his second F1 season, still a teenager, he is tearing apart a teammate who, not long ago, many inside the sport were tipping as a future world champion.

It has echoes of Daniel Ricciardo watching Verstappen’s rise at Red Bull and realising, with cold clarity, what the future looked like.

Sundays belong to Antonelli

For Russell, there is no escape route now. No convenient switch of teams, no early reset. He is locked in alongside a driver who has simply moved the bar.

After holding the upper hand for much of 2025, Russell has been overwhelmed in 2026. The damage is being done on Sundays.

Strip away the noise and look at the race pace across the 13 Grands Prix so far. Remove Belgium, where Russell retired early, and the picture is stark: in 10 of the remaining 12 races, Antonelli has been the faster man over a race distance.

Russell only edges him in China and Austria, and even then by less than a tenth of a second. On average, over those 12 Grands Prix, Antonelli is 0.380 seconds per lap quicker.

That is not a marginal gain. That is a different category.

It puts Antonelli in rare company. In his second year, he looks more like Verstappen or Fernando Alonso did at a similar stage—drivers whose true gift lay not in a single lap, but in what they could do over 300 kilometres. Where Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel arrived as qualifying assassins, Verstappen’s genius always burned brightest on Sunday.

Antonelli has that same weapon.

The Saturday weakness

There is, however, a familiar flaw.

Just as Verstappen needed time alongside Carlos Sainz and Ricciardo before he began crushing teammates in qualifying as well as in races, Antonelli is still vulnerable over one lap. If Russell can hurt him anywhere, it’s on Saturdays.

The numbers underline it. Antonelli leads the qualifying head-to-head 7–6, but only just. His average advantage is 0.093 seconds—tiny compared to the gulf that opens up in race trim.

Over a single lap, Russell can still live with him. Sometimes, he can beat him.

Antonelli is not yet the complete package that Verstappen became from 2018 onwards, when he started to dominate both Saturdays and Sundays with the inevitability of a metronome. Right now, Antonelli’s empire is built on race pace and race control, not pure qualifying devastation.

Where Verstappen still stands alone

The most obvious gap between the two is decorated in silverware. Verstappen has the wins, the titles, the years of sustained excellence. Antonelli has a blistering start and a rising body of work. He still has to prove he can hold this level over the grind of a full campaign, year after year.

But the biggest difference lies somewhere else entirely.

Verstappen’s wheel-to-wheel racing is on its own planet. His judgement in combat, his ability to attack and defend without crossing the line, to place a car in exactly the right piece of tarmac at exactly the right millisecond—that is where he separates himself from everyone else.

Even at Monza, Verstappen reminded the field why he is still the benchmark in direct combat.

Antonelli is not there. Not yet.

His wheel-to-wheel work can look untidy. He ran off the track while duelling Russell, a mistake you rarely see from Verstappen in similar situations. Earlier this season, Charles Leclerc openly criticised Antonelli’s racecraft in close quarters. Those are not small voices or small moments.

The encouraging part for Mercedes is that Antonelli is clearly learning. The rough edges are being filed down. The aggression remains, but the decision-making is sharpening with every duel.

A successor in the making

What is no longer in doubt is the scale of the talent.

Antonelli’s race pace is ferocious, his composure unnerving, his impact on a seasoned teammate devastating. The parallels with Verstappen are no longer lazy comparisons; they are anchored in hard numbers and hard evidence.

A first world title, in only his second year, already feels less like a dream and more like an expectation.

Verstappen still stands as the finished article, the man with the record book and the aura. But for the first time in years, there is a driver on the grid who looks capable—given equal machinery—of making his life genuinely miserable.

The question now is not whether Kimi Antonelli belongs at the very top. It’s how long it will take before he starts rewriting the sport in his own image.