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Andrea Kimi Antonelli is the 18-year-old whose emergence is being compared to Max Verstappen’s prodigious rise - and has now been officially unveiled as Lewis Hamilton's replacement at the Mercedes Formula 1 team in 2025.
Hailing from Bologna, Antonelli is called Kimi by almost everyone around him, with Andrea reserved for close family and appearances on F2 timing screens because it is his full name on his racing licence.
Antonelli first caught the eye in karting with achievements including winning the same CIK-FIA Karting European Championship that Verstappen won, back-to-back in 2020 and 2021.
By then he was already a Mercedes junior, having joined in 2019, and by midway through 2021 he was old enough to get out in a single-seater, starting his career with Prema.
He won 13 out of 20 races in Italian F4 and nine out of 15 races in German F4 respectively in 2022, then won the Formula Regional European title the following year to set up a step to F2 for 2024.
Unlike his current F2 team-mate Ollie Bearman, who jumped straight from F4 to F3, the almost-sideways step to the Regional championship means Antonelli has been facing more of a learning curve this year - with new tracks and the Pirelli rubber that F3 uses but Formula Regional does not.
It’s also a bigger pace step from Regional to F2 so he’s coping with a lot more power and downforce than he is used to.
Antonelli sits a respectable seventh in the drivers' championship with four rounds of the season remaining. Despite Prema's underperformance, he's outperformed Bearman and has both a feature race and sprint race victory to his name.
Elsewhere, he impressed with an F1 test in a 2022-spec Mercedes at a wet Imola ahead of the Grand Prix there, where Mercedes technical director James Allison told F1's website Antonelli "looks like the real deal" and impressed the team as he was "fast, consistent, didn’t make any mistakes".
After further private testing, Antonelli made his F1 practice debut at Monza - the weekend where his promotion to Mercedes in 2025 was made official.
His FP1 debut didn't go to plan as a strong start was quickly curtailed by a big crash that ended his session.
If Antonelli looks familiar to you and you can’t place from where, he appeared in a movie called ‘Veloce come il vento’ (Italian Race in English) when he was 10 years old, so maybe that’s it?
His favourite Italian expression is 'Mamma Mia' - but only when accompanied by a very specific hand gesture - and he reckons his worst habit is “playing too much on the sim when I need to study”. Figures!
His biggest pet peeve is when someone pushes your seat on an aeroplane from behind. Good choice, Kimi.
It’s not clear if Kimi Raikkonen influenced his name. There are reports that Antonelli’s father was a fan of Raikkonen's, but other reports have suggested the name likeness is a mere coincidence.
Antonelli's father Marco runs the AKM Motorsport racing team and has a driving CV of his own including races in the European Touring Car Championship and the championship previously known as Blancpain GT.
