- Kimi Antonelli wins third straight race, leads F1 championship at 19.
- Toto Wolff flags Italian public expectation as his biggest threat.
- Italy’s football crisis has made Antonelli and Sinner the nation’s hope.
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has warned that the weight of Italian public expectation poses the greatest risk to 19-year-old Kimi Antonelli, who leads the Formula 1 drivers’ championship after winning three consecutive Grands Prix.
Antonelli’s victory at the Miami Grand Prix on May 3 made him the first Italian to win three races in a row since Alberto Ascari in 1952.
He also became the first driver in F1 history to win his opening three races from his first three pole positions. He now holds a 20-point lead over Mercedes teammate George Russell.
Wolff’s warning: ‘The bigger problem is the Italian public’
Wolff was quick to separate what the team controls from what it cannot.
“The easiest bit is making sure that he keeps both feet on the ground within the team; his parents have done a great job in keeping him grounded,” the Mercedes boss told Sky Sports, before pinpointing the real concern.
“The bigger problem is the Italian public.”
Wolff pointed directly to the Italian public’s growing investment in Antonelli as the source of pressure that concerns him most.
“There are so many requests for his time, it’s on us to keep the handbrake on that,” Wolff added.
“We just really need to stay calm here because such success for such a young man at this stage, all of Italy will be on him.”
He drew a comparison with tennis world number one Jannik Sinner, noting that both athletes have won major titles on the same day on three separate occasions this season.
Italy’s football team also failed to qualify for the upcoming World Cup, which Wolff said has intensified the public’s focus on the two young sportsmen.
‘Sinner and Antonelli, Antonelli and Sinner’
The parallel between Antonelli and Sinner has become one of the defining stories of Italian sport this year.
On 15 March, Sinner won at Indian Wells on the same day Antonelli triumphed at the Chinese Grand Prix. On 29 March, Sinner claimed the Miami Masters title while Antonelli won in Japan. And on 3 May, both won again, in Madrid and Miami respectively.
Sinner’s Madrid victory made him the first player ever to win five consecutive ATP Masters 1000 events. Wolff acknowledged the scale of what both athletes represent right now.
As the Austrian put it to Sky Sports:
“Sinner and Antonelli, Antonelli and Sinner. We have won three Grands Prix, Sinner is world No 1 and has won many Grand Slams.”
The backdrop sharpens that picture considerably. Italy failed to qualify for the World Cup for the third time in a row after losing a playoff to Bosnia and Herzegovina on penalties.
The defeat forced federation president Gabriele Gravina to resign. Italian newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport described it as “the third apocalypse.”
Into that national grief have stepped a 24-year-old tennis player and a teenage racing driver.
Playing the long game with a generational talent
Wolff made clear that Mercedes is not thinking race by race. The team is thinking in terms of years and decades.
“This is the long game,” he told Sky Sports.
“He has a killer of a team-mate that is extremely fast. We want to play the long game. He can hopefully win many championships over 10 years, 15 years. We don’t want to stumble now with these huge expectations on him.”
This approach has roots in Antonelli’s difficult debut season in 2025, when he replaced Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes. There were doubts at various points about whether he would survive the year.
Wolff’s response to that period was characteristically direct. “It is easier to calm someone down that is wild,” he said, “because you won’t be able to accelerate a donkey.”
After Antonelli’s first win in China earlier this season, Wolff had also spoken about protecting him from “time thieves,” urging him to learn to say no to distractions. That thinking has only grown more urgent since.
What’s next for Kimi Antonelli
The 19-year-old Italian himself gave no sign of losing perspective after stepping off the podium in Miami.
“This is just the beginning,” he told Sky Sports. “The road is still long. We’re working super hard. The team is doing an incredible job. I’m going to enjoy this one and then get back to work.”
The F1 circus travels to Montreal for the Canadian Grand Prix from 22 to 24 May.
Antonelli will have the opportunity to write many more pieces of Formula 1 history there. He could become the first driver to claim their first four pole positions consecutively.
If not that, he could go on to claim his first four race wins consecutively. No driver in F1 has ever done either of those things.
If he manages to do both in Canada, it will be a feat beyond the wildest dreams of Formula 1 fans.
One thing is clear: regardless of what Antonelli achieves, Wolff and his team will spend the weeks before that race trying to ensure that the Italian adulation does not bog their driver down.
