Antonelli was breathtaking before crash — like another Monza GP debut 99 years ago

This Wednesday post-grand prix column which we’ve been presenting for the last couple of years is a fun way of taking events of the previous race weekend and finding historic parallels. This week the thread of history stretches far further back than any we’ve looked at before, but the parallels are unmistakable.

Last Friday at Monza, Andrea Kimi Antonelli made his first appearance in an official F1 weekend, driving George Russell’s Mercedes in FP1. It was a brief but spectacular performance from the 18-year-old. He went to the top of the timesheets on his first flying lap, pitted to allow the tyres to cool, then went out for a second attack lap. James Allison, observing the way Antonelli had his outside front wheel almost on the grass on the approach to the first chicane said to Toto Wolff, “We need to have a conversation with him about the difference between FP1 and Q3.”

He was hustling the car super-hard, late braking and not only using all the track on entry and exit but flicking the car in with incredible precision and commitment. Go in-car with him and it’s a blur of no-margin braking points, clipped apexes and aggressively early power applications. His speed into the fast Ascari chicane is breathtaking – and literally the fastest anyone took it all weekend. He went through there at 190km/h (118mph). By the end of the session, the second-fastest speed through there was Lando Norris at 179km/h (111mph).

He’d also been way faster than anyone through the preceding Lesmo 2. By the time he arrived at the Parabolica approach, the outside left-tyres were over-temperature. This would normally have been manifest with a little wobble perhaps. But such was the outrageously late braking he took into there, they simply surrendered immediately – and spun him hard into barriers. Session over after one-and-a-bit flying laps, car extensively damaged.

Back in 1925 Alfa Romeo was grand prix racing’s absolute top team. Its P2 model, designed by Vittorio Jano, was the fastest car around by a significant margin. Its lead driver Antonio Ascari was arguably the world’s fastest. The only other man who could lay claim to that status was Pietro Bordino but his employer Fiat had withdrawn from grand prix racing at the end of ’24 after suffering a humiliating defeat to the much smaller Alfa Romeo team in the previous year’s French Grand Prix. Bordino was still in Fiat’s employ so he was not racing in grands prix in ’25. At the first grand prix of the season Ascari had headed an Alfa 1-2, their superiority so great the Spa crowd were jeering. But a month later Ascari suffered a fatal accident when leading the French Grand Prix at Montlhery.

Alfa had become such a formidable force thanks in large part to the efforts of Enzo Ferrari who had poached star designer Jano away from Fiat, together with many other key technical personnel. He was still at this point doing occasional races with Alfa as a driver, but was beginning to recognise his greater skills were as a force behind the scenes. He’d been very close to Ascari and knew that Alfa’s other driver Giuseppe Campari was never going to be an adequate replacement. Ferrari surely played his part in convincing Alfa Romeo that the man it needed to try out as a potential Ascari replacement for the forthcoming Italian Grand Prix at Monza was Tazio Nuvolari, the motorcycle mega star who had done a few races in a low-powered car in lesser events. Ferrari had observed his skills close up on track and was a fan.

For the first practice session at Monza Nuvolari got his try-out in grand prix racing’s fastest car. His progress astonished observers, but worried technical chief Jano. Within five laps he was lapping faster than the experienced grand prix winner Campari and was within sight of Ascari’s record in the same car from the year before. On the sixth lap he crashed heavily out of the Lesmos, the car rolling over, lacerating his back and putting him into hospital. Afterwards Nuvolari insisted the transmission had seized and locked the wheels. Jano reportedly became even more furious at this and it would be many years before he could be convinced to take another look at Nuvolari as a potential Alfa driver. They would go on to fantastic success together after that difficult start.

Antonelli’s employers have been more forgiving than Jano was with Nuvolari back in ‘25. Toto Wolff and he sat together at a press conference the following day where it was announced that Antonelli would be the 2025 replacement for the great Lewis Hamilton. It’s going to be exciting.