Seventy-three years since Alberto Ascari became the last Italian F1 driver to win the world championship, expectations of title leader Kimi Antonelli are growing — but the teenager isn't flinching under the pressure
Antonelli arrives in Miami leading the championship
In Miami on Thursday, Formula 1 championship leader Kimi Antonelli was asked about Alberto Ascari, specifically whether he felt the weight of a nation on his shoulders after becoming the first Italian to win back-to-back races in 73 years.
The 19-year-old’s answer was careful, measured and strategically deflective.
“Well, I’m aware of what’s happening, but I’m not trying to focus too much on that or worry,” he said. “At the end, it’s still a very long season, a lot of races left. And I know on my side I just need to keep raising the bar.”
It’s a mature response from someone who will turn 20 in August, and in its very deliberateness it says more about the situation than a more candid answer might have.
Because the weight is real, even if Antonelli is wise enough not to carry it publicly.
The statistical backdrop to his season so far is almost absurd.
When Giancarlo Fisichella won the 2006 Malaysian Grand Prix — the last time an Italian driver had stood on Formula 1’s top step before this year — Antonelli had not yet been born. Fisichella’s victory came in March 2006. Antonelli arrived in August.
Fisichella last won before Antonelli was born
Grand Prix Photo
For the entirety of his childhood, adolescence and junior career, no Italian had won a Formula 1 race.
Italy had not merely been absent from the podium; for significant stretches, it had been absent from the grid entirely.
Between 2012 and 2017, there was no Italian driver in Formula 1 at all — for the first time since 1969.
Antonio Giovinazzi provided a few seasons of representation without seriously threatening at the front before losing his seat in 2021, leaving Italian Formula 1 effectively dormant until the teenager from Bologna arrived at Mercedes in 2025.
To understand why the drought lasted so long, you need to understand the peculiar trap that Italian motor sport set for itself.
Italy gave Formula 1 two of its founding champions in Nino Farina and Alberto Ascari, and for decades it produced a steady stream of competitive drivers: Riccardo Patrese, Michele Alboreto, and Fisichella among them.
But the sport’s most famous Italian institution became, paradoxically, part of the problem.
Antonelli has won two of the first three races of 2026
Ferrari, as Fisichella himself has noted, is so dominant in the Italian sporting consciousness that it actively draws attention away from Italian drivers.
The nation’s passion for the Scuderia is not the same thing as a passion for Italian drivers, and for young talent trying to attract sponsorship, the distinction matters enormously.
Italian companies invest mostly in the red car, not the rising stars who might one day drive it.
The junior ladder was equally fraught.
For years, there was no coherent system to support Italian drivers through the feeder series. Talent was present but infrastructure was not, and without sponsorship backing, promising careers stalled before they reached Formula 1.
The cost of progressing through junior formulae fell disproportionately on the drivers and their families, at a time when Italy’s economic difficulties made that burden harder to bear than in countries with deeper corporate motor sport cultures.
What changed to produce Antonelli is revealing.
He did not come through a Ferrari-adjacent pathway. He was identified by Mercedes, developed within its academy and given structured, progressive support from an early age.
The machine that produced him is fundamentally different from the one that failed to produce his predecessors: it is well-funded, methodically run and connected to the resources of one of F1’s biggest teams.
Whether that model can be replicated for the generation behind Antonelli is a different question.
Antonelli admits the pressure will grow as the season progresses
He remains, for now, the only Italian on the 2026 grid.
Compounding pressure
Which makes the scale of what he is doing all the more eye-catching.
He is not merely a good young driver in a winning car. He is, whether he chooses to engage with it or not, the only driver representing an entire nation’s relationship with the sport it helped create.
When he won in China, he described it as probably the best day of his life, and spoke about wanting to bring Italy back to the top step. When he backed it up with victory in Japan, the 73-year Ascari comparison became unavoidable.
Both men drove for top teams – Ascari for Ferrari in its early years when the car was built around a four-cylinder of Aurelio Lampredi’s design, Antonelli for a Mercedes that carries the Silver Arrows heritage.
The parallel may be imperfect but the resonance is genuine, particularly for an Italian.
What Antonelli is carefully avoiding, at least in public, is the logical extension of that resonance: the championship itself.
He leads after three races, nine points clear of his team-mate George Russell, with Ferrari and McLaren arriving in Miami with a significant upgrade package aimed at closing the gap.
Nobody knows whether Antonelli can sustain his challenge over a 24-race season. He has Russell, one of the most complete drivers on the current grid, as a permanent internal benchmark and rival, and he will face circuits where his relative inexperience is more exposed than in the smooth execution of Shanghai or Suzuka.
But his composure so far, highlighted on Thursday in Miami by his instinct to take the question about Ascari and deflect it into process-talk, was itself evidence of something.
Asked directly about the mental pressure of leading the championship, he was candid about the difficulty while refusing to be destabilised by it.
“For sure there will be a lot of pressure in case the opportunity comes,” he said. “Ferrari, they’re close; McLaren, definitely we’ll see this weekend much better their true pace; Red Bull, they will definitely get closer.
“I’m just going to try to focus race by race, not trying to think about the end result or championship, just trying to stay as much as possible into the moment.”
He mentioned Peter Bonnington – Bono, Lewis Hamilton‘s long-time race engineer who now works with Antonelli – as someone who keeps him grounded and guides him through situations of this kind.
That doesn’t sound like the language of a driver drowning in expectation, but of someone who has thought carefully about how not to. Toto Wolff is probably very proud of that.
Antonelli appears not to be naive about the weight of it all, but he is making a conscious choice to manage it rather than deny it exists. That, arguably, is one of the most Ascari-like things about him.
The two-time champion was known for controlled precision rather than flamboyance, but ruthless when in front. Seven decades on, the driver carrying Italy’s hopes in Formula 1 appears to carry similar instincts.
