Kimi Antonelli wants to be more aggressive in his approach to weekends

Kimi Antonelli is one of the six drivers competing in his first full season in F1. He is currently the highest-ranked in the championship, sitting in sixth place, enjoying the luxury of being ahead of the man he replaced at Mercedes, Lewis Hamilton. While he has shown consistency by scoring points in four of the first race weekends, the young prodigy aims to further improve his performance. That’s why he intends to be more aggressive from the start of the weekend, to find the limits of his car earlier and thus try to go even faster during qualifying.

In the Miami paddock, the new Mercedes driver referred to his off-track incident during his first lap in last year’s Monza free practice: « I also learned the hard way. You have to be mindful of your mindset. If you tell yourself to take it easy during the first practice session, I think that’s not the right mindset. Yes, we want to gradually build up, but if we start too far behind in terms of pace, the gap becomes very significant by the time of qualifying. It’s very difficult to achieve. »

The Italian thus cited Suzuka as an example of what is possible to do: “At Suzuka, I had the approach of going there gradually. But it was too easy, and I had to make huge improvements in qualifying. Obviously, on a new track, you don’t want to go off to avoid compromising your confidence. I was very happy with my qualification (Editor’s note: sixth, two-tenths behind his teammate, George Russell) because I managed to make that big step forward, but I was also very disappointed because I wondered what would have happened if I had pushed more during free practice. I would have had a different level of confidence.”

Miami is the second Sprint weekend of the season: « It’s a new track for me and it looks quite complicated. After just one practice session, it will be straight to qualifying. As I am gaining more confidence in the car, I am more confident to push harder. I’m not yet at the level I want to be but I’m making progress. » Over the past week, he had the opportunity to go to the simulator, where he was able to complete 70 laps: « It’s a good help but I think the conditions will be different tomorrow. »

Asked about the subject by MotorsInside, he drew a parallel with his experience in F2: « In F2, you use the hard tires for free practice and switch directly to softs for qualifying, without trying them beforehand. Obviously, driving an F1 is even more difficult, but F2 is good preparation for this type of weekend because it prepares you to be on the limit from the first free practice session. It’s not something I’ve done since the beginning of the season, but I intend to do it from now on. »

As he is still in the learning phase, he cannot yet guide his engineers in making setup changes to his car, but he can rely on George Russell’s experience to head in the right direction. It helps me a lot because he has had a very good start to the season. He helps me to do even better but also to see his way of describing his feelings about the car.

From our special correspondent in Miami