Andrea Kimi Antonelli is enjoying an extraordinarily successful second season in Formula 1 because his driving style works perfectly with the current generation of cars, says his team mate.
George Russell is Antonelli’s closest rival at the top of the championship standings, but the second-year driver is 81 points ahead. This is a sharp contrast to last year, when Russell out-scored Antonelli by 319 points to 150.While Russell said Antonelli’s ability was clear before this season, he believes the reduction in aerodynamic downforce and grip this year has played to his team mate’s strengths.
“Of course Kimi is extremely talented,” said Russell. “He’s an incredible driver and has been fast in his whole career.
“I think his driving style is very similar to what he had last year and I think with just how things have fallen this year, it’s kind of the perfect driving style for these cars.”
Russell believes the same is true of other drivers, including Lando Norris, who is the only driver to have won more than one round this season.
“If you look last year, there are definitely trends,” said Russell. “If you look at Brazil last year, Kimi had a really strong race and Lando won in Brazil, and they’re two drivers who are always very strong on the low grip tracks and they’re two drivers who are arguably the best-performing drivers of this season.
Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and
“He’s an amazing driver and he was of course doing extremely well last year as well. Let’s see next year if it changes or not, but certainly his natural driving style suits very well for this regulation.”
Charles Leclerc echoed Russell’s view that Antonelli’s potential was clear despite his patchy rookie campaign last year.
“I wish I knew, but clearly he’s doing something that works very well,” said Leclerc. “But to be honest, it’s not that it comes as a complete surprise.
“If I look at Kimi going through the junior ranks, I think it was quite clear for everybody that he had something very special. If you look obviously at his first year in Formula 1, I think he probably faced challenges – it is not up to me to go into detail, I don’t know, but surely he had some struggles in the first year – but this year has been extremely impressive. I mean, from the first race to now, he’s been perfect and driving at a very high level against a driver that I rate extremely high as well, which is George. So he’s doing an incredible job.”
However Leclerc said there is only so much he can tell about Antonelli’s qualities from outside the Mercedes team.
“To [tell] you exactly why he’s so fast, and why he is outstandingly fast this year compared to last year, is very difficult for me. We are all here analysing the data of everybody but we can only go up to a certain amount of detail, then you really need the data of the actual car to dig into more detail.
“So it’s difficult. But his laps look a lot on the limit but somehow he manages to do the lap when it counts and that’s been very impressive to watch.”
Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and
Browse all Formula 1 articles