dren wrote: ↑17 Mar 2025, 13:26
Antonelli was impressive. Perhaps he is the generational tallent Mercedes seem to think he is.
I think that should be pretty obvious.
Mercedes clearly considers him to be a Verstappen level talent with how much trust they placed in him from such a young age. They clearly did not want to risk losing him to Red Bull or Ferrari like thye did with Verstappen, so they did everything in their power to not just get him into F1 as fast as possible, but also to get him into a top seat as fast as possible. Antonelli is literally the reason that Hamilton ended up in Ferrari.
Mercedes clearly felt they needed to promise Antonelli a top seat quickly in order to keep him, especially with how badly Perez was performing and how replaceable Sainz is. The way they intended to do it was by getting him the Williams seat in 2025 and the Mercedes seat in 2026. This forced them to offer Hamilton a one year contract, which triggered the Ferrari shuffle.
I remember Mercedes hyping him up even back in 2021 when he was still in karts. It was very obvious that they were going to fast-track him to F1 even back then, as long as he didn't fall completely flat in cars, which he didn't. He completely blitzed the field in every junior formula he raced in up until F2. I'd argue his junior record is at least a match for Leclerc, who I consider to have the best junior category record of anyone on the current grid.
In F2 he was still great and beat Bearman convincingly, despite Bearman being an F1 quality driver in his own right and a year older. He was probably the best or second best driver on that F2 field, but Prema was absolutely awful last year.
Mercedes expects Antonelli to become better than Russell, and they might actually be correct given how insane his junior category record was, especially for someone so young. Personally I expect him to turn out to be at least on the level of Leclerc, perhaps even as good as Verstappen. I also expect him to get poached by Ferrari basically as soon as Hamilton decides to retire, given the fact that he's Italian.