There is something so shocking—and so complete—about Antonelli’s racing this season that it makes people stand back a little in his presence, both out of admiration and also, to some extent, from fear, because they don’t want to disturb him in the slightest. When I met Wolff at Brackley to talk about his protégé, the first thing that he said, with celebration in his voice, was “He’s not a dick!” Later, Wolff spoke more soberly about the need to “condition him and calibrate him in the way that he stays like he is.”
This Formula 1 season was always going to be disruptive. Every few years, the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile, which regulates the sport, makes the teams redesign their cars. The changes for the 2026 season were the most dramatic in a long time: the cars became smaller and lighter, with more electric power and new driver controls for overtaking during a race. People have speculated that the new setup suits Antonelli’s driving style particularly well. His aggressive cornering helps him to better manage the car’s battery power through the course of a lap. But Wolff told me that Antonelli’s real advantage is his brain. This year’s cars are more complicated to drive—more settings, more modes, more lightning-quick decisions—and Antonelli has an unusual head for data. Wolff has compared him to an A.I. agent.
“He has this ability of processing quick, and kind of putting the pieces of puzzle together,” Wolff said. You can watch videos of Antonelli hanging out with fellow-drivers, in which they quiz him about lap times from years earlier, before he was in Formula 1. “You know when we did the race at Monza, in F4? What was your lap time in quali?” Oliver Bearman, who drives for Haas, asks Antonelli, of a race in 2021. “You wanna know?” Antonelli says, before offering “Fifty-two, nine.”(As in, one minute, fifty-two point nine seconds). Bearman checks his phone. Antonelli is right. Bedlam. Laughter. “Another one!” Antonelli calls out. “I like the challenge.”
Before this season began, Antonelli spent three weeks at the team factory, immersed in the new cars and their technological demands, “trying to make them become natural—like, secondhand,” he said, “so I don’t have to think too much about it while driving.” Like many drivers, Antonelli visualizes before he gets in the car. He closes his eyes, imagines the lights changing, and previews the course: turning the wheel, stiffening his body suddenly when his mind hits the brakes. “It’s always difficult to visualize perfectly,” he said. “For example, the length of a straight. But corners-wise? Yes.”
Antonelli told me that, during a race, he feels almost like a different person. “You’re so in the moment that you’re kind of disconnected from everything else,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t even realize what I’m doing. I’m just driving as if I put on autopilot.” The team radio can disrupt Antonelli’s concentration, so Wolff told me that the engineers have learned how to use it less often, or with fewer words. “He doesn’t realize any external world,” Wolff said. “Sometimes you see him getting out of the car and I see he’s physically there, but his brain is still in that car.” On the day after a race, Antonelli told me, he needs time alone, without his phone, to decompress. I asked him what that looked like. “Most of the time I just play on the simulator,” he said.
At Monza this year, Antonelli started on the penultimate row of the grid: in nineteenth position, out of twenty-two drivers. He was there because of a grid penalty—Mercedes had decided to use the race to upgrade his engine—and had close to no chance of victory. There have been more than eleven hundred Formula 1 races since the World Championship began, in 1950, and only two have been won by drivers who started in nineteenth place or below. “It felt strange at first,” Antonelli said. “Also, because of that, the weekend was a lot more relaxing in some ways.” Watching Antonelli on the track and in the garage in the days before the race, Wolff sensed an easiness about his driver. “He could only positively surprise,” he said.
