Kimi Antonelli’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix started in the worst way when technical issues hampered his practice and a crash in Q1 forced him to start 16th on the grid. Talking ahead of this weekend’s Bahrain Grand Prix, the young championship leader revealed the hard call that rescued what was a very difficult weekend on a street circuit where overtaking is difficult.
While a less mature mind would have spent the race driving hard in an attempt to claw their way through the pack, the Italian made a conscious effort to back off, protect the car, and allow the field to come to him. After 51 laps, he finished a surprising fifth.
Why he chose to drive “under the limit”
“First of all, I didn’t really like it, driving under the limit,” he admitted. “I felt a bit too slow, but I think the learning was that sometimes you have to accept this kind of situation. You have to accept to settle for a result that even you didn’t expect or you didn’t want, you know, settle for a P5 before.
“And also I think in the race I kind of learned even more about myself, I think. How I react to certain things. And trust me, it was very hard to make that decision after the start of the race to just sit back and kind of like… take it, I wouldn’t say easy, but take the least amount of risks as possible because I’ve been used to all season to just push. Go for it.”
Driving in the windy city required a different type of strategy, however. One that didn’t allow him to use his strong Mercedes powertrain and straightline advantage to its full potential.
“Whilst Baku for was the first time where I actually had to tell to myself, ‘look, just take the least amount of risks as possible and just take advantage of other people’s mistake and just bring it home,’ because at the end it was such a disrupted weekend where everything was going wrong from FP1 – missing 45 minutes in FP1, 35 minutes in FP2 and crashing in qualifying – that everything was just going so wrong that what I just needed was finishing the race with a decent result just to move on and focus onto the next one.”
Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes
Photo by: Michael Potts / LAT images via Getty Images
Talking to Sky Sports F1 following the race, Antonelli joked that he was “driving a bit like my grandmother today, just damage save mode.”
He benefited massively from a clean race, at least on his part.
No dent in the season
While his team-mate George Russell won the race from pole with a career-first grand slam, he still sits 66 points ahead of the Briton – a haul worth more than two race wins. This is a commanding cushion.
And will the grandmother-driving make a return?
“She went back to Italy,” he joked. “I booked a flight. She went back home.”
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