Talking to Sky Sports F1 after Kimi Antonelli won the United States Grand Prix, Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff revealed what his driver told him before the race.
The Italian driver started on pole at the Circuit of the Americas and drove a commanding race to take his ninth victory of the season. Wolff said Antonelli showed no signs of nerves.
“Yeah, what a boy, you know. I was just saying before I got a question whether he was nervous before the race and I said no, he just sneaked into my office before getting ready and said ‘I’m just going to enjoy this right now. And it’s weird, I’m not thinking about the championship at all.’ Isn’t that funny?
“So he’s on a discovery mission there also in terms of what’s happening to him emotionally and then you know he just delivered from the beginning to the end, it was exceptional at any time.”
Antonelli kept the lead from Max Verstappen at the start, despite being on the medium tyre, helped by Verstappen getting wheelspin.
“Yeah, exactly and on the medium tyre which is a little bit slower off the line, you lose a metre against the soft but I think it looked like Max had a lot of wheelspin so that was good,” Wolff said.
When Verstappen switched to a two-stop, Mercedes refused to respond and kept Antonelli on a one-stop.
“Strategy has really done a good job today. We discussed it, you know, that Max could undercut us and we stayed firm with the decision saying the one-stop looks like the fastest strategy. Norris hit the hard and looked very good, so we stayed solid and at the end it came out pretty much what happened. In theory it was eight seconds quicker and at the end it was a little bit more.”
Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes
Photo by: Brett Farmer / LAT Images via Getty Images
The Austrian admitted it was not an easy call.
“Yeah, we absolutely trusted the information. We didn’t want to react because the others did, which is a little bit, you know, at the moment it’s a scary call, but stick to the data and trust your data.”
Lewis Hamilton’s fourth place and George Russell’s eighth kept the title fight alive, but Antonelli now leads Russell by 123 points and Hamilton by 124. A top-nine finish in Mexico City next weekend will seal the title, whatever his direct rivals do.
Mercedes has celebrated in Mexico before, with Hamilton clinching his fourth and fifth world titles there in 2017 and 2018. But Wolff was not getting ahead of himself.
“I think we had Lewis there one day also. It would definitely be a lot of tequila on ice. But you know, he still needs to finish the race in Mexico.”
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