On the face of it, Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff giving an interview to Auto Motor und Sport carefully downplaying expectations surrounding rookie driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli seems like a typical piece of off-season ‘noise’. Very little of it would provoke angry debate in the sanctified halls of the Oxford Union.
“If you expect him [Antonelli] to be on pole position in Melbourne, win the race and immediately compete for the championship, then the risk is high because that won't happen,” said Wolff.
“If we take into account that he is only 18-years-old, very talented, but needs to grow and make mistakes first, the risk is less.”
Even Wolff’s old sparring partner Christian Horner wouldn’t argue with the logic of this proposition.
Isaac Newton wasn’t right about everything – he lost a chunk of his fortune in the South Sea Bubble, after all – but, famously, when he assumed a seated position under an apple tree he wasn’t expecting its contents to fall upwards.
If Antonelli were to place his car highly on the grid for the first round, win a few races and be in contention for the championship at the end of the season, he would be the first rookie to do so since… the guy whose seat he’s just taken. And the competitive circumstances of that season, 2007, were very different.
The question, then, is why Wolff should trouble himself to state the bleedin’ obvious.
Are there expectations which need to be managed? Perhaps not in the broad spread of the fan community or the paddock itself. But at board level – the Mercedes-Benz Group retains a shareholding alongside Ineos magnate Jim Ratcliffe and Wolff himself – the wisdom of Antonelli’s promotion will be called into question if results fall short of expectations.
While the popular perception is that Antonelli had a somewhat unimpressive rookie season in Formula 2 last year, there were mitigating circumstances behind his apparent early pace deficit and several incidents which cost him positions.
More troubling to those in the know was the way he pushed too hard, too quickly when he drove a current Formula 1 car in public for the first time in FP1 at Monza last year. The impression was that here was a young man in too much of a hurry to prove himself.
Wolff’s original plan was for Antonelli to contest a second F2 season in 2025 and then replace Lewis Hamilton in ’26. But during all the contractual push-pull in his last renewal, Hamilton saw this coming, sent out feelers to Maranello, and made his own deal to depart on a date of his choosing.
With Plan A now consigned to the round filing cabinet, Wolff had to shuffle through his least disagreeable options, in which promoting Antonelli a year early trumped hiring a stand-in.
So Wolff’s messaging is entirely consistent with keeping the pressure off Antonelli: telling the stakeholders, and a team accustomed to the previous occupant of that seat making very few mistakes, to expect a few bumps along the way, while throwing a protective – if slightly cautionary – arm around Antonelli’s shoulders.
Competitive circumstances have also provided Wolff with a smokescreen in case of further disruption. Very much against the trend of recent seasons he is not the only team boss with a rookie in play – including Antonelli there are five for the upcoming campaign.
Over the past few years the sensitivity of the Pirelli tyres has moved teams to favour experienced drivers over rookies, a trend strengthened by F1’s return to ground-effect aerodynamics which have made the cars peakier and more difficult to drive.
The way Wolff spins it, F1 had a road-to-Damascus moment when Oliver Bearman – now full-time on the grid with Haas in 2025 – filled in for Carlos Sainz in Saudi Arabia and was acceptably rapid while keeping the Ferrari out of Jeddah’s many walls.
“Then Franco Colapinto also made an immediate impact [at Williams],” he said. “Suddenly everyone realised that the youngsters were starting at a very high level.”
While plausible, this is slightly disingenuous – while Bearman and Colapinto both got off to impressive starts, they also demonstrated how difficult it is to perform consistently at the highest level. Bearman’s third F1 race, in Sao Paulo, was one for the memory hole, while Colapinto began to test the stamina of the Williams mechanics, the depths of the parts inventory, and the nerves of those charged with the team’s budget-cap compliance.
The truth of the matter is hiding in plain sight: “We see 2025 as a transitional year and want to prepare him for 2026,” said Wolff, “when everything will start from scratch for everyone.”
Anyone with a passing knowledge of any sport more professional than tiddlywinks will have heard leaders talk of “transitional” seasons. It is a go-to word in the lexicon of expectation management.
Given that in each racing season tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars hinge on the final championship positions, 2025 is only “transitional” in the sense that there will likely be relative technical stability as engineering eyes turn to the challenges to come. This just reduces one of the competitive variables rather than enshrining this as a season with less at stake.
Nevertheless it is on this pretext that all five rookies – Antonelli, Bearman, Isack Hadjar, Jack Doohan, Gabriel Bortoleto – will go into battle.
And while the messaging is that expectations will be low in this “transitional” year, don’t bet on failure being excused. No matter what Wolff may say about preparation for 2026, if Antonelli or any of his fellow rookies register a miss they may not make it that far.
As is well known, Wolff hasn’t given up on getting Max Verstappen…
