Kimi Antonelli “didn’t want to take any risks” on “much calmer” second Mercedes outing
Kimi Antonelli reflects on his second outing for Mercedes in FP1 for the Mexico City Grand Prix.
Andrea Kimi Antonelli has admitted he “didn’t want to take any risks” on his second official F1 outing for Mercedes to avoid repeating his mistake at Monza.
Antonelli crashed out early on during his first FP1 run for Mercedes back at the Italian Grand Prix.
He pushed hard on his first official outing for the team, ultimately crashing at Parabolica, just 24 hours before he was unveiled as a Mercedes driver for the 2025 F1 season.
Antonelli adopted a “calmer” approach in Mexico as he stepped into Lewis Hamilton’s W15.
Reflecting on the session, he said: “Yeah definitely much better than Monza, I drove much calmer today, I didn’t want to take any risks, I just wanted to do a clean session just to get some laps, understand the car and the tyres a bit more, overall was pretty decent.
“I could feel I wasn’t on the limit but just because it was my choice, I just wanted to get a clean session overall.”
It wasn’t all plain-sailing for the 18-year-old as he ran over some debris in FP1.
The debris caused some minor damage to the floor of his car and did lead to the first stoppage of the session.
When asked about the debris, he said: “Yeah to be honest I didn’t really see it so yeah was a shame because I got quite a bit of floor damage from it, was quite a big damage, so of course it wasn’t ideal but I managed to get a few laps in the bag.”
Antonelli ended up 12th fastest overall, 1.2s down on Russell’s top time.
He conceded he was “surprised” by how much grip the soft tyre had when completing his fast lap.
“I was trying to build the confidence lap by lap and also it was my first time on the track so I was trying to learn as much as possible,” he added.
“Of course on the soft the step in grip was quite big, also because on hard I was doing consecutive laps I wasn’t doing one cool one push, so I couldn’t really try the single lap work, so I went on soft and I felt a lot more grip and didn’t really use it as I was surprised by the amount of grip.”
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