The reason Kimi Antonelli is testing a 2020 Mercedes F1 car today
Mercedes protege Andrea Kimi Antonelli will be driving the team's 2020 F1 car today - here's why.
Andrea Kimi Antonelli will be back behind the wheel of a Mercedes F1 car today, but in the team’s 2020 challenger.
Mercedes have organised some extra mileage for the 18-year-old rookie ahead of his debut F1 season, with Antonelli driving the Silver Arrows’ W11 which claimed both world championships during the 2020 season.
It was the car which took Lewis Hamilton to his record-equalling seventh drivers’ world championship - which remains his most recent F1 world title.
Hamilton’s replacement Antonelli has undertaken a rigorous testing programme ahead of his first F1 campaign and has driven several Mercedes cars, including their 2021 and 2022 challengers during outings last year.
The Italian also drove Mercedes’ 2024 car when he made his practice debut at Monza, and again during the post-season test in Abu Dhabi last month.
But for Antonelli’s latest run, which takes place in Jerez in Spain, Mercedes have elected to hand him the reins to much older machinery from the pre-ground effect regulation era.
This decision is a direct consequence of an update to F1’s sporting regulations about ‘Testing Previous Cars’ - otherwise known as TPC testing.
Previously, F1 teams had no restrictions to the amount of mileage they could complete with cars that were at least two years old.
However, the regulations have been tweaked for 2025 after Max Verstappen tested Red Bull’s 2022 car at Imola in the build-up to last year’s Spanish Grand Prix as the team looked to cure weaknesses with their RB20.
F1 teams can now only conduct a maximum of 20 days per year of TPC, with current drivers limited to just 1000 kilometres of running.
While Mercedes could theoretically have carried out Antonelli’s outing in a 2023 car under the TPC, they purposely chose against doing so in order to save valuable testing time.
Instead, Antonelli’s run will officially be classed as Testing of Historic Cars (THC), which is “designed and constructed in order to comply with the Technical Regulations of any of the three calendar years falling immediately prior to the calendar year preceding the year of the championship.”
Going down this route will not only save Mercedes TPC time to use later in the year, but still hand Formula 2 graduate Antonelli time to re-acclimatise with F1 machinery following the winter break.
Haas also in action
Haas are also running in Jerez as the American outfit carries out their first-ever TPC test programme.
Oliver Bearman will drive the 2023 Haas on Wednesday, with teammate Esteban Ocon taking over on Thursday.
Toyota junior Ritomo Miyata will get some running in Haas’ VF-23 at the end of each day.
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