The other side of Kimi Antonelli which impressed Mercedes

Mercedes have revealed key traits shown by Andrea Kimi Antonelli that impressed them prior to his F1 promotion.

The 18-year-old Italian will partner George Russell at Mercedes in 2025 having been named as the replacement for seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton, who made the shock switch to rivals Ferrari.

Antonelli has been a Mercedes junior since he was 11 and been under the watchful eye of Mercedes driver development advisor Gwen Lagrue as he progress through karting and into single-seaters.

Having won several single-seater titles, Antonelli bypassed Formula 3 to go straight into Formula 2 in 2024. Joining Prema it was expected that he would be a potential title contender in his rookie season, but the Italian single-seater giants endured an unexpectedly difficult campaign.

Nevertheless, Antonelli was still able to notch up two victories on his way to a sixth-place finish in the championship despite withdrawing from the final round in Abu Dhabi due to illness.

How Antonelli dealt with the challenges in his first F2 campaign particularly impressed Mercedes.

"I would say that normally you have a certain consistency in terms of teams leading F2, so we know that Prema, ART, Carlin, or a few others are the teams you have to work with if you want to deliver in F2,” Lagrue told Motorsport.

“But the new F2 actually brought some new challenges, and we have seen that the big teams were not adapting that well to F2. Prema was performing super well and had top engineers. We put Kimi in there thinking, we will put him in a very strong environment, and we will normally deliver strong results. And it appears that we struggled a little bit.

"But in a way, it was also very interesting because having Kimi dealing with such challenges made us discover part of him we haven't seen before. We had to help him to deal with difficult weekends, which never happened before.

“He was used to winning all the time, or to fighting for the win, and this year was the first time actually he had to deal with not winning and not performing, and sometimes even have really, really tough weekends.

"And I have to say that I was very impressed with his maturity and his leadership in such a difficult situation. And at the end of the day, he has still done a very, very strong season in F2 considering all we had to deal with this year."

Those experiences will serve Antonelli well as he prepares to embark on his debut F1 season.