Toto Wolff is happy to have successfully completed his bet by directly offering Andrea Kimi Antonelli a holder’s place at Mercedes F1. The team’s director did not want to start his new nugget in another team and after good results and the pole for the sprint in Miami, this choice already seems to bear fruit.
“There have been a lot of votes, even in sport, who suggested that he should have a year of preparation at Williams or something similar” Wolff told Servustv. “But for us, it was clear.”
“We wanted to give him this year of preparation within our own team, so that it is ready for next year, when the new regulations will come into force and that he will already know all the circuits. We were ready to take this risk, even if that involved errors.”
“And now we are rewarded for our courage. We have always said that there would be mistakes. But he continued to develop regularly and did not make these mistakes, even if they will come at one point or another. But the kilometers he has traveled today, and that is what allows him to be efficient at this level.”
Antonelli is 18, and Wolff remembers a young recruit of 12 years old who came to the Mercedes stand in 2019: “This young man, barely a few years ago, stood next to me in the garage, eyes wide, assimilating all of this.”
“I feel like it was yesterday. And now, the speed he shows is incredible. He doesn’t even know the circuit yet, it was the next step. It is perhaps just a ‘mini -le’, but you have to know how to take it when it happens.”
“I immediately said to the crowd that acclaimed me in the garage ‘good, enough celebrations. It is a Sprint qualification pole, it’s good, but now the work begins for tomorrow’. Let us be able to reproduce this performance during the qualifications and the race on Sunday.”
