As Mercedes heads into Formula 1’s technical reset of 2026, one of its biggest curiosities is not just how the new cars will behave, but how its young charger, Kimi Antonelli, will perform in his second season among the sport’s elite.
The young Italian’s rookie campaign was anything but linear. From the highs of sprint pole in Miami to a bruising mid-season run of Q1 exits and crashes, Antonelli looked, at times, like a prodigy learning the sport the hard way.
Yet his late-season resurgence – podiums in Mexico and Brazil and seventh overall in the standings – has Mercedes convinced it is sitting on something special, and trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin has explained why.
A Gamer’s Brain in an F1 Cockpit
Shovlin believes Antonelli embodies a trait increasingly common among F1’s youngest generation: the ability to process more than just driving inputs at 300km/h.
“We’re starting to understand him a lot better,” Shovlin explained. “He’s getting very comfortable in the team. He’s comfortable in his own performance, and we’re excited to see how he does [this year].”
With radically different cars and power units arriving in 2026, adaptability will be everything. For Shovlin, Antonelli’s background is already giving him a head start.
“Adapting to the rules, that will really be about practice. Kimi, because he’s a youngster, has a pretty impressive ability to sit in the sim and drive it all day long.
“I think all the younger drivers who’ve grown up gaming develop that spare mental capacity to drive while talking, while making fun of everyone else who’s on the game with them.
“It does help to have that cognizant thing of thinking while you drive, and the driving becomes secondary. It frees up your brain to think about energy, strategy, and how you overtake.
“But he enjoys driving it [the simulator], and he’ll do as many hours as is required, and that’s by far the biggest bit.”
In a sport where cognitive overload can be as costly as a missed braking point, Mercedes sees this “spare mental capacity” as a genuine weapon – one it hopes will pay dividends when the rule book is rewritten.
Learning The Language of Performance
Raw mental agility, however, is only half the equation. The other half lies in communication, and Shovlin points to Antonelli’s growing rapport with race engineer Pete Bonnington as a crucial factor in his late-season turnaround.
“Because Kimi can describe to Bono exactly what the car is doing, Bono knows what to do with it,” he explained.
“Over time, you can start to explain how everything’s working and all the various ways of balancing the mechanical balance of the car around the lap with all the tools we’ve got.
“That’s increasingly coming to him, and they [young drivers] start to build up this sort of database of ‘When I made this change, this is what the car felt like, therefore if I know I’ve got this balance that might be a useful trick to deploy’.”
That learning curve was not without its stumbles. Shovlin admits Antonelli occasionally pushed too hard as confidence grew.
“As the results were getting better towards the end of the year, there were a number of sessions where he probably got a bit ahead of himself. He performed very well in Q1, Q2, and then he just overdid it in Q3 and paid the price.
“But this is all the real fine detail that drivers with six years, 10 years under their belt have learned by going through it, learning it the hard way.
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As Mercedes looks ahead to 2026, Antonelli is no longer just the talented rookie who needed time to settle.
In Shovlin’s eyes, he represents a new type of F1 driver – one who can drive on instinct, think on another level, and keep learning faster than the sport changes around him.
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