🇮🇹 Kimi Antonelli

Andrea Kimi Antonelli was born on 25 August 2006 in Bologna, Italy, the son of a racing team owner, and was karting competitively almost as soon as he could reach the pedals. European karting titles brought him to the attention of Mercedes, which signed him to its junior programme while he was still a schoolboy — beginning one of the most carefully managed ascents in modern motorsport.

In single-seaters he simply won wherever he was put. Racing for Prema in 2022 he swept both the Italian Formula 4 and ADAC Formula 4 championships. Mercedes then made the aggressive call to skip Formula 3 entirely: Antonelli won the 2023 Formula Regional European Championship, and in 2024, aged seventeen, he stepped straight into Formula 2, winning races in his rookie season while the paddock openly debated whether he was ready for the biggest promotion of all.

That promotion came sooner than anyone expected. When Lewis Hamilton announced his departure for Ferrari, Mercedes named the teenager from Bologna as his replacement. Antonelli made his Formula 1 debut at the 2025 Australian Grand Prix at eighteen, one of the youngest starters in the sport's history, and immediately delivered points. During his rookie 2025 season he became the youngest driver ever to lead a lap of a grand prix and the youngest to set a race's fastest lap, at Suzuka — records previously held by Max Verstappen — while managing the scrutiny that comes with replacing a seven-time world champion.

The 2026 season turned promise into domination. By the time Formula 1 arrived in Monaco in June, Antonelli was the form driver of the field, arriving on a winning streak that Monaco would stretch, by several accounts, to five consecutive victories. He seized pole position on the circuit where qualifying matters more than anywhere else, then controlled the race with a maturity that belied his age.

On 7 June 2026 he won the Monaco Grand Prix by 6.2 seconds from Lewis Hamilton, with Isack Hadjar third. At 19 years, 9 months and 13 days, he broke Hamilton's mark as the youngest Monaco winner — a record set in 2008, when Hamilton was 23 — by nearly four years. And because he had won from pole, led every lap and set the fastest lap, Antonelli recorded a 'grand slam', becoming just the 28th driver in Formula 1 history to achieve one and, by a distance, the youngest ever to do it.

The symbolism was impossible to miss: the man he beat to the line was the man whose seat he fills, on the circuit that crowned Hamilton's own young greatness. Italian media, starved of a home-grown F1 superstar since the days of Alberto Ascari's records, have embraced him; Formula 1's statisticians simply note that almost every 'youngest' record on the books now has Antonelli's name beside it, with his twentieth birthday still ahead of him at the time of the Monaco win.