Twenty-year-old Kimi Antonelli made history on Sunday becoming the youngest Formula 1 Drivers’ Champion in the history of the sport and the first Italian driver to win it since Alberto Ascari in 1953. He clinched it finishing third at last weekend’s Mexico Grand Prix, sharing the podium with fellow champs and legends in their own rights, Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, who lifted Antonelli up onto their shoulders for an F1 photo op to end all F1 photo ops.
Mathematically, Antonelli’s championship win was almost a foregone conclusion at that point, but his picture-perfect victory almost didn’t happen that way because it’s now been revealed that his final laps in Mexico City were done in a car that was very much on its last legs. Mercedes F1 deputy team principal Bradley Lord appeared on the High Performance Racing podcast after Sunday’s race and said Antonelli won it all on a cracked oil sump.
He almost DNF’d
“We got the car back after the race, took the floor off the bottom — covered in oil,” Lord recalled. “Sump cracked, and Kimi said he thinks about four laps from the end, he could start to feel the engine just starting to struggle. So, right on the edge of retirement of that race and yet it held together.” For what it’s worth, non-catastrophic engine issues were a bit of a theme for Mercedes in Mexico as Antonelli’s teammate George Russell, who qualified P2, suffered a power unit “deployment problem” right at the start of the race. He lost multiple places quickly and eventually finished sixth.
Cracked sump or not, it’s unlikely Antonelli would’ve been going ham in those final stages of his race anyway as he apparently struggled to even see through his own tears before crossing the finish line as World Champion, according to Sky Sports. In the end, he finished a little over four seconds away from second-place Hamilton, who was eight-tenths off of race winner Verstappen. The Italian driver picked up 15 points, more than enough to secure the biggest trophy in motorsport earlier in life than anybody else who’d ever done it before.
