At Monza, Antonelli won the race he wasn't supposed to win
Kimi Antonelli had braced himself for one thing: absorbing, quietly, a race where winning wasn't part of the script. Starting 19th after an engine penalty, the Italian found himself leading after 18 laps, nearly threw it all away in the gravel five laps from home, and ended up giving Monza its first Italian winner in 60 years.
By Marc ErnoultCreator of OvertakeWritten with the help of AI, reviewed and approved before publication. Read our editorial policy.
A penalty that was meant to write off the weekend
Before the lights even went out, Kimi Antonelli knew his home race would be about damage limitation. An unscheduled engine change had dropped him to 19th on the grid, and Mercedes itself was talking about a podium as the most optimistic target — something close to a win in the circumstances. The plan for the weekend was containment, not ambition.
The red flag that flipped the script
Charles Leclerc's second-lap crash brought out a red flag and, with it, a free round of tyre changes for the whole field. Antonelli was already up to 12th when the race stopped; by lap 13 he was third, and by lap 18 he'd swept past his own teammate, George Russell, to lead a home Grand Prix nobody expected him to lead. The two Mercedes traded the position back and forth for a dozen laps, with the slipstream down the straight deciding more than raw pace.
The near-miss that almost cost him everything
Five laps from the flag, Antonelli went for the outside line on Russell as the track surface was breaking up. He ran wide into the gravel, lost a second and a half and picked up dirty tyres in the process — by his own admission, he briefly thought his chance was gone. A lap later, running down towards Ascari, he found the pace again and made the pass stick for good.
"I thought a podium was possible, not a win"
Antonelli said he hadn't seen the result coming and described it as a dream turning real. Even so, he was careful afterwards not to look too far ahead, pointing out how quickly a season can turn and insisting he'll take it one race at a time. The win still stretched his championship lead over Russell to 66 points and made him the first Italian to win at Monza in sixty years — only the fourth ever, after Ascari, Farina and Scarfiotti.
A week ago the goal was survival; now Antonelli leaves his home race with a near three-race cushion in the title fight, and the only question left is how long he can keep saying it doesn't matter.
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