Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff admits Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s debut season has proved more challenging than the team expected.
However he stressed the team does not doubt the potential of the 19-year-old, who has taken the seat Lewis Hamilton vacated at the end of last season.
“We went into putting Kimi in a Formula 1 car with great enthusiasm and I think the team also needed that, with Lewis going,” Wolff told Sky. “For us it was the best alternative.
“We walked into this with open eyes saying there’s races we’re going to tear our hair out and others are going to be brilliant. And that’s what happened. Maybe there were more that were hair tear-out situations, but we are committed.”
Antonelli scored points in all bar one of his first six weekends. Since then he has failed to score in all but two of the last nine events, though one of those was his first podium appearance at Montreal.
A year on from Antonelli’s practice debut for the team at Monza, when he crashed at Parabolica, Wolff said the team could have handled his introduction to F1 better.
“There’s no doubting Kimi, because he came into the sport with great fanfare, the quickest ever in karting, great early junior series track record,” he said.
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He comes in here, he blasts a lap out in the first two sectors that everybody says well, that is really ‘mini-Jesus’, and then he puts it in the wall, which can happen. We probably didn’t calibrate him the right way.
“Throughout the season, he started very strong, but then we had a car that was unpredictable and didn’t give him any confidence. And then it was better.
“But a mistake in FP1 in Zandvoort didn’t set him on the right trajectory for qualifying. This time he started a bit calmer here and at the end it was solid. So I think most important is to just let him grow and let him do the mistakes.”
Antonelli is hoping to rebound from his disappointing race last weekend, where he was on course to finish in the points before colliding with Charles Leclerc.
“In the race I had good momentum, the pace was strong and especially on that hard tyre I felt pretty [good],” he said. “I was able to catch, lap by lap, the group in front.
“Then of course, the contact happened, which obviously was not ideal. In the moment I felt like going for it, also because it was probably my only chance.”
“It’s always nice to have back-to-back races because, despite what happened, I can still carry this momentum into this race weekend, especially after seeing that the pace overall was better,” he added. “So hopefully we can keep working, keep improving, and then deliver a great result this weekend.”
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