A tearful Kimi Antonelli became Formula One’s youngest world champion on Sunday, clinching the title at 20 years and 68 days with third place in a dramatic, red-flagged and restarted Mexico City Grand Prix won by Red Bull’s Max Verstappen. The Mercedes driver’s voice cracked over the team radio as he crossed the line: “We did it, we did it.”
Antonelli arrived in Mexico City needing only a ninth-place finish to seal the championship with four races still to run, such was the scale of his lead. Starting fourth, he navigated an incident-filled race at the high-altitude Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez and came home behind Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton’s Ferrari — more than enough to make his advantage unassailable at 119 points.
The title breaks a record that had stood for 16 years. Sebastian Vettel was the previous youngest champion, winning his first title with Red Bull at 23 years and 134 days in 2010. Antonelli is also the first Italian world champion since Alberto Ascari in 1953, ending a 73-year wait for a country that treats motorsport as part of its national identity.
His rise has been startlingly fast. Mercedes signed him to its development programme as a 12-year-old after he dominated European karting, fast-tracked him into Formula One at 18 in 2025 as Hamilton’s replacement, and watched him win nine races in his second season against team-mate George Russell, the pre-season favourite. He joins Hamilton, Jacques Villeneuve and Juan Manuel Fangio as only the fourth driver to win the title in his second season.
The Mexico weekend also underlined the human side of the achievement. Antonelli battled illness and exhaustion in the build-up to the race, and his celebrations — captured on a GoPro as he embraced his team — showed a young man still absorbing what he had done. Russell, who congratulated his team-mate warmly on Monday, admitted simply that 2026 “was just not my year”.
For Mercedes, the drivers’ title is the team’s first since Hamilton’s seventh crown in 2020, and the constructors’ championship could follow in Brazil next weekend, with Mercedes on 630 points to Ferrari’s 504. For Formula One, a first-time champion in consecutive seasons — after McLaren’s Lando Norris in 2025 — suggests a generational changing of the guard is under way.
Antonelli becomes the 36th different driver to win the world championship. At 20, he has time to chase many more. But even if he never wins another, the record he set in Mexico City — youngest ever, in only his second season — will stand as one of the sport’s great arrivals.
