Kimi Antonelli has become the youngest world champion in Formula 1 history, sealing the drivers’ title at the age of 20 years and 68 days with a third-place finish in a chaotic Mexico City Grand Prix on 1 November. The Mercedes driver, who needed only a ninth-place finish to secure the crown, finished behind race winner Max Verstappen of Red Bull and Lewis Hamilton of Ferrari, and was hoisted into the air on the podium by the two men whose combined championships number 11.
Antonelli’s title breaks a record that had stood since 2010, when Sebastian Vettel won his first championship with Red Bull at 23 years and 134 days. Hamilton, second on the all-time youngest list, won his first title at 23 years and 300 days in 2008, while Verstappen, who won Sunday’s race, became champion at 24 years and 73 days in 2021. Antonelli has beaten them all by more than three years, and he has done it in only his second season in Formula 1.
He is also Italy’s first world champion since Alberto Ascari in 1953, ending a 73-year wait for a third Italian champion after Ascari and inaugural winner Giuseppe Farina. Antonelli joined Mercedes as a 12-year-old and has long been lauded as a generational talent, and his march to the title, with nine wins, seven pole positions and 16 podiums in 19 races this season, has been a story of dominance rather than a late surge.
The Mexico City race itself was far from straightforward. Verstappen won after a red-flagged and restarted race, with a crash involving Valtteri Bottas’s Cadillac bringing out the red flag on lap 46 and a clash between the Ferrari drivers at the start adding to the drama. Antonelli started fourth, recovered to third with a late-braking move on Charles Leclerc 24 laps from the finish, and held his nerve through the restart to bring home the points he needed.
He leaves Mexico with 380 championship points and an unassailable lead of 119 points, with four rounds remaining. Mercedes, on 630 points in the constructors’ standings to Ferrari’s 504, could clinch that title in Brazil next weekend. Antonelli, tearful over the team radio as he took the chequered flag, called it a day he will remember forever, and the emotion was understandable: a championship sealed before his 21st birthday, in a sport where most drivers wait a decade for such a moment.
Antonelli now joins Jacques Villeneuve and Hamilton among drivers who won the title in their second season, excluding the sport’s first two champions in 1950 and 1951. He is the 36th different driver to win the world championship, and the first first-time champion in consecutive seasons after McLaren’s Lando Norris in 2025. The generational shift at the top of Formula 1, long predicted, has now arrived in full.
What comes next is the question that will follow Antonelli for the rest of his career. A champion at 20 has time on his side that no predecessor has enjoyed, and the records that once seemed distant, from multiple titles to all-time win totals, are now within a plausible horizon. For now, though, the achievement stands alone: the youngest champion in 75 years of Formula 1, an Italian champion after 73 years, and a title won with four races to spare. Mexico City will be remembered as the day the sport’s youngest star became its king.
