Mercedes highlight Kimi Antonelli ‘gaming’ advantage for F1 rules revamp

Kimi Antonelli's "spare mental capacity" has been hailed as a factor that could prove an advantage with the wide-sweeping new F1 regulations for this year.

Antonelli enjoyed a solid rookie campaign with Mercedes, although it was offset by a remarkable run of results that saw him start and finish the season superbly over the long-haul legs, but suffer miserably in the middle at the European races.

After learning one type of car last year, now the 19-year-old effectively has to start all over again for this season, given the radical changes to the rules, and the different style that will be required to extract the most from it in qualifying and over a race.

Trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin, however, feels Antonelli will comfortably be able to adapt due to one aspect of his life that will stand him in good stead.

"We're starting to understand him a lot better," said Shovlin, speaking to select media, including RacingNews365, at the end of last season.

"He's getting very comfortable in the team. He's comfortable in his own performance, and we're excited to see how he does [this year].

"Adapting to the rules, that will really be about practice. Kimi, because he's a youngster, has a pretty impressive ability to sit in the sim and drive it all day long.

"I think all the younger drivers who've grown up gaming develop that spare mental capacity to drive while talking, while making fun of everyone else who's on the game with them.

"It does help to have that cognizant thing of thinking while you drive, and the driving becomes secondary. It frees up your brain to think about energy, strategy, and how you overtake.

"But he enjoys driving it [the simulator], and he'll do as many hours as is required, and that's by far the biggest bit."

Antonelli 'got ahead of himself'

Naturally, Shovlin witnessed Antonelli improve in all areas last season, in particular, such as "the flow of a race weekend" but also less interestingly with "the ins and outs of all of our engineering tools to try and balance the car".

Hailing Antonelli as "very strong" in explaining what the car is doing, the young Italian worked with race engineer Pete Bonnington to understand the tools at Mercedes' disposal, and work on finetuning.

"Because Kimi can describe to Bono exactly what the car is doing, Bono knows what to do with it," said Shovlin. "Over time, you can start to explain how everything's working and all the various ways of balancing the mechanical balance of the car around the lap with all the tools we've got.

"That's increasingly coming to him, and they [young drivers] start to build up this sort of database of 'When I made this change, this is what the car felt like, therefore if I know I've got this balance that might be a useful trick to deploy'."

An area where Shovlin feels Antonelli needs to significantly improve is understanding how to approach a race, a qualifying session, and learning how hard he needs to push.

Shovlin claims that last season, Antonelli's lap execution was often lacking, resulting in him getting snaps through the first couple of corners due to him applying too much power.

The result was him being unable to shed the higher temperature in his tyres around the lap, with qualifying for the Hungarian Grand Prix a good example of that when he qualified a lowly 15th. "He just overcooked it," said Shovlin.

He added: "As the results were getting better towards the end of the year, there were a number of sessions where he probably got a bit ahead of himself. He performed very well in Q1, Q2, and then he just overdid it in Q3 and paid the price.

"But this is all the real fine detail that drivers with six years, 10 years under their belt have learned by going through it, learning it the hard way.

"What has been good is that he did get through to Q3, which means you can maximise the learning there, and he finished all the races. Again, you maximise that learning. It will be easier for him when he comes round to doing all the tracks again."