Wolff admits to failing Antonelli on Mercedes F1 debut

Toto Wolff believes Mercedes failed to recognise the pressures placed on Andrea Kimi Antonelli in handing him his grand prix debut at the Italian Grand Prix.

Antonelli was drafted into George Russell's W15 for FP1 at Monza to fulfil the mandatory requirement to run a rookie, but the Italian crashed at Parabolica after attempting to take too much speed through the corner.

The next day, Antonelli was formally announced as the replacement for Lewis Hamilton in 2025, with Wolff adding that the Mercedes protege had been his first choice for the seat when Hamilton had informed him of his move to Ferrari. 

It was not the first time that Antonelli had driven an F1 car, with thousands of miles clocked up in the Testing Previous Cars (TPC) programme, including in the 2022 W13 ground-effects machine.

But given the weight of expectation around him potentially becoming the first Italian on the grid since Antonio Giovinazzi in 2021, Wolff believed the team made the wrong judgement.

"I wouldn't say it was a mistake, but I think we weren't completely right in assessing the pressures he could find himself under," Wolff explained to Motorsport.com.

"We talked about how to approach the session, he has been brilliant in testing. He has never put a single foot wrong in the many thousands of kilometres that he's done.

"But it's a different ball game if you're an Italian driver, you're 18 years old in Monza and it's your first opportunity.

"Maybe if we had considered that as a risk factor against the set of data we had from him, probably it would have been wise to give him an FP1 that would have been in a different country to Italy, but he will learn a lot from that.

"I knew that that was going to hurt him, that it was going to hurt him emotionally.

"I thought it was not good and that it was a shame for him.

"He was so quick, and that was his first session in Italy, about to be announced as a driver, which everybody had pre-empted."