Kimi Antonelli Is Champion at 20. Will It Change Him?

Kimi Antonelli clinched the 2026 Formula 1 World Championship in Mexico City on Sunday. He finished third, Max Verstappen won the race, and Lewis Hamilton, the driver Antonelli replaced at Mercedes, came home second in his Ferrari. At 20 years and 68 days old, Antonelli is the youngest champion the sport has ever had, and he is the first Italian to win the title since Alberto Ascari in 1953.

IndyCar is home for me, but I love all of it, and I have watched enough racing to believe a title like this changes how everyone treats a driver far more than it changes the driver himself. That is where the real test begins for him.

Start with what it settles. Ever since Mercedes put him in the car, one question has followed him around: can he win it? He has, and he never has to answer that question again. However the rest of his career goes, nobody can take that away from him, and I think that counts for a lot with a driver this young.

What changes is everything around him. Mercedes is now his team. For two seasons it was the team that replaced Hamilton with a teenager, and that story is finished. George Russell came into this year as the favourite in a lot of people’s eyes, and now he is the teammate chasing the champion, which is a very different place to sit even in the same car. Then there is Italy, which has waited more than seventy years for one of its own to win this title. I expect the country to treat him like a rock star, and that kind of attention follows a driver into every race weekend.

History cuts both ways on early titles. Sebastian Vettel won his first championship at 23 and went on to make it four in a row. Lewis Hamilton also won his first at 23, and then he waited six years for the second one. They were the same age, and they had very different next chapters. An early title can free a driver to go out and race, or it can make every season after it feel like a letdown, and you usually don’t know which one you are looking at until a few years have passed.

That is why I think champions are measured in the off years. Nobody wins a title in a bad car, and I don’t take anything away from him for having a good one. What I want to see is how he handles it when he doesn’t have the best car on the grid. We will see if the car does not perform, or if the other manufacturers catch up. Verstappen winning on Sunday, his third win of the season, was a small reminder that the others are not standing still.

So here is my question for 2027. If the Mercedes is not the best car out there, or if the rest of the field closes the gap, what does Kimi Antonelli do with it? Does he grind out points on the days the car is a few tenths off, and does he stay patient with Russell right there on the other side of the same garage? Those are the weekends that will tell us what kind of champion he is going to be.

I will be watching every one of them, and I hope you will watch it with me.