Antonelli misses Q2 in damaged Mercedes

It's not every day that you get to make your debut in F1 at eighteen! Even less so when you have to replace someone at Mercedes a seven-time world champion, Lewis Hamilton. However, this was the task that awaited Andrea Kimi Antonelli for this first qualifying session of the year. While his teammate George Russell managed to qualify in fourth position, the young Italian crashed at the first hurdle, finishing sixteenth in Q1. After starting his qualifying on medium tires, like his teammate, Antonelli quickly had to switch to soft tires.

And it was during his first attempt with these tires that he went wide at Turn 6. As a result, the Italian driver suffered damage to his floor. Despite his inexperience in Formula 1, Antonelli quickly noticed that his car no longer had the same aerodynamic balance, and that it was also losing a few km/h on the straights. It was therefore difficult to compete in such a tight pack, and he missed Q2 by just six hundredths of a second.

A compromised session

"I was a bit unlucky, because on medium tires I would have needed one more lap to be able to do a competitive lap.", he told the official F1 website. “But we had to put the softs on, and after I went off at Turn 6, the car was quite damaged. I don't know how much time that cost me, but I could already feel on the straights that I was losing speed. I also felt that the car was less aerodynamically loaded, so it wasn't handling the same way anymore. So that compromised my qualifying.”

After a rather difficult start to the weekend, the number 12 driver is eagerly awaiting the race. It will most likely be held on a wet track, which gives him a chance to make a comeback. The goal: to finish this first weekend in the Antipodes on a better note: “Tomorrow it will rain, so anything can happen. We will try to finish well."

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