Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli could be the F1 darling Italy is waiting for

A long time ago, when the Formula One world championship was still in its infancy, Italy ruled the roost.

In its first season in 1950, patrician Giuseppe Farina won the title for Alfa Romeo in one of their powerful 1.5-litre supercharged racers. The following year, Argentinian legend Juan Manuel Fangio took the first of his five titles in a similar car.

In 1952 and ’53, it was the turn of Alberto Ascari, the son of pre-war star Antonio, as he won back-to-back titles for Ferrari. But he was killed in a testing accident in 1955.

Other Italians have won grands prix since: Luigi Fagioli, Piero Taruffi, Luigi Musso, Giancarlo Baghetti, Lorenzo Bandini, Ludovico Scarfiotti, Vittorio Brambilla, Michele Alboreto, Riccardo Patrese, Elio de Angelis, Alessandro Nannini, Jarno Trulli and Giancarlo Fisichella. But only Alboreto ever vied for the world championship and he was beaten by Alain Prost in 1985.

So Italy still waits.

But now, with two wins in two weeks, Bolognese teenager Kimi Antonelli has suddenly become the tifosi’s other darling alongside their beloved Ferrari. There is belief that, finally, he is the man Italy has been waiting for.

But while F1 celebrated the new star’s feats, there was deep consternation over the alarming accident that befell rising British star Oliver Bearman.

It happened on the 22nd lap and led to the safety car that boosted Antonelli’s fortunes. It occurred because Franco Colapinto’s Alpine was harvesting energy on the run down to the very fast Spoon Curve, while Bearman was using his overtake mode to pass him.

The new 2026 cars derive 50 per cent of their 1,000bhp from their internal combustion engines and the other half from batteries, but the latter needs continual recharging. Hence, there are stages when cars have their full 1,000bhp and stages when they don’t, as the batteries are being recharged just like Colapinto’s were.

The result was a huge closing speed between the two cars. Bearman was travelling at 308kmh, 50kmh faster when he came upon Colapinto and had to take avoiding action, swerving to the left and losing control on the grass. He then half spun and slid across Colapinto’s nose and into 50G contact with the tyre wall on the outside of the corner.

Bearman was able to get himself out of the car and escaped with only a bruise to his right knee, where it had hit the side of his Haas car’s carbon fibre survival cell.

The accident was an example of what many drivers had warned about in 2026: huge speed differentials resulting from the new regulations.

It was the second such incident in 2026, the first also involving the innocent Colapinto, whose lightning reactions saved him from colliding at high speed with Liam Lawson’s slow-moving Racing Bulls at the start in Australia, where the new cars had shown themselves to have unpredictable launching behaviour.

In both these cases, the endangered drives had room for manoeuvre. The greater concern is of a wheel-to-wheel impact on tighter tracks, which might cause a car to fly if a driver were to go into the back of another slow-moving car, or worse, be launched over their rear wheels because there isn’t leeway to effect last-moment avoidance.

“We’ve spoken about that being a possibility since these cars were conceptualised,” Oscar Piastri said. “It’s what we’re stuck with, with the power units. There’s no easy way of getting around it.

“So, I think there’s clearly an element of learning for us. I think we understand as a sport there’s a lot of things we need to tweak, especially on safety grounds. There are some that need to be looked into pretty quickly.”

The enforced break due to the cancellation of the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian races should give the governing FIA the perfect opportunity to do just that before the Miami Grand Prix in May.