The good guy won: what Kimi Antonelli just proved about ruthlessness

Kimi Antonelli became Formula 1’s youngest world champion on Sunday, finishing third in Mexico City at 20 years and 68 days old, with four races to spare. He’s the first Italian to win the title since Alberto Ascari in 1953. At the end of his media session that night, his team principal, Toto Wolff, used the moment to bury a type.

This notion of win at all costs, selfish, opportunistic, ruthless for your own benefit, that model of racing driver has died. We have a new champion that represents values like humility, like integrity, loyalty, respect, being himself.

Wolff didn’t say “gentleman”, but that’s the word he was reaching for. And he finished with the line every decent man would like to be true: “You’ve got to be a good person too, and he has demonstrated that you can beat everyone out there by being a good person.”

It’s a lovely thought. It’s also about half right, and the half that’s wrong is the more useful one.

The case for the kid

Start with what Wolff told Sky Sports F1, because it’s the best thing anyone said all night. “We’re dealing with very stiff, unemotional English people,” he explained. “So then comes this Italian boy that starts to hug everyone in the garage and you can see how it changed the environment and now all the Brits are hugging each other, which is weird to see.”

He tells another story. Wolff went looking for his driver a few weeks ago and found that, for his birthday, the future world champion was at a waterpark with his friends. This is a young man who could have spent it almost anywhere.

None of this is trivial. Warmth towards the people around you, with nothing to gain from it, is most of what we mean by class. It’s the same man to the waiter as to the chairman, applied to mechanics. And it’s fair to think it helps: people work harder for someone who knows they’re there. Mercedes lost two sponsors when it promoted him, Wolff says, “because who is this kid?” The team stuck with him through a hard first season anyway, and he says “all of them continued to trust him”.

Now the small print

Wolff is not a neutral witness. He has known Antonelli since he was 11, he made the call to put him in the car, and he has a driver to promote. That doesn’t make him wrong. It does mean you should read the sermon the way you’d read any proud boss on his best day.

Then there’s the record. PlanetF1 kept a list of Antonelli’s punishments this season, and by the Hungarian Grand Prix in the summer it came to 25 seconds of time penalties, a three-place grid drop, two warnings, a reprimand and a fine. Some of it is comic: the fine was for going 0.1km/h over the pit lane limit in Monaco. Some of it isn’t. The stewards found him “wholly to blame” for hitting Isack Hadjar in the China sprint, and the reprimand in Barcelona was for braking in front of Lance Stroll after passing him.

Last year at Zandvoort he punted Charles Leclerc out of the Dutch Grand Prix, and said sorry for it. Wolff’s own response then was rather less pastoral: “I’m sorry for Charles and Ferrari, but we want him to go for the moves, and he should.”

Quite right too. Nobody wins nine Grands Prix in a season by waving people through.

Antonelli hasn’t proved that ruthlessness is dead. He’s proved you can leave it on the track.

That is the real lesson, and it’s a better one than Wolff’s. A gentleman isn’t a soft man. He competes as hard as the rules allow, and when he gets it wrong he says so. Then he takes his helmet off and hugs the man who changed his tyres. Good manners were never the opposite of wanting to win. They’re what stops the wanting from turning you into someone nobody can stand.

Where Wolff slipped

Having praised humility, Wolff kept going. Antonelli, he said, “should be a role model for the few entitled ones in Formula One – the endless moaners on the radio, the ones that complain, the ones that crash.”

He named nobody, which leaves the whole grid wondering. It’s great fun to read. It’s also a poor way to celebrate a young man’s modesty, and it breaks a rule we’d hold anyone to: praise in public, correct in private. “The ones that crash” is a brave phrase, too, given the list above.

Nor does “the talent is there with everyone” stand up, however kindly meant. There are plenty of pleasant people in motor racing, and very few of them have ever won nine Grands Prix in a year. Being good didn’t do that. Being very, very fast did, and being good is why people are glad about it.

The best manners of the night

They may not have been Antonelli’s at all. Being gracious is easy when you’ve just won the world championship. The harder job fell to his team-mate, George Russell.

Wolff found him after the race at the FIA scales, “distraught about the situation”. As Wolff put it, “for a racing driver, this is a catastrophic moment.” According to Sky Sports, Russell was still one of the first to congratulate Antonelli in person, and embraced him. His statement that night began: “Firstly, congratulations to Kimi on a thoroughly deserved championship.”

He didn’t do the media work, and Wolff called that “absolutely understandable”. Nobody owes the cameras a brave face. But he walked over and did the one thing that mattered, on a night when nobody would have blamed him for going home. “It was a great show of sportsmanship to go and see Kimi,” Wolff said, and for once he undersold it.

So take both of them. From Antonelli: be the same person in the garage as on the podium, and go to the waterpark. From Russell: when it’s your turn to lose, cross the room first.

How we wrote this: the quotes come from reports by F1 Chronicle, dpa, Formula1.com and Sky Sports, read on 2 November 2026, and outlets’ wording differs slightly. PlanetF1’s penalty list was published in August and runs to the Hungarian Grand Prix, so it doesn’t cover the whole season. We haven’t met anyone in this piece, and we’re judging only what they’ve said and done in public. The photograph shows a Formula 4 car at Circuit Paul Ricard, for illustration. The opinions are ours, and nobody paid to appear here.