Antonelli ends Italy’s 60-year wait for home F1 win with Monza triumph from 19th | Formula One 2026

For all that they could not enjoy a win for Ferrari, the tifosi at the Italian Grand Prix were treated to a moment that will live long in the memory. Their homegrown hero Kimi Antonelli produced an exceptional, extraordinary victory from 19th on the grid, definitively ­marking his arrival as a potential great of ­Formula One and putting him within reach of his first F1 championship.

The 20-year-old Italian, in only his second season in F1, gave a performance of a seasoned veteran. Antonelli has proved repeatedly this season that he has verve and skill vying at the front with abandon but his comeback drive here proved he has the racecraft, control and judgment to scythe through the field and deliver from a seemingly impossible position.

In beating his Mercedes ­teammate George Russell – starting ­second on the grid, 17 places in front – into ­second and Red Bull’s Max ­Verstappen third, Antonelli has ensured his place in the annals of the sport. Only one driver has come back to win from further down the grid, John Watson from 22nd at the Long Beach GP in 1983.

It made Italian hearts soar not only in the almost operatic scale of the victory but in the fact that Italy had not enjoyed a home winner at Monza since Ludovico Scarfiotti, 60 years ago in 1966.

Yet not one of those fans would have considered whistling a few bars of “It’s coming home” before the race. Mercedes had hoped Antonelli, who had been handed a grid penalty for taking a new set of engine components before the race, might do well to come back to as high as fifth at best. Yet the Italian once more exceeded their expectations.

Little wonder the team principal, Toto Wolff, who backed the kid even when others questioned his rapid promotion to the team last season, was visibly moved by the victory.

Wolff said he had really believed Antonelli could win: “because he’s going to walk on water here in Monza.” He duly did so. “I knew that was his mission today to win the race,” Wolff said. “I chatted with his father yesterday, the father saw it coming. Then other moments where you can see how the weekend is panning out, through the sessions, that a special moment could come.”

Antonelli was understandably over­joyed, whooping at the success with an abandon that was a ­pleasure to behold and typical of the unbridled joy he brings to the sport. Yet there was the big picture here too, and when he wrings the champagne out of his overalls that will perhaps sit best.

A weekend that had been expected to be damage limitation became one that has moved Antonelli a significant step closer to taking the world championship. Russell had gone into the weekend expecting to claw something back from his teammate’s 59-point lead but is now 66 in arrears and must be shellshocked.

Russell had been vying for the lead in the early stages only to find his teammate hurtling through the pack to catch him not once but twice – once from 19th to the pair exchanging places at the front within 17 laps, then once more when Antonelli took an extra pit stop and came back again this time from sixth, admittedly on fresher rubber and with what transpired to be the better strategy, to hunt him down again.

The result was a huge return for Antonelli and demonstrated his tremendous ability to navigate through the field with control and decisiveness. The first time he has been tasked with coming back in a dominant car, the Italian handled it with a cold nerve demonstrating quite what an all-round driver he is proving to be, threading the needle through back markers and emerging with flying colours.

In what was a dramatic race there was plenty of action, not least when Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc came together at the first corner, then Leclerc being involved in a huge crash at ­Parabolica on lap two, from which he emerged unhurt. There were scraps ­throughout the field, including a feisty battling drive from Verstappen who was as ever not shy in mixing it with the two Mercedes at the front.

Throughout it was Antonelli who held the gaze, a soliloquy that was impossible to ignore. His final chase of Russell from sixth and 14 seconds back was a thing of rare beauty. Such is the youngster’s confidence and skill that it had an air of inevitability about it that would have been all too ­familiar to the ­occasions when Hamilton and ­Verstappen have pulled off the same implacable Terminator‑esque march.

Three laps from the end, after a heart-in-mouth moment where he overcooked a pass on Russell at the first chicane and slewed across the gravel – the only foot he put wrong – Antonelli made the pass. The lead and the win belonged to the Italian and Monza erupted.

Earlier at the weekend Antonelli said he planned to give songsheets of the Italian national anthem to his Mercedes team and teach them to sing it if he achieves his dream of winning the world ­championship. At Monza they were given an indication of quite what that moment will be like and a reminder that they will likely have to be in full throat on Antonelli’s behalf sooner rather than later.