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Antonelli under extra pressure? 'There is a magnifying glass on him'
- Cas van de Kleut
There is a lot of talk in Italy about Andrea Kimi Antonelli. On Friday, he made his first appearance during an F1 race weekend. During FP1, he was given the opportunity to drive his first metres, but the Italian crashed George Russell's Mercedes in the Parabolica. According to team principal Toto Wolff, Antonelli is under a magnifying glass because of his talent.
Is Wolff guilty of putting pressure on Antonelli
After FP1, it looked like Wolff wanted to call Antonelli's lap times stunning, but he changed his mind and changed it to amazing. The Mercedes team boss was then asked if he felt guilty for putting too much pressure on Antonelli by statements. To this he answered, "I think the circumstances are guilty. In our industry, we perfectly understand who is capable and not and I think how it's all panned out here, he's jumped the F3, he's pretty much won everything before and then it's clear you start to become a Mercedes driver, you test in FP1."
Wolff continued, "At the same time you're under the magnifying glass because it all happens in Monza. It has been a while that an Italian driver was in a top team so I'm sure that this can be a lot for an 18 year old"
Finally, the Mercedes team boss added: "But I said before, he needs to he needs to swim and these days that are so difficult like it is for him. At the moment it feels certainly terrible and and that's part of the development curve and I don't want to be the one who picks out great moments and say well did you see that sector, did you see that lap time or we could have been in third or first or whatever but what we see is. And that's why I chose the word differently what we see is a performance. We've even seen that in the few laps that we've seen but what you try to do the car can take."
This article was written in collaboration with Kada Sarkozi
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17 September 2024
