Kimi Antonelli Clinches Formula 1 World Championship, Ending Italy’s 73-Year Wait

MEXICO CITY — Italy has a Formula 1 world champion again.

Seventy-three years after Alberto Ascari last carried the nation to the pinnacle of Grand Prix racing, Kimi Antonelli secured the Formula 1 World Championship on Sunday with a third-place finish at the Mexico City Grand Prix, delivering one of the most significant milestones in modern Italian motorsport.

The result was enough to seal the title mathematically and complete a breakthrough season for the 20-year-old from Bologna, whose rise culminated in a feat no Italian driver had achieved since Ascari claimed the second of his back-to-back championships with Ferrari in 1953.

Antonelli’s triumph places him immediately among the defining figures in the history of the sport. At just 20 years old, he becomes the youngest Formula 1 world champion ever and the first driver born in the 2000s to win the title.

The achievement also marks a major return to prominence for Mercedes. The German team had not celebrated a drivers’ championship since 2020, when Lewis Hamilton captured his seventh world title. Six years later, a new generation has restored the Silver Arrows to the top of Formula 1.

There was symbolism in the final podium scene in Mexico City.

As Antonelli stood amid the celebrations that confirmed his championship, Hamilton occupied the third step of the podium. The image linked two eras of Mercedes success: the driver responsible for the team’s most recent title sharing the stage with the young champion who ended its wait for another.

For Italy, however, the larger significance stretched far beyond a single race result.

Since Ascari’s championship run in the early years of Formula 1, generations of Italian drivers had pursued what ultimately proved an elusive goal. Decade after decade, the sport’s most prestigious prize remained out of reach. Antonelli’s title finally closes that chapter, ending one of the longest droughts for a major racing nation and returning Italy to a position it had not occupied for nearly three-quarters of a century.

The emotional weight of the moment was evident in the immediate aftermath of the race, as Antonelli celebrated through tears while Mexican fans witnessed a historic coronation.

Officially, the result goes into the record books as a third-place finish. In reality, it represented something far greater: a podium that delivered a world championship, rewrote Formula 1 history, revived Mercedes’ title-winning tradition, and ended Italy’s longest wait in the sport.

For Italian motorsport, the Mexico City podium was not merely another race result. It was the moment a 73-year absence finally came to an end.

(Photo: © AndKronos)