Kimi Antonelli grateful for F1 rule change: ‘I was a sitting duck’ | F1 | Sport

Kimi Antonelli said he was relieved to hear that the FIA has outlawed the qualifying ‘trick’ used by Mercedes to gain a small engine advantage. Along with Red Bull, the Silver Arrows were able to use a loophole in the rules to deploy extra electrical energy at the end of a flying lap, which was more useful in the Melbourne and Suzuka rounds than it was in Shanghai.

But the trade-off for that was a significant drop of power for a period on the following lap as the MGU-K would be disabled. That was not a performance problem in a qualifying session, but it did raise some safety concerns over cars on flying laps suddenly coming across especially slow-moving rivals.

Antonelli felt that side-effect at Suzuka where he found himself trundling slowly through the fast-paced esses section of the track, feeling particularly exposed. So while Mercedes will now miss out on a small amount of qualifying performance, now that the FIA has outlawed the practice in any case other than an emergency, the 19-year-old said he is pleased that he won’t come across that problem again.

Speaking to Express Sport and select F1 media on Friday, the championship leader said: “It wasn’t the nicest of feelings. Of course, we tried to squeeze every bit of performance, but you can come out with facing some issues or some unexpected situation.

“I was aware that that could have happened, but I didn’t really experience it up until Melbourne and Suzuka. First of all, it’s not so safe because, especially in Suzuka, I was a sitting duck in the esses and knowing that the track is also not very wide, there’s not a lot of space.

“It was quite stressful, for sure, not being able to do anything because the car was not responding to any input and I just was rolling very slowly on track. It was a stressful moment. But now it’s good to know that we probably won’t face this thing again.

“Also in qualifying, you can easily get a penalty for this, you can easily impede someone on a lap and then you can easily get a penalty, and that’s not what you want. This comes with giving up maybe a couple of hundreds of a second, so very little time, but at least it gives the confidence that this thing is not going to happen again.”

Antonelli leads the championship by nine points over team-mate George Russell, who remains the favourite to win the drivers’ title due to having significantly more F1 experience. But the odds on Antonelli becoming world champion in only his second year on the grid have shortened thanks to his very impressive start to the season.

He said of his situation: “It’s been a better start than what we all anticipated and hoped for, at least on my side. I think it’s definitely been a very strong start of the season. Definitely, expectations automatically are a bit different now… I’m aware of the increase of support and following, especially my first my first two wins, which has been very nice to see.

“But I don’t I don’t feel more pressure. I know expectations from people are higher now because I’m coming off of two wins and a strong start of the season. But I don’t really want to put too much emphasis on expectation or final result. I’m just trying to keep myself grounded, to focus on the ultimate goal and how to get there.”