Lewis Hamilton sent nightmare verdict at British GP as Toto Wolff blown away | F1 | Sport
Lewis Hamilton starts Sunday’s British Grand Prix from third (Image: Getty)
Toto Wolff ominously claims Kimi Antonelli has “no weaknesses” as he lavished praise on the British Grand Prix pole-sitter. It is a message that will worry Ferrari‘s Lewis Hamilton as he bids to rival the championship leader for an eighth title. The Mercedes teenager was three-tenths faster than Hamilton, who will start Sunday’s race from P3, at Silverstone. Just hours earlier, Antonelli made light work of overtaking Hamilton to win the Sprint race. The Brit, a record nine-time British Grand Prix winner, had secured pole and was looking to bite into Antonelli’s lead atop the Drivers’ Championship but couldn’t keep the Italian behind him.
The gap between the two in the title race instead widened to 47 points, and Antonelli looks likely to increase it further this weekend. Hamilton’s old boss Wolff is blown away by the performance levels and levelheadedness of Antonelli, who is also 43 points clear of Silver Arrows team-mate George Russell in the standings and has six wins, seven podiums and five pole positions now this season. Wolff said to Sky Sports F1: “Satisfying. It’s impressive how he’s calm and then just kills with a smile. It’s a pleasure to watch. You can see the delta time getting faster and faster and faster and no mistakes.
“He’s really performing on such a high level considering it’s only his second year. You did pretty well, you were a world champion! He hasn’t won the World Championship yet so we always need to consider the big picture.
“He’s being compared to the great ones and I think he has all the traits to be a great one but you need to lock in the results. He doesn’t show any weaknesses. He was a little bit on the back foot, no problem. As any driver, you don’t like to be sent out first, he made that comment in the pitlane and then he parked it.
“It’s compartmentalised. It doesn’t play any role in his ability to drive fast. He had a really bad run last year, it was nine races in a row without any points and George was operating very well.
“He was probably victim to the pressure, to the new environment that comes upon you. He was just 18. In that way it’s remarkable how he came out of the blocks at the beginning of this year. It’s like he’s an experienced mature driver but he’s just 19.”
Antonelli batted back the suggestions he has no room to improve and was happy the tricky conditions at Silverstone posed a fresh challenge of his abilities. The 19-year-old said when told about Wolff’s comments: “Ah there always are [weaknesses]! Of course. It’s great. There’s a really good dynamic in the team. A really good environment.
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Kimi Antonelli replaced Lewis Hamilton after the Brit left Mercedes for Ferrari (Image: Getty)
“I’ve been really enjoying the time with the team and also with Bono, my performance engineer Stefan and also Marcelo, has been great. I have a really great team around me and we’ve been enjoying the journey so far.
“There’s still occasions and situations where I still need to learn quite a lot but today was a good test because the wind was very gusty, it was unpredictable. Together with the team we had to work our way around a little bit.
“It was good because it was not a straightforward session. The start was a bit tricky. Really happy we were able to build momentum and just keep improving.”
Hamilton stormed to a brilliant sprint pole on Friday when he went just 0.011s faster than Antonelli. But in his bid to secure a first proper Silverstone pole since 2020, he was significantly behind the Mercedes youngster.
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Explaining why he finished P3 behind his team-mate Charles Leclerc, the glum Brit replied: “Just wasn’t as fast today. We made a couple of changes to the car but nothing major. Like the tiniest of changes. But yeah didn’t feel quite as comfortable as I did yesterday.”
On the team’s energy deployment problems, Hamilton added: “It was the same this morning in the sprint. Quite a bit of an issue for us, just having different performance to these guys. Whether or not we’ll have something different tomorrow, we’ll see.
“Any circuit when you’re full throttle and the power is dropping away and the guy ahead is pulling away, obviously that’s frustrating.
“We understand that’s where we are. We keep continuing to work. This is a great result for the team to have a second and third. I’m hopeful we can try to apply some pressure tomorrow.”
