The track engineer praises his driver
With the success achieved in China, the first of his career in F1, Andrea Kimi Antonelli he became the 13th rider at the start on the current starting grid to have won at least one GP in his career (the 9 still ‘dry’ are Liam Lawson, Arvid Lindblad, Nico Hulkenberg, Gabriel Bortoleto, Alexander Albon, Lance Stroll, Franco Colapinto, Oliver Bearman and Isack Hadjar).
Mercedes had no doubts in focusing without hesitation on the Italian driver when Lewis Hamilton agreed with Ferrari starting from the 2025 season. Antonelli became Hamilton’s heir also with regards to the track engineer, because the now very famous Peter ‘Bono’ Bonnington he is the technical support of the Bolognese who has a veteran like Bono ‘in his headphones’.
Bonnington was visibly emotional on Sunday in China and couldn’t deny himself to the microphones Sky Sports UKintervention in which he had no shame in bringing Antonelli’s name closer to that of the two F1 heavyweights statistics in hand: “When I read the book about the fact that with 10 thousand hours of training we would all be able to excel in any discipline, at first I believed it, then I met people like Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton and that point you realize that for certain things there are no hours of practice to be like them, and you have them or you don’t have them, and Antonelli has them. Antonelli has that tenth or even two tenths more that only the very best have, you can see it from the data. We wonder how he manages to be so fast and at the same time keeping the car neutral and managing the tire temperature, and yet it manages to do it. It’s a spectacle to see and observe all this.”
