Antonelli, 20, Becomes Formula One’s Youngest World Champion In Mexico City

MEXICO CITY — Kimi Antonelli became the youngest world champion in Formula One history on Sunday, finishing third in a red-flagged and restarted Mexico City Grand Prix at 20 years and 68 days to take the title with four rounds of the season still to run. The Mercedes driver, in only his second season, is the first Italian champion since Alberto Ascari in 1953 — a wait of 73 years — and he broke the record Sebastian Vettel set at 23 years and 134 days when he won the first of his four titles in 2010.

Third Place Was More Than Enough

Antonelli arrived at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez 123 points clear of his teammate George Russell and 124 ahead of Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton, and needed only to finish ninth to make the championship mathematically his. He started fourth, raced while battling illness and exhaustion, and finished third behind race winner Max Verstappen — who won in Mexico City for the sixth time — and Hamilton. His lead is now an unassailable 119 points. On the podium, Verstappen and Hamilton, who hold eleven titles between them, hoisted the new champion into the air. “We did it, we did it,” Antonelli said over the team radio, his voice cracking, as he crossed the line. “Thank you so much.”

A Season That Tore Up The Script

Russell began the year as the title favourite; Antonelli, who replaced Hamilton at Mercedes and joined the team’s junior programme as a child, ripped up that script. He has won nine races this season — one more than Russell has managed in a career that began in 2019 — including five in a row from China to Monaco, and victories at Monaco, at Spa and at his home race at Monza, where he came through from the back of the field. Reuters’ list of the sport’s youngest champions notes that he has won more races in a single season than any Italian driver before him, and he is only the fourth driver in the sport’s history to win the title in his second season, after Hamilton, Jacques Villeneuve and Juan Manuel Fangio.

‘One Of The Greats’

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff, who took Hamilton to six of his seven championships and Nico Rosberg to the 2016 title, told Reuters that Antonelli had exceeded all expectations and had nothing left to prove. “He’s done an insane job,” said Lando Norris, the outgoing champion, who had said before the race that Antonelli had made winning the title look easy and deserved more credit for it — not least for beating a teammate, in Norris’s words, who has been in the sport four or five times longer and is very good. Mercedes lead the constructors’ championship with 630 points to Ferrari’s 504 and can clinch that title in Brazil next weekend. The drivers’ championship, though, is already settled: a 20-year-old from Bologna owns it, three years younger than anyone who has ever held it before.

Sources: Reuters, November 1–2, 2026 (race report; youngest-champions list; Norris and Wolff reporting); CNN, November 1, 2026; USA Today, November 1, 2026; The Drive, November 2, 2026.