The rookie believes that he needs to reach the limit earlier in each GP weekend
This weekend in Austria Kimi Antonelli returns to the scene of his first Formula 1 experience gained with a TPC run with Mercedes last year.
And he does so on a mission to “make a step” and up his game from the start of each race weekend.
The Italian has hitherto adopted an approach of steadily building up momentum over Friday and Saturday.
It’s a logical approach, and one taken by Oscar Piastri in his rookie season. And in Antonelli’s case it’s also a reaction to his Monza FP1 crash last year, when he went too hard too soon.
However it has sometimes caught him out as he’s found the jump from FP3 to the level of commitment required in actual qualifying to be significant.
Indeed, he’s regularly made good forward progress through actual qualifying sessions as he builds up his knowledge with each run. But the lingering feeling is that his ultimate grid positions could be better if he was able to be right on it from the start of Q1.
Having logged his first podium with third in Canada – and with team mate George Russell having proved there that the W16 is capable of winning races – he realises that he needs to approach the limit earlier in the weekend, and thus be in a potentially stronger position come qualifying.
“I think Canada was really important for me,” he said on Thursday. “It was a big relief. But as well, it was important because I think there was couple of time in the season where I came close to the podium.
“Australia, first race, I came incredibly close, and as well with Miami, with the pole in the sprint and P3 in the quali, I remember back then that was the goal to be at least in the podium. But I just missed out. And to finally achieve that in Canada definitely was really important.
“And I think as well, this will help me, as a driver, to drive a bit more relaxed as well. Because, I’m not going to lie, in the previous weekends, I’ve been maybe a bit too tense on some occasions, and a bit too conservative as well, especially in practice.
“And I think now is really the time, after achieving this result to make a step, and to make a step further and to improve, to prove myself, especially as well on the approach in practice.
“So trying to explore a bit more, especially the grip. Because I think in qualifying, I’ve been always arriving with a bit too many question marks, and having to explore too much and to learn too much.
“And in qualifying, you don’t really have much time, because it’s only one lap on the tyre, and then that’s it. So I think it’s really the time to make a step on this side.”
Antonelli readily admits that the Monza crash has weighed on his mind and affected his overall approach.
“I think still in Canada I was a bit too conservative, especially in FP, because if you look at the trend in FP, I would always arrive quite late into the session.
“I always put the time quite late in the session, just because it kind of required me many laps to get to get there.
“I truly believe I over-corrected after what happened in Monza, and now I’m a bit too safe, I’m a bit on the safest side. But that’s why I think after getting such a result this, results like this also help you to move forward and to make the step.
“I think now is the time to do the step, because nowadays, F1 is super tight, especially when you see qualifying, the gaps are just so close that even a 10th can put you in the back foot.
“So it’s really important to be on the top of the game, and that’s why I cannot keep arriving in qualifying with so many question marks and not the right confidence on how much grip there is, and having to explore too much and to learn too much.
“So I think now is the time, especially in practice, to get back a bit closer to Monza. Not exactly like Monza! But get closer to that in order to arrive ready in quali.”
An intriguing aspect of Antonelli’s season is that some of his best performances came in Miami and Montreal, tracks he didn’t know. He’s now coming to a run of European venues that he knows well from F2, and in some cases has also done TPC running.
“As a driver, when you go in a new track, it’s always very exciting. But I don’t know why I’ve been going so much better in tracks that I didn’t know. Even Suzuka. First time in Suzuka, you know, the race went pretty well. And then in tracks, I didn’t know I’ve been I’ve been struggling a bit more. I think,
“I think also in the European season, Monaco, Imola, I’ve been struggling, as I said, also previously with the C6 and that really also put me in a position where I also put kind of more pressure on myself, just because I could see I couldn’t really extract the best out of the tyre, and performance-wise, I didn’t really feel that confident.
“And while Montreal, of course, there was the C6, but you know, in those two races, I was able to learn a lot more, and I was a lot more confidence about the tyre and on how to extract the maximum out of it.
“But, yeah, I cannot find an explanation of why I went so much better on new tracks. That’s why this weekend I want to go well.”
Four decades ago I landed my first media pass at the 1985 Le Mans 24 Hours
Today represents a special 40th anniversary for me, as what transpired on Wednesday June 12th 1985 proved to be the catalyst for my career as a motor sporting journalist.
It was around lunchtime on that day that I arrived at Le Mans railway station after an overnight trip from London. I caught a bus to the circuit, talked my way into the paddock without any kind of accreditation, and from there things escalated pretty quickly…
I find it hard to believe that 40 years have passed since the magical trip to Le Mans that would change my life.
But let’s go to the start of my story. At the time I had recently turned 20, and I’d just come to the end of the first year of my university business studies degree.
A devoted motor racing enthusiast, and obsessive reader of Autosport since I bought my first copy at age 10, I was desperate to find a summer job in the sport that I loved so much. I was a regular visit to Brands Hatch, and I’d been to a dozen Grands Prix as a paying fan, including three trips to Zolder and one to Zandvoort.
But I wanted desperately to be an insider, having had a taste in my early teens helping Adrian Russell, a local secondhand sportscar dealer who as a 40-something amateur had competed in FIA F2 events and the Aurora championship.
I’d long ago given up hope of making it on the technical side, as A-level maths and physics proved so complicated that I had abandoned any plans I might have had of pursuing an engineering degree.
I guess at the back of my mind I had dreams of being a journalist – I’d even mentioned the idea to a bemused school careers specialist when I was 15 or so – but it seemed about as achievable as joining NASA and heading into space.
But anything would do, and with my future business studies qualification in mind I wrote to the three F1 teams based within easy reach of my south London home, namely McLaren, Tyrrell and FORCE/Haas. Inevitably they all wrote back saying they had no temporary opportunities, although the letter from Ron Dennis at least said I should try again when I graduated.
I subsequently explored a few other avenues, including working at Brands Hatch – I’ll never forget the steely glare of the dragon lady on the circuit’s reception desk, who had no interest whatsoever in helping me when I offered my services.
I then came up with the idea of approaching Barry Bland, well known then as the organiser of the Macau GP. I showed up one day at his London office. He couldn’t help, but he referred me instead to someone who shared his premises, and who might need a helping hand.
That man was Chris Parsons, familiar more recently as a Le Mans pundit on Eurosport, but then a marketing man and racing enthusiast who had just set up OSCAR – the ‘Organisation for Sportscar Racing,’ a fledgling sort of FOCA for the then expanding FIA World Endurance Championship.
To my surprise he suggested that he might indeed need some assistance at the upcoming Le Mans 24 Hours, so I eagerly offered my services, and began planning my trip.
Nearer the time when I rang up to confirm details Chris said the opportunity was no longer there. I told him I was by now committed to coming, and to placate me he said he would ask his pal Roy Baker – entrant of two Tiga Group C2 cars – if he could do with a spare pair of hands. That was all the incentive I needed. I just wanted a chance.
Thus on Tuesday June 11th I set off by train from London Victoria to Dover, having finished my last end of term exam earlier that day. I hopped on a ferry to Calais, followed by a train to Paris Gare de Nord. I can’t remember much about the journey, but I assume that somewhere along the way I managed to catch some sleep!
A trip on the metro took me to Gare Montparnasse, from where I took the train to Le Mans. On arrival I bought a postcard from a little tabac to send to my parents – in those pre-mobile and email days I wanted to let them know that I had made it. That postcard now sits in my office.
“I have just got off the train at Le Mans and I’m about to get a bus to the circuit,” I wrote. “Journey was okay. Weather is cool. I still don’t know if I can get in or not!”
Not exactly a good calling card for a would-be journalist, but I guess I included all the relevant facts…
Somehow I found a bus heading in the general direction of the circuit, and after a long trek from where it dropped me I told the guys on the various gates I passed through that I worked for Roy Baker Racing, and my team pass was in the paddock. Fortunately they accepted my story, and I eventually made it to the inner sanctum.
And then for reasons I can’t recall instead of seeking out Roy and the team I was ostensibly going to work for, I looked for Chris Parsons, who was using a little caravan as base camp for OSCAR.
I don’t know whether he’d forgotten that he’d changed his mind, or was just impressed that I’d actually shown up. But all of a sudden the (unpaid) OSCAR job was back on. I never did work for the late Roy Baker, although he was to become a good friend over the years.
OSCAR was running a sort of official news service for the championship, and my job was to run around and gather information for Mark Cole, the journalist who was actually writing the press releases. I would then distribute them around the paddock and media centre, and run other errands, like taking messages from OSCAR to the team bosses.
From somewhere Chris managed to produce an ACO press pass – technically that weekend I was accredited by Mosport Park, the venue of an upcoming WEC race!
Meanwhile when it dawned on him that I had nowhere to stay – it never occurred to me that I might need to sort something out – he agreed to let me crash out in the official OSCAR caravan, on the basis that I was out of the way when it was needed as an office in the mornings.
So there I was, suddenly at the centre of the action at one of the biggest races in the world, dashing around the paddock, the pit lane and through the alleyways in the back of the old pit complex, still exactly as it was in the Steve McQueen movie. It was a dream come true. That weekend I met team bosses, drivers and journalists, and one of those encounters was to change my life.
Up in the old press tribune opposite the pits I bumped into Quentin Spurring. Known to everyone as Q, he was then the editor of Autosport, as well as its WEC correspondent. But to me, steeped in the magazine since I was a wee lad, he might as well have been God.
I told him what I was up to, and handed him a copy of that day’s OSCAR press release. And then out of my back pocket I produced a tatty copy of a rather amateurish CV that I had typed up before I left home, just in case it came in useful. There wasn’t really much on it, as I hadn’t really done anything up to then except study and read Autosport, so it didn’t take long for Q to scan it.
He mentioned the name of my school, and I responded by naming the one he had attended. He looked a little surprised, but impressed. I’d done my homework. Many times I had scanned the potted biographies of racing journalists in a handy reference book called the Motor Racing Directory, looking for clues on how they had started their careers. And for some reason that little detail of Q’s education had stuck in my mind. I guess that caught his attention…
I spent an amazing few days dashing around the paddock. The Joest Porsche 956 won the race, and the weekend came to an end all too soon. On the Monday morning a guy I’d met from Canon cameras gave me a lift to Paris. He dropped me at his office, and I did the tourist bit at the Pompidou Centre before heading off to Calais by train and getting my ferry back to Dover, and finally a train to London.
That could have been the end of my motor racing adventure. But in the following days I badgered Chris Parsons by phone, and he said if I could get myself to the next WEC race in Hockenheim, I could help out there too.
Not too convinced about German public transport, I decided to try and get a lift instead. So I rang Group C2 team Spice Engineering and arranged to meet their motorhome at Dover a few days before the race.
I was standing at the gate of the ferry terminal at 11am on the Wednesday morning or whatever it was, and sure enough the aforementioned team vehicle came into view at the agreed time. I was on my way to the Hockenheim 1000kms – and it was a free ride! Team boss Jeff Hazell, who had been at Williams just a few years previously, was a bit surprised when he realised that I was also planning to sleep in the motorhome. I managed to convince him…
I met Q again that weekend, and bothered the poor man with another sales pitch. Then the week after that came the British GP. A contact from Le Mans had put me in touch with someone involved in running the Silverstone media centre, and I landed myself my first F1 press pass and spent the weekend doing whatever odd jobs were required, without payment.
Q showed up once again, and this time I surprised him by handing over a copy of report of the Hockenheim WEC race I had written, just to see if I could string a few words together. By now he must have thought I was his stalker…
My persistence paid off, and a couple of days later the phone rang at my parents’ house. It was Q. Somebody at Autosport was going away on their summer holiday for a couple of weeks, and they needed a spare pair of hands. Would I be interested in coming in and helping out at £2.50 an hour?
There was no guarantee that I would last beyond the first day, but I didn’t need to think it over. I had a foot in the door…
So it was that on Monday July 29th I headed not to the main Autosport office in Teddington but to its satellite base at its typesetters in an old industrial building near London’s Old Street station. Following the instructions I’d been given I climbed the stairs to the top floor, and I eventually found a dreary, barely furnished office.
It served as home for the junior members of the magazine’s editorial team on every Monday and Tuesday, when that week’s issue was being put to bed. The only things in the room were some tables and chairs, and a collection of ancient manual typewriters – this was before the days of word processors. Scattered around were pages of that week’s magazine, in various stages of completion.
My three new colleagues were already there, working away. Their names, I was to find out, were Bruce Jones, Tony Dodgins and Joe Saward. They acknowledged this wide-eyed interloper with an air of curiosity – who was this kid, and why had their usually sane boss Q given him a chance to join their profession?
Bruce handed me my first job – proofreading and subbing a Nigel Roebuck interview with Bernie Ecclestone. Then after a few minutes of instruction, with the help of a scalpel and a can of glue, I designed and laid out the pages for the story, including choosing the pictures. I was in the magazine business…
As well as getting involved in production after a little hustling I was allowed to write race reports in the weeks that followed. The first was an FF2000 event at Brands won by Martin Donnelly, the second an entire club meeting at Thruxton, which included a prestigious Esso FF1600 round. I made a point of talking to as many of these ambitious young drivers as I could – and that day I met Damon Hill, Johnny Herbert, Eddie Irvine, Mark Blundell and Bertrand Gachot for the first time.
I also continued to get myself to World Sportscar races with portable typewriter in hand – Richard Lloyd picked me up at Dover in the RLR team motorhome for the trip to the Spa 1000kms, where I covered the C2 class with my first report on an international event.
I must have done something right, because after my initial two-week opportunity expired Q asked me back to help out in the office when someone else went on holiday. I would combine work and studies for the next couple of years, and I just kept plugging away, getting to races under my own steam as and when I could.
And then the week I finished university in July 1987 I landed a fulltime role at Autosport – my dream really had come true…
It’s not been a straightforward start to his Williams Formula 1 team career for Carlos Sainz as the Spaniard has had to adjust to a very different car and power unit.
In Bahrain things have started to come together, and having been as high as seventh in Q2 he secured eighth on the grid, behind Max Verstappen’s Red Bull and directly ahead of his Ferrari replacement Lewis Hamilton.
However he insists that he’s not getting too carried away, and that there’s plenty more still to come.
It certainly didn’t hurt that he’d tested (and been fast) in Bahrain in February, although he lost valuable track time when he had to hand his car to Luke Browning for FP1.
Solid progress through FP2 and FP3, with some experimentation along the way, paid off in qualifying.
“I think a bit of everything for sure,” he said when I asked if familiarity with the track had helped. “I’m testing different things every weekend to try and unlock a bit more performance.
“And this weekend, I again drove a bit of a different car on Friday, tested some things learned, put them together for today, and seems like we did a little bit of a step in the right direction.
“It doesn’t mean that today we suddenly discovered everything, and we are back to my usual self of extracting the maximum out of the car, but at least step by step. Today we did a step in the right direction, and we need to keep our head down.
“This is still not where I want to be, P8. I want a bit more. But progress with the team, progress with myself, with my driving, with the setup, and we keep going.”
Sainz agreed that Bahrain was the best start to a race weekend he’s had thus far in 2025.
“I just felt like I did some clean laps in quali, which is hasn’t been the case up until now,” he said.
“I’ve always done mistakes, never put a lap together, really. I know when I put things together, I have the pace. It’s just understanding the car, where to push, where not to push, where to find the lap time.
“And today, I definitely did some steps in the right direction. As I said, not where I want to be still – you look at Gasly [starting P4]. But at the same time, we managed to qualify in front of a Red Bull and a Ferrari.
“So it must be that we’re doing things in the in the right way, and now we need to keep investigating things, testing things. Not missing FP1 in Jeddah could help also to try some things. So let’s see.”
In essence it’s mainly about understanding where the limits of the car are, and what works or doesn’t work. It’s largely a question of track time.
“Definitely more confident and more under control,” he said. “More than confident, it’s knowing where I was going to go and risk it and find the lap time, and knowing where I was not going to push, because I know the car cannot take what I can or what I want to do.
“So just stay in discipline, with my driving, with my tools, with my setups, with my front wings, with my things to know where to extract the lap time. Still as I said, a lot of things to learn, and many more qualis like this to do, to understand many other things. But at least today, we did a step.”
Sainz insists that he knew it would take time toget properly up to speed.
“Honestly, I wasn’t feeling too stressed about it,” he said. “I know where I stand, I know far I am from my limit, from the limit of the car.
“Suzuka was more a matter of putting the lap together, which I didn’t do. I know this will come, the more laps I do with this car.
“Obviously, China was a bit of a shock to the system, but at the same time, I shrugged it off pretty quickly after, with Suzuka and here.
“Honestly, as I said, I wasn’t feeling too stressed about it. I just know I need to stick to my plan, do small steps at a time, and it will come, because I know I have the speed and I have a good team around me.”
Oliver Oakes admits that he’s still learning about Alpine
New Alpine Formula 1 boss Oliver Oakes sees his role as someone “who takes the bullet for the team” and gives the Enstone staff support and direction.
Oakes was named during the summer break as the new team principal after the departure of Bruno Famin, working under the overall direction of Flavio Briatore.
He says he arrived knowing that he would need time to learn about the operation and determine what can be done better.
“I didn’t come in with any preconceived ideas in terms of what I thought about the team,” he said. “Because at the end of the day, until you’re in somewhere, you don’t know the people closely.
“You don’t know what they’ve gone through. You read about it, and I’ve known certain members of the team, and had some snippets. But I didn’t come in with any preconceived ideas.
“I think you come with your own ethos and approach in terms of how you feel you need to build that trust, that unity and stability back in the team. But I think that’s sort of who you are as a person.
“That’s not because of actually the specific team. For me, I think I know pretty well some of the stories that have gone on at Enstone, sort of the long statements made, and I knew how that had a sort of adverse effect in different ways.
“So the main thing I came with, really, was a sort of clean sheet of paper of, right, where are we at now? What things have we done right? What haven’t we done right?
“And actually, you also want to listen a bit as well to some of that, because you need to get to the bottom of it. It’s never as simple as you know one person, one mistake. There’s always loads of things that have gone into it.”
Oakes insisted that there is now “a clear vision” of the direction to take.
“It’s a pretty special place, Enstone,” he noted. “I keep saying it, but there is a lot of knowledge there, it’s been in F1 a long, long time, as Flavio keeps reminding me daily!
“But because of that the place knows what it’s doing, it just genuinely needs some leadership, and it needs support.
“I’m going to say this because it’s on my shoulders, but I think it’s actually got a clear vision now and clear leadership with me and Flavio there. We’re committed, and as he does keep saying as well, I got the job because I live down the road!
“I enjoy being there, and it does require full commitment from those who are running it, and I think the place probably hasn’t had that for a couple of years.
“And I think that’s the biggest thing I wanted to bring, really, that there’s someone there who takes the bullet for the team, gives them the support and the direction they need.
“That was my only real sort of vision before starting. I actually felt it needed that. It needed someone there who was a racer, who understood what everybody was going through. I’ve just got to deliver, haven’t I?”
The biggest uncertainty in the camp concerns the 2026 power unit, with the Renault project in Viry to be abandoned in favour of a Mercedes customer supply, although the arrangement has not be formally confirmed.
“There’s obviously certain sensitive topics at the moment!,” said Oakes. “I think they’ve been spoken about a lot. I think what hasn’t been spoken about much is about what we plan to do at Enstone, by the same sort of token, really.
“Viry is undergoing a bit of an assessment of the project. And the same things going on at Enstone. We need to understand, actually, where we are good, where we need to improve, and also what changes need to be made as a small sort of evolution and step forward, particularly as we are coming into that transition now, with ’26 on the horizon. It’s a pretty big time in F1 at the moment.
“And I think, from my point of view, it’s quite fortunate to have landed straight after the shutdown that I think I’ve got a bit of time to influence the direction we’re going in, and make sure what happened the beginning of the year, and sort of decisions that were made last summer that caused that problem that we try to mitigate that.
“Because at the end of the day, this team hasn’t forgotten how to build a good race car and to go racing. It’s done that through every cycle of regulations, which is pretty impressive, really.”
Oakes stressed that the updates introduced at Spa paid off with a strong seventh place for Pierre Gasly at Zandvoort,
“I think was quite a good uplift for us, particularly made me look good being in the points on my first weekend!,” he said.
“But I think that was very, very positive, particularly from where the team started the beginning of the season. Full credit to them for that.
“We plan between now and the end of the year to bring a couple more [updates]. We definitely will bring a little bit more performance between now and the end of the year.
“At the end of the day, we want to continue I’d say that sort of recovery from the beginning of the year.”
Adam Cooper F1 