Antonelli finished third behind Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton on Sunday to seal the drivers’ championship for Mercedes, tearful on the final lap and later saying he could not see through the water in his eyes.

The number tucked inside that result is the point. At 20 years and 68 days he is the youngest world champion the sport has ever had, beating Sebastian Vettel’s 2010 record by more than three years, and the first Italian to win it since Alberto Ascari in 1953.

He is also, almost certainly, the first F1 world champion still on an allowance from his mother.

Veronica Pomaro, who worked for Italy’s postal service, gives him a set sum each month and expects him to live within it.

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“I told him: let’s agree on a budget, so at least you have a clear idea of how it works. It’s important to keep your feet on the ground,” she told Corriere della Sera.

She still calls him Andrea rather than his racing name, and in the same interview said simply that “Kimi is still my little mouse”.

A gym in Casalecchio, 1997

Marco Antonelli and Veronica met at a gym in Casalecchio sul Reno, just outside Bologna, in 1997. He was starting out as a GT driver and would later found AKM Motorsport, the team that runs in the International GT Open and Italian Formula 4. She grew up in a Veneto farming family that had moved to Emilia-Romagna.

Those early racing years were not comfortable. Marco has recounted taking out a bank loan at one point simply to afford a new helmet, a plane ticket and a race suit.

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Kimi’s younger sister Maggie is 11, and the family has treated him first as a 20-year-old from Bologna rather than as a Mercedes driver. Both parents credit that for how he held up through this title year.

Marco calls last year the real championship

Veronica was asked about the twelve months that led here. The 2025 season, Antonelli’s rookie year after Mercedes promoted him to replace Hamilton, had included a difficult mid-season stretch and public arguments about whether the then 18-year-old had been pushed into the car too soon.

“Looking back at last year, it was an incredibly hard year, full of criticism: of Andrea, of the family, of Mercedes and of Toto. It was genuinely difficult. Being here today is something incredible, I would never have said it was possible,” she said at the circuit.

Marco, standing a few feet away, offered his own revision of when his son became a champion.

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“For me, we saw the champion last year, in the way he climbed back out of a dark period,” he said in the same interview.

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