Of course, just one week after I praised the FIA for doing something good, they decided that that couldn’t last. They have now gone back on one of their most fundamental rules the first moment even the slightest bit of pressure was applied.
Back in 2015, Max Verstappen made waves by becoming the youngest ever debutant in Formula 1. At just 17 years of age, he wasn’t even old enough yet to drive on the regular roads in his home country of the Netherlands, since you have to be 18 years old to drive there. It was one of those typical situations where “nobody bothered to make rules against it, because we never thought this situation would actually happen”. Clearly the FIA didn’t think that could remain the case, because immediately after Verstappen made his debut, a new set of rules was adopted about getting your racing license in F1, the so called ‘superlicense’. From then onwards, you needed to be 1. above the age of 18, 2. have a license for regular road cars, and 3. have gotten enough points for your superlicense, which you can get through various competitions in junior formula.
Since then everything went pretty well with this new system. All the new rookies that made their debut since then were 19 years or older, and if a team did have faith in a younger rookie they were usually fine with having them drive around in other championships for a year or two longer to have them mature a little. But then 2024 rolled around, and the FIA was faced with their first challenge of this rule.
And obviously, they immediately gave in.
Mercedes has a golden opportunity in Kimi Antonelli
In 2019, Mercedes signed a promising young driver to their junior program. Andrea Kimi Antonelli had been driving for Nico Rosberg’s karting team and had won five karting titles in just that year. With the help of Mercedes he made his step up to racing cars in 2021 and after one season of getting his experience in, he began racking up titles as if it was nothing. In just the span of 2022 and 2023, he competed in seven championships and won the title in five of them while winning half of the races he competed in in those other two championships.
Reason enough to skip F3 and throw him in Formula 2 for this year. And with Lewis Hamilton and George Russell extending to the end of 2025 with the Mercedes F1 team, the plan seemed pretty clear: give Kimi Antonelli one or two seasons in F2, and then once Hamilton or Russell leaves they’ll be replaced by Kimi Antonelli.
Kimi Antonelli's karting record in 2018 and 2019. (Source: Wikipedia)
But then Hamilton decided that he was done trying to make sense of the rudderless Mercedes team and signed a contract with Ferrari. So now Mercedes suddenly has an empty seat for next year and a highly promising young driver that is too young and inexperienced to really get into that team right now. The best thing of course would be if he could already get some experience in this season in F1. But how could he? After all, while he has plenty of superlicense points due to all his victories in the past two years, he still doesn’t have a regular road license and he’s only seventeen years old. So what are you to do, when the FIA holds on to these rules?
Some help from the FIA would be great for Mercedes
Well, one solution would be for the FIA to just let go of these rules. And guess what? That’s exactly what they’ve done. It was announced on Friday that effective immediately, the rules around this have changed. It’s no longer required to hold a regular license, which is convenient for Kimi Antonelli because you have to be 18 in Italy to drive. That age requirement of 18 to make a debut in F1 is still intact….. sort of. Because a new passage in the rules now reads: “At the sole discretion of the FIA, a driver judged to have recently and consistently demonstrated outstanding ability and maturity in single-seater formula car competition may be granted a Super Licence at the age of 17 years old.”
Not "younger than 18". 17 years old.
They might as well have added “as long as the driver is named Andrea Kimi Antonelli”.
It wasn’t too long ago that the FIA blocked IndyCar driver Colton Herta from going to F1 because he didn’t have enough superlicense points. That can be blamed mostly on IndyCar getting insultingly few points for the superlicense, but that’s a discussion for another day. The point is, back then the FIA showed themselves unwavering in their conviction that this was absolutely vital. But now, a month after the FIA received a request to grant dispensation to Kimi Antonelli, the entire rulebook has been overturned with two fundamental rule changes.
What this means in practice is that we’re most likely going to see an announcement from Williams soon that Kimi Antonelli is taking over from Logan Sargeant for the rest of the season. The consequences for the contracts at Williams and Mercedes for next year depend completely on how well Kimi Antonelli does in the next few months. Maybe they’ll throw him into the Mercedes seat immediately and Sainz can go for that Williams seat, maybe they’ll keep him at Williams for a year longer and put Ocon at Mercedes as a placeholder. Either way, it seems more than obvious that the FIA has opened the doors wide for Mercedes to get their junior star into F1.