Mercedes have revealed key traits shown by 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Andrea Kimi Antonelli that impressed them prior to his F1 promotion.

The 18-year-old Italian will partner168澳洲5最新开奖结果: George Russell at Mercedes in 2025 having been named as the replacement for seven-time world champion168澳洲5最新开奖结果: Lewis Hamilton, who made the shock switch to rivals Ferrari.

Antonelli has been a Mercedes junior since he was 11 and been under the watchful e꧙ye of Mercedes driver development advisor Gwen Lagrue as he progress through karting and into single-seaters.

Having won several single-seater titles, Antonelli bypassed Formula 3 to go straigh🐽t into Formula 2 in 2024. Joining Prema it was expected that he would be a potential title contender in his rookie season, but the Italian single-seater giants endured an unexpectedly difficult campaign.

Nevertheless, Antonelli was still able to notch up two victories on his way to a sixth-place fꦜinish in the championship despite withdrawing from the final round in Abu Dhabi due to illness.

How Antone🌄lli dealt with the chall📖enges in his first F2 campaign particularly impressed Mercedes.

"I would say that normally you have a certain consistency in terms of teams leading F2, so we know that Prema, ART, Carlin, or a few others are the teams you have to work with if you want t🌸o deliver in F2,” Lagrue told .

“But the new F2 actually brought some new challenges, and we have seen that the big teams were not adapting that well to F2. Prema was performing super well and had top engineers. We put Kimi in there thinking, we will put him in a very s🌊trong environment, and we will normally deliver strong results. ❀And it appears that we struggled a little bit.

"But in a way, it was also very interesting because having Kimi dealing with such challenges made us discover part of him we haven'♊t seen before. We had to help hi♐m to deal with difficult weekends, which never happened before.

“He was used to winning all the time, or to fighting for the win, and this year was the first time actually he had to deal with not winning ꦓand not performing, and sometimes even have really, really tough weekends.

"And I have to say that I was very impressed with his maturity and his leadership in such a difficult situation. ꧑And at the end of the day, he has still done a very, very strong season in F2 considering all we had to deal with this year."

Those experiences will serඣ൲ve Antonelli well as he prepares to embark on his debut F1 season.