Kimi Antonelli after his Baku recovery drive: “I was driving like my grandmother”

Kimi Antonelli summed up his race in Baku with a vivid phrase: he said he had been “driving a bit like [his] grandmother”, in preservation mode. His fifth place stood in contrast to his spectacular comeback victory at Monza, with his run through the streets of Baku set to be more of a footnote in his early career.

After hitting the wall in qualifying, Antonelli started from 16th, facing his second recovery race in three weekends. The 6km Baku City Circuit offered more overtaking opportunities than F1’s previous stop in Madrid, but the driver knew repeating his Monza heroics would be very difficult at best and impossible at worst.

In a difficult weekend, fifth place represented successful damage limitation. Antonelli was able to mount a challenge on Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton. However, he was clipped by Haas driver Oliver Bearman after the restart, damaging the left-hand edge of his floor.

On the windy and treacherous street circuit, Antonelli took a cautious approach and gradually passed midfield drivers to move up to eighth. Alex Albon then caused a safety car on lap 31 of 51. Having already benefited from Lando Norris going off at Turn 1, Antonelli took advantage of the field being bunched up; Franco Colapinto then took out Norris and his team-mate Pierre Gasly, while the Mercedes driver escaped the chaos.

Thanks to his recovery to fifth, Antonelli limited the points he lost to his race-winning team-mate George Russell to 15. He leaves Baku with a 66-point lead in the standings as F1 heads to Malaysia.

“I was driving a bit like my grandmother today, just damage-save mode,” Antonelli said. “I just didn’t take a risk. Before making a move, I was making sure that I could go for it.”

The driver added: “After the restart, I had big floor damage.” According to Antonelli, his entire left side was gone after the contact, making the car very tricky to drive. “I still tried to get to fourth, but all in all, it’s one of those days where you have to be happy with fifth,” he said.

Antonelli said he saw the Alpine lock up and immediately backed off, while preparing a switchback. “But I obviously didn’t see Ollie coming so quickly on the inside. I was lucky to get away with it, but not so lucky to come away with so much damage,” he added.

The driver arrived in Baku after a disrupted weekend that included a hydraulic leak in practice and a crash in qualifying, and he said he was disappointed with his own performance. That lack of pace and rhythm dictated his more cautious race approach. “If I had the same pace as at Monza or in previous races, it would have been different,” he explained.

He would have attacked flat out, but quickly realised that overtaking was much harder in a train of cars all using overtake mode, and that he did not have his usual pace. “The mindset changed very quickly. And seeing so many people making mistakes also makes you pull back a little. Today, I simply took advantage of everyone else’s mistakes and moved forward,” Antonelli concluded.