Lewis Hamilton took one side and Max Verstappen the other, and on the podium in Mexico City on Sunday they lifted a 20-year-old onto their shoulders. Kimi Antonelli had finished third in the race, enough to make him world champion, and the two men holding him up had 11 titles between them. At 20 years and 68 days, Antonelli is the youngest champion in Formula 1’s history. Sebastian Vettel, who held the record before him, was 23 when he won his first title in 2010. “I will definitely frame the picture and put it in my house,” Antonelli said afterwards.
The picture will hang on a wall in his house, but it also belongs to a much older gallery. Since his karting days in Bologna, Antonelli has carried a heavy label: generational talent. Formula 1 hands the label out rarely and takes it back often. The few drivers who have kept it earned it in different ways, and the parameters of what makes a generational talent change depending on whose career you put the label against.
Hold it against Ayrton Senna’s and it means a single lap, driven at the outer edge of what a person and a car can do together. At Monaco in 1988, Senna took pole position 1.4 seconds clear of his McLaren teammate Alain Prost, a gap that made no sense in identical cars. He later said he had felt as if he were driving in a tunnel, beyond conscious control, and the feeling frightened him enough that he backed off. He led the race by nearly a minute – a minute is a stupendously long time in F1 – then crashed at Portier with about a dozen laps left and walked back to his apartment without a word to the team. Brilliance and fallibility belonged to the same afternoon.
{{/usCountry}}Hold it against Ayrton Senna’s and it means a single lap, driven at the outer edge of what a person and a car can do together. At Monaco in 1988, Senna took pole position 1.4 seconds clear of his McLaren teammate Alain Prost, a gap that made no sense in identical cars. He later said he had felt as if he were driving in a tunnel, beyond conscious control, and the feeling frightened him enough that he backed off. He led the race by nearly a minute – a minute is a stupendously long time in F1 – then crashed at Portier with about a dozen laps left and walked back to his apartment without a word to the team. Brilliance and fallibility belonged to the same afternoon.
{{/usCountry}}With Michael Schumacher, the word means will, applied without pause for over a decade. He arrived at Ferrari in 1996, joining a team that had not produced a drivers’ champion since 1979. He won his first race for them that June in Barcelona, in rain so heavy that much of the field could barely keep their cars on the circuit. Then he spent four years building the team around himself, with Jean Todt, Ross Brawn and Rory Byrne, until the titles came in a run of five, from 2000 to 2004. In the last of those seasons he won 13 of 18 races. His ruthlessness had a darker edge in the collision with Damon Hill at Adelaide in 1994 and the swerve into Jacques Villeneuve at Jerez in 1997, which cost him every point he had scored that season. He finished with 91 wins and seven titles, and for years both numbers looked permanent.
Hamilton’s version of greatness is written large in the numbers that define his career, the numbers that eventually overtook Schumacher’s. He drew level on seven titles in 2020, and that same season, at Portimão, he won for a 92nd time and moved past the German. He now has 106 wins and 105 pole positions. In his debut season in 2007, alongside the reigning double champion Fernando Alonso at McLaren, Hamilton finished on the podium in each of his first nine races and turned the most experienced driver in the team into the junior partner. He led the championship with two races left and eventually finished one point behind. A year later in only his second year, much like Antonelli now, he took the championship. What followed was longevity, the hardest kind of greatness to see because it accumulates slowly. Hamilton won six titles in seven seasons in the turbo-hybrid era that began in 2014. He lost an eighth on the last lap at Abu Dhabi in 2021, in circumstances he has never quite been allowed to forget, and then left Mercedes for Ferrari to make room for the teenager he was lifting up on Sunday. At 41, he won in Barcelona this season and finished second in Mexico City.
Verstappen came to his greatness the other way round, with everything early and all at once. He won on his Red Bull debut in Spain in 2016, at 18, and became the youngest race winner in the sport’s history. Later that year, in the rain at Interlagos, he climbed from 16th to third in the closing laps, finding grip where other drivers found none – and in a car that was far from the best. He raced hard enough to make enemies and precisely enough to keep winning, and from 2021 he won four titles in a row. In 2023, he won 19 of 22 races. Last year, with a car that was no longer the best, he clawed back a deficit of more than 100 points and lost the title by two, a defeat that showed his talent as clearly as any of his wins.
So the club Antonelli joined on Sunday is not a tidy one. Its members share little beyond the ability to do things in a racing car that others cannot.
A year ago, almost nobody would have put Antonelli forward for it. Mercedes had chosen him to replace Hamilton, no less, and through much of 2025 he looked like a driver who had been promoted too soon. There were flashes of what he could do, including a first podium in Canada, but the season was full of errors, and he scored less than half the points of his teammate George Russell. He later admitted he had doubted himself. The first race of 2026 promised more of the same. He crashed heavily in practice in Australia and finished behind Russell.
In China, he passed Hamilton at the start and simply drove away from him, from Russell and from Charles Leclerc. He became the second-youngest race winner in F1 history. Holding back tears, Antonelli could barely speak on that day. Then he won the next four races as well.
Over 2026, bad luck played its part against Russel, but the Briton too could barely bounce back from the series of setbacks. Unlike Antonelli. Car problems in Barcelona, where Hamilton won, and a Russell victory in Austria cut Antonelli’s lead. At Silverstone, with the bodywork around his left-front wheel damaged so badly that he could barely turn into corners, he ignored the team’s pleas to retire and nursed the car on in pursuit of a single point. A penalty for running off track took even that away, but the stubbornness told Mercedes something about him.
At Monza, two years after crashing there on his first F1 weekend (he drove Russel’s car for a test in free practice), he started 19th and by lap 17, he was in lead. No Italian had won the Italian Grand Prix in 60 years, and no driver had won from that far back since 1983. He ate spaghetti from the trophy. “For me personally, I’m not even thinking about a fight or a comeback or anything,” Russell said afterwards, and with that, the title fight was effectively over.
By the time the circus reached Austin, Red Bull and Ferrari had caught Mercedes on pace, and the car had become skittish after its latest upgrades. Russell could not make it work and finished eighth. Antonelli took pole and controlled the race from the front, keeping Verstappen and Leclerc behind him. Toto Wolff called it probably the best race he had seen from his driver.
The numbers tell the rest. Antonelli began the season without a win in Formula 1 and has now won nine races. He has stood on the podium 16 times, five more than Verstappen, the next best. He has 380 points, 119 clear of Verstappen with three rounds left. His nine wins are one more than those of the four drivers behind him - put together. Those four, Verstappen, Hamilton, Russell and Leclerc, are separated by just 16 points, from 261 down to 245. Antonelli is more than seven times that distance ahead of all of them.
Seen in context, the achievement looks larger. In 2025, Antonelli scored less than half of Russell’s points. This season, in the other Mercedes, he has 130 more than Russell, three times as many wins and twice as many podiums. Had the gap between them stayed where it was in 2025, this would probably have been a season-long fight between Russell and Hamilton, who are nine points apart, a fight between Mercedes and Ferrari. Instead, Russell has slipped to fourth, behind Verstappen and Hamilton, and the championship belonged to one driver for most of the year. He drained the jeopardy out of it so thoroughly that it has not always been thrilling to watch, and that is the measure of how well he drove. Antonelli kept winning after Mercedes lost its advantage, and he kept scoring when his car and his luck turned against him.
Hamilton is 41, and Verstappen is 29. Antonelli will still be 20 when next season begins. At 20, Hamilton was racing in the Formula 3 Euroseries and was two years from his first Grand Prix win. Antonelli already has nine wins and a world title. Hamilton once reached Schumacher’s numbers, and if anyone on the grid is to reach Hamilton’s, the likeliest candidate is the driver with the most years ahead of him. On Sunday the two greatest drivers of their era carried him on their shoulders, and from March they will be trying to catch him.