Kimi Antonelli has achieved more in five rounds than 24 Italian F1 drivers in 33 years

Antonelli turns Italian drought into dominance

Kimi Antonelli’s extraordinary start to the 2026 Formula 1 season has already moved beyond a breakthrough story and into the record books. The Mercedes driver arrived in China still chasing his first grand prix victory. He left Shanghai as the first Italian Formula 1 race winner in 20 years, delivering a commanding performance that ended one of the sport’s longest waits for a major racing nation.

Since that first victory in China, the 19-year-old has won four more grands prix in succession. His five wins from the last five rounds underline a level of momentum that has rapidly reshaped the 2026 campaign, with his latest run also forming part of the wider title picture covered in our report on Antonelli extending his championship lead after Monaco.

A five-race run that rewrites modern Italian F1 history

The scale of Antonelli’s achievement is striking. His five victories are already more than the combined total achieved by all 24 other Italian drivers who have competed in Formula 1 since the start of the 1993 season.

Across those 33 years, only Fisichella and Jarno Trulli reached the top step. Fisichella won three grands prix during his F1 career, while Trulli took victory at the 2004 Monaco Grand Prix. Before Antonelli’s arrival, that left modern-era Italian drivers with four wins combined.

Antonelli has surpassed that total alone, and he has done it in just five races.

The drought looks even more severe when viewed against the previous Italian winners. Before Antonelli began this run, the fifth-most-recent victory by an Italian driver was Riccardo Patrese’s triumph at the 1992 Japanese Grand Prix. More than three decades later, Antonelli has effectively compressed a generation’s worth of frustration into a single, devastating sequence of results.

The names behind the statistic

The list of Italian drivers to have started at least one grand prix since 1993 is long: Riccardo Patrese, Andrea de Cesaris, Michele Alboreto, Pierluigi Martini, Ivan Capelli, Nicola Larini, Gabriele Tarquini, Gianni Morbidelli, Alessandro Zanardi, Fabrizio Barbazza, Emanuele Naspetti, Luca Badoer, Marco Apicella, Andrea Montermini, Domenico Schiattarella, Massimiliano Papis, Giovanni Lavaggi, Giancarlo Fisichella, Jarno Trulli, Gianmaria Bruni, Giorgio Pantano, Vitantonio Liuzzi and Antonio Giovinazzi.

The 24th name is Vincenzo Sospiri, who entered the 1997 Australian Grand Prix with Lola-Mastercard but did not qualify before the team folded soon after.

Patrese was a six-time grand prix winner, and Alboreto won five times before 1993. But from that point onward, Italy searched for its next consistent winner. Antonelli has now provided the answer emphatically: five unforgettable weekends, five victories, and a record that places his rise in a remarkable historical frame.