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Kimi Antonelli’s second Formula 1 season has developed into a championship statement. The 19-year-old leads the drivers’ standings at the halfway stage, 50 points clear of the Ferrari driver and 59 ahead of Mercedes team-mate George Russell. His progress has been sharp enough to place him on course to become F1’s youngest champion.
Yet Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff believes Antonelli’s emergence is not simply a consequence of raw speed. He has identified Peter Bonnington, better known as ‘Bono’, as a particularly important influence on the teenager’s development.
Bonnington moved from a long spell as Lewis Hamilton’s race engineer into the role of guiding the driver who replaced him. His Formula 1 career began with Jordan as a data engineer in 2004, followed by work with Jenson Button at Honda and Brawn, including Button’s 2009 title-winning campaign. He later worked with Michael Schumacher at Mercedes before becoming Hamilton’s race engineer in 2013, a partnership that lasted until Hamilton’s departure at the end of 2024.
Antonelli has described himself as “really lucky” to have Bonnington’s experience around him. Wolff’s assessment suggests that relationship has become central to the driver’s maturation, a theme that also features in five key storylines for the second half of the 2026 F1 season.
Wolff says Bonnington’s importance lies in the closeness of the engineer-driver relationship and the calm it brings to Antonelli’s working environment.
“Bono is the engineer who is closest to him,” Wolff told RacingNews365. “So all of the preparation, all of the debriefing happens with Bono.” He added that Bonnington is “a very calm and balanced engineer”, with neither panic after a poor result nor excessive emotion after a strong one.
That steadiness marks a clear contrast with Antonelli’s rookie season. His speed was evident, but frustration and difficult weekends appeared to linger. During the European leg of the calendar, he scored only 15 points, 12 of them from fourth place in Azerbaijan.
The current version of Antonelli has produced six victories and nine podiums from the opening 11 rounds. There have still been flashes of frustration, including his radio call for Russell to be penalised during their Canadian battles, but such moments increasingly appear isolated.
Asked whether Antonelli still tortures himself over mistakes, Wolff replied: “Not anymore. No, there’s no torturing.” He said the driver has become a different person, particularly in how he processes information, facts and feedback.
Bonnington cannot create Antonelli’s innate pace. His value lies in what follows an imperfect lap, a difficult session or a mistake: preparation, debriefing and the judgment to know when to intervene and when to leave the driver alone. For Mercedes, that balance is becoming one of the defining features of Antonelli’s title challenge.
He’s a software engineer with a deep passion for Formula 1 and motorsport. He co-founded Formula Live Pulse to make live telemetry and race insights accessible, visual, and easy to follow.