安东内利加冕F1世界冠军，成为史上最年轻冠军
安东内利夺得F1世界冠军，成为史上最年轻的世界冠军，将原纪录提前三年多。他在F1的第二个赛季就以近乎完美的表现夺冠，维斯塔潘和汉密尔顿在还剩四站时已失去数学上的争冠可能。
昨晚谁睡得最好：安东内利
一个人人都喜欢的孩子赢得了世界冠军
当你试图消化安东内利的这个冠军时，该从哪里说起？又该说些什么？也许先从数字说起。这场胜利是历史性的。他不仅是最年轻的F1世界冠军，还把此前的纪录提前了三年多。他在F1的第二个赛季就以近乎完美的表现做到了这一点。而此时此刻，他在积分榜上领先的是两位多次世界冠军、本身也是世代级天才的维斯塔潘和汉密尔顿，两人在还剩四站时就已经失去了挑战他的数学可能。
你必须谈论一种不可思议的天赋。年仅20岁、赛车经验仅约五年，仅凭这份非凡天赋就足以带来一个冠军——尽管一切都表明他仍有很大的成长空间。对任何如此年轻的人来说，必然如此。
不可避免的，人们也会谈论赛车本身，但没有人能否认这些数字。只需看一眼墨西哥大奖赛后的积分榜，就能明白这不仅仅是梅赛德斯的功劳——是安东内利在创造差异。
还有他对赛车和生活的态度。他对自己的热爱有多么投入，他对自己有多么严格地要求，以及他如何在围场之外保持一个普通孩子的样子。
然后是她的性格。善良、谦逊、有礼、慷慨、尊重他人。基米·安东内利是每个车队领队都梦寐以求的车手——也是每个父母都梦想拥有的儿子。在当今疯狂的世界里，这是一个关于如何在实现一切目标的同时保持所有这些品质的故事——这是一个美妙而暖心的故事。你就是忍不住喜欢他——以及他做事的方式。
但这不仅仅是一个关于天赋的故事。这也是一个关于如何让天赋闪耀的故事。
毕竟，拥有天赋是一种恩赐。而发现天赋并让它绽放，则是一种本领。
而且你得佩服托托·沃尔夫：他向所有人展示了该怎么做。他和整个梅赛德斯车队不仅发现了安东内利，还如此迅速、如此出色地将其转化为成功——这堪称培养人才的教科书式范例。
这应该在管理学院里讲授。这应该成为一个案例研究——以及为那些渴望成为领导者的人提供的一份行动指南。
没有理由再把这一切重述一遍，但确实有足够多的时刻，沃尔夫本可以犹豫，或让疑虑占据上风。安东内利艰难的国际汽联二级方程式赛季。那次蒙扎撞车。去年年中那段可怕的时期——以及随后媒体上的风暴。这些只是我们看到的时刻。可能还有更多我们不知道的。然而沃尔夫和他的团队始终秉持一个原则穿越了这一切：他们支持他，他们力挺他，他们继续相信他——因为他们知道自己拥有什么。他们全力以赴。而他也完全回报了这份信任。毫无疑问，他还会带来更多。
比赛结束几分钟后，托托的副手布拉德利·洛德被递上麦克风接受F1电视台采访时，谈的正是这件事。
“刘易斯告诉我们他要离开的那天，托托走进办公室，还有基米，我们打电话给基米说，你能来工厂吗？”他回忆道。“他碰巧在银石赛道测试。我们坐在托托的办公室里，托托告诉他，‘可能是你’。这是刘易斯带来的消息。‘可能是你，基米’。
安德烈亚·基米·安东内利，梅赛德斯，托托·沃尔夫，梅赛德斯
“而托托从第一秒起就相信这一点，从有机会把他放进车里的那一刻起，他就相信我们会做到这件事，而且会成功。”
“而那份信念支撑我们度过了艰难时刻。所以这首先是基米的成功。但同样，是的，正如我所说，这要追溯到最高层，追溯到托托的决心和信念——我们拥有一颗钻石，需要稍加打磨，但我们拥有一颗钻石。
“而今天证明了这是真的。”
他们为他配备了合适的人。当然，最值得一提的是彼得·邦宁顿。我们可能永远无法知道博诺本人追随汉密尔顿——那个与他共同取得如此多成就的人——去追寻红色梦想的诱惑有多大。是否有过他想离开的时刻？也许没有。但将打磨那颗钻石的任务托付给他，以及托付给车手周围的整个团队，是沃尔夫的又一妙招。因为他们不仅帮助安东内利成长，还设法让他享受其中——而不是在压力下崩溃。
“我的意思是，基米正在与这项运动有史以来最成功的比赛工程师合作，”布拉德利说。“所以博诺是一位令人难以置信的、冷静的、有引导力的人物。”
“而他会第一个说，在基米身边，他只是一个冰山一角，身边有斯特凡、马塞洛——性能工程师、控制工程师，有负责动力单元方面的乔治奥斯，有负责他所有日程安排的丹尼，索菲亚负责差旅，罗莎负责公关，塞尔吉是他的教练。我们建立并组建了一整个团队和一整个圈子。”
“而结果就是一个热爱生活的年轻人，你知道，是的，他应对着F1的压力，但并没有被压垮，能够享受其中。”
“而且我喜欢[看到]巴库之后，有很多议论，这是不是他崩溃的时刻？他飞往马来西亚，和塞尔吉一起去了水上乐园。这就是你需要了解的关于基米的一切。你知道，他20岁，正过着最美好的生活。这就是我们想让他拥有的。就享受这段旅程，享受这场冒险，让天赋自然流淌。”
而正是布拉德利本人，与罗莎·埃雷罗·贝内加斯、亚当·麦克戴德以及梅赛德斯传播团队的许多其他人一起，在保护安东内利免受媒体审视、让他适应外界压力方面发挥了作用。而我们这些另一边的人——记者们——常常因请求被拒而感到沮丧，尤其是在早期，但他们清楚地知道自己在做什么。
因为沃尔夫不仅仅是自己相信安东内利的天赋——他还确保整个车队都相信。
“我的意思是，是的，这从最高层开始，从托托开始，”洛德说。“从奥拉[康林松，梅赛德斯-奔驰集团首席执行官]和斯图加特的所有董事会成员开始，然后贯穿詹姆斯[艾利森]和他的技术团队、肖[安德鲁·肖夫林]和罗恩[梅多斯]、维修区墙上的那些人、布里克斯沃斯的[达伦]豪厄尔以及HPP所有出色的工程师们。而且，你知道，自从我们上次赢得冠军以来，这支车队超过一半的人是2021年之后新加入的。
“所以我们经历了一个巨大的变革时期，新的、新鲜的血液、新鲜的想法、新鲜的人才加入进来。经历一段困难时期然后反弹回到顶峰也是非常非常特别的。但这一切都从最高层开始，从托托和他令人难以置信的领导力以及他绝对拒绝不赢的态度开始。
“他不断推动我们，他如此用力地推动每个人，但这就是结果，这是值得的。”
梅赛德斯不仅需要发现安东内利的天赋、培养它、打磨它，并帮助它在通往2020年以来首个车手总冠军的道路上绽放。它还需要在上一版技术规则下的艰难时期之后重塑自我——而这一路走来究竟做出了多少正确的决定，只有内部人士才知道。这无疑也需要培养和激发数百位其他优秀人才的最佳状态，即便安东内利的案例是最为人所见的。
但这也反映了沃尔夫和他的团队在重返巅峰之路上成功建立的文化。如今发生的一切，最终证明了你可以通过信任你所相信的人——并给予他们交付所需的一切——来创造属于自己的成功。
真的，除此之外没什么可说的了。除了祝贺——以及干得漂亮。
英文原文
Who slept best last night: Kimi Antonelli
A kid everyone likes has won the world championship
Where do you start when trying to digest Kimi Antonelli's championship? What do you say about it? Perhaps start with the numbers. This victory is historic. He's not just the youngest to win the F1 title; he's beaten the previous record by more than three years. He's done it with an almost perfect season, just his second in F1. And right now, at this very moment, he's ahead in the championship of two multiple world champions and generational talents themselves, Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton, both of whom have lost even a mathematical chance of challenging him with four rounds still to go.
You've got to talk about an incredible talent. At 20 years of age, and with barely five years of experience racing cars, that exceptional talent alone was enough to deliver a championship victory - even though everything suggests there's still plenty of room for growth. There just has to be, as with anyone so young.
Inevitably, there will be talk about the car as well, but no one can deny the numbers. A brief look at the standings after the Mexico Grand Prix is enough to understand that it's not just Mercedes - it's Antonelli making the difference.
There's his attitude to racing and life, too. How dedicated he is to his passion, how rigorously he works on himself, and how he manages to remain a normal kid outside the paddock.
And then there's his personality. Kind, humble, polite, generous, respectful of others. Kimi Antonelli is a racer every team principal would kill to have - and a son every parent would dream of having. In today's insane world, it's a story about how you can achieve everything you want while remaining all those things - and it's a fantastic, heartwarming story. You just can't help liking him - and the way he goes about things.
But it's not just a story about talent. It's also a story about how you make that talent shine.
Having talent is a gift, after all. Spotting it and making it flourish is a skill.
And you've got to hand it to Toto Wolff: he's shown everyone how it's done. The way he and the whole Mercedes team managed not only to spot Antonelli, but to turn it into success - so quickly and so brilliantly - is a textbook example of how you nurture talent.
It should be taught in management schools. It should be a case study - and a playbook for those aspiring to be leaders.
There's no reason to go over it all again, but there have been enough moments when Wolff could have hesitated or let doubts take over. Antonelli's difficult F2 campaign. That Monza crash. That horrendous middle part of last year - and the subsequent storm in the media. Those are just the moments we've seen. There are probably more we don't know about. Yet Wolff and his team navigated through all of it with one principle in mind: they backed him, they supported him, they continued to believe in him - because they knew what they had. They committed. And he has repaid that faith in full. There's no doubt he'll deliver more.
When, minutes after the race had finished, Toto's deputy Bradley Lord was handed a microphone for an F1 TV interview, that's exactly what he talked about.
"The day Lewis told us he was leaving, Toto came into the office and Kimi, and we phoned Kimi and said, can you come to the factory?" he recalled. "He happened to be at Silverstone, testing. And we sat in Toto's office and Toto told him, 'it could be you'. Here's this news from Lewis. 'This could be you, Kimi'.
Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes, Toto Wolff, Mercedes
"And Toto has believed that from the first second, from the very first moment that the opportunity came to put him in a car, he has believed we will do this and it will be a success.
"And that conviction has carried us through the difficult moments. And so this is Kimi's success first and foremost. But also, yeah, as I said, it goes back to the top and it goes back to Toto's determination and belief that we had a little, we had a diamond that we needed to polish a little bit, but we had a diamond.
"And today shows that's true."
They surrounded him with the right people. Most notably Peter Bonnington, of course. We'll probably never know how serious the temptation was for Bono himself to follow Hamilton - the man he'd achieved so much with - and pursue the dream in red. Was there a moment when he thought about leaving? Maybe there wasn't. But entrusting the task of polishing that diamond to him, and to the whole group around the driver, was another great move by Wolff. Because they didn't just help Antonelli grow. They managed to keep him enjoying himself - and not crumbling under pressure.
"I mean, Kimi's working with the most successful race engineer this sport has ever seen," Bradley said. "So Bono's an incredible, calm, guiding character.
"And he would be the first to say he's the tip of an iceberg around Kimi with Stephane, with Marcelo, the performance engineer, controls engineer, with Georgios on the PU side, with Danny, who does all his scheduling, Sofia doing the travel, Rosa doing the PR, Sergi is his coach. There's a whole group and a whole bubble that we've built and put together.
"And the result is a young man who is just loving life and, you know, yes, dealing with the pressure of F1, but not overwhelmed by it and able to enjoy himself.
"And I loved [seeing] after Baku, there was a lot of talk, is this the moment where he crumbles? He flew to Malaysia and went to a water park with Sergi. And that's all you need to know about Kimi. You know, he's 20 and he's living his best life. And that's what we wanted for him. Just enjoy the ride, enjoy the adventure, let the talent flow."
And it's Bradley himself, together with Rosa Herrero Venegas, Adam McDaid and many others from the Mercedes communications team, who played their part in shielding Antonelli from media scrutiny and making him comfortable with the pressure of the outside world. And while those of us on the other side - the journalists - were often left frustrated by denied requests, especially early on, they knew exactly what they were doing.
Because Wolff didn't just believe in Antonelli's talent himself - he made sure the whole team did, too.
"I mean, yeah, it starts from the top and it starts from Toto," Lord said. "It starts from Ola [Källenius, CEO of Mercedes-Benz Group] and all the board in Stuttgart and it goes through James [Allison] and his technical team, Show [Andrew Shovlin] and Ron [Meadows], the guys on the pit wall, [Darren] Howell in Brixworth and all the amazing engineers at HPP as well. And, you know, since we last won a championship, this team is over half the people are new since 2021.
"So we've had a huge period of change, new, fresh blood, fresh ideas, fresh talent come in. And it's very, very special to have a difficult period and then bounce back to the top as well. But it all starts from the top and from Toto and his incredible leadership and his absolute refusal to not win.
"And he keeps pushing us and he pushes everybody so hard, but this is the result and it's worth it."
Mercedes didn't just need to spot Antonelli's talent, nurture it, polish it and help it flourish on the way to its first drivers' title since 2020. It needed to reinvent itself after a difficult spell under the previous regulations - and the true number of right decisions made along the way is known only to those on the inside. That surely required nurturing and bringing out the best in hundreds of other talented people, too, even if Antonelli's case is the most visible.
But it's also a reflection of the culture Wolff and his team have managed to build on their way back to the top. What has happened now is the ultimate proof of how you can create your own success by trusting those you believe in - and giving them everything they need to deliver.
And there's nothing more to say, really. Apart from congratulations - and well done.
Motorsport.com ·
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