Kimi Antonelli qualified third for the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix on Saturday after saying he had been overdriving the car all weekend. It was a strong result on paper, but it also marked the first time this season that the 19-year-old would not start from the front row.
That is why people are asking what happened to Kimi Antonelli today. He said he had not had enough pace over a single lap, and the conditions in Barcelona were “very tricky, very slippery and very hot.” Antonelli said the tyres had been running away from him a little bit, leaving him struggling to extract the maximum from them for the whole lap.
There were reasons for the lost time. Antonelli missed FP1, when Fred Vesti took over driving duties, and traffic affected his running in FP3. By qualifying, George Russell had taken pole position ahead of Lewis Hamilton, putting Antonelli third in a session that rewarded clean laps and punished small mistakes.
Antonelli did not hide the problem. He said he had been overdriving the car, a phrase that in practice means asking too much of the tyres and pushing beyond the balance the car can comfortably carry through a lap. In hot conditions like these, that tends to make the tyres fall away sooner, and once they do, the final sector of a lap can vanish before the driver can recover it.
Even so, third place leaves him in a usable position for Sunday’s race. Antonelli said a good start will matter because the run to Turn 1 is long, and he expects tyre management to decide much of the race. He added that race pace was good in FP2 and said he hoped Sunday would allow him to make better use of it. With 66 points in the World Championship standings, he is still carrying a healthy cushion, but Barcelona showed that even a driver who can reach P3 is not always getting the most from the car.
