Kimi Antonelli has won three of the opening four races of 2026, leads the world championship by 20 points, and looks every inch the heir Mercedes told everyone he would be. But the 19-year-old has used his post-Miami media duties to single out the part of his weekend he still does not trust — and it is the part he has the least time to fix in private.
"I still don't have that confidence, being consistent with that," Antonelli said. "I still have a bit of uncertainty, so it's a big point that needs to be improved."
The weakness is the race start. Specifically, the clutch drop. Antonelli lost two positions off the line on Sunday in Miami, and six in Saturday's Sprint. He converted pole into victory anyway, but the gap between his qualifying form and his opening lap remains the one consistent weak spot in a season that otherwise has the F1 paddock grading him on the same curve as Lewis Hamilton's first Mercedes year.
"I think also with the team, but for sure mainly from me," Antonelli said, "because I'm still a little bit inconsistent, especially on clutch drop."
That self-assessment is unusually direct from a championship leader. Most drivers in his position deflect to setup, tyre temperature or someone else's launch sequence. Antonelli's framing was the opposite. He took grip in the Sprint as a partial mitigation — expected grip levels "was just not there," he said — but landed back on his own consistency as the actual problem.
"But still, no, it's not acceptable," he said. "I think especially in a weekend like this, that the gaps are a lot closer, it can really change the race."
That is the part of the equation he keeps coming back to. The Mercedes is fast enough at one corner of the equation — qualifying — to mask the other. In Miami the field bunched, the storm-shortened Sunday brought the tyre window down, and Antonelli still had enough margin to overhaul Lando Norris in the McLaren on a strategy call. In a closer race, on a track where overtaking is harder, two positions off the line is the difference between leading lap one and surrendering the championship momentum.
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff was even less forgiving than the driver was on Sunday evening, conceding earlier in the weekend that the team's starts have been "mediocre" and that rivals had cracked the new 2026 energy code at the lights. The 2026 cars are running the new 50/50 hybrid split, which forces drivers to manage clutch bite and energy deployment in the first 100 metres in a way that is fundamentally different from the late V6-hybrid era.
That technical context is the part Antonelli is willing to share with the team. The clutch-drop muscle memory is the part he is keeping for himself.
"It's not acceptable," he repeated. "It's a big point that needs to be improved."
One factor working in his favour is the calendar. With Canada the next round, then Imola and Monaco — a circuit where the start matters less than at almost any other venue — Antonelli has a window to bring his start performance into line with his qualifying. If he does, his 20-point cushion turns into the kind of race-by-race plus he can spend on tyre management and strategy rather than on recovery drives.
For a rookie leading the world championship, the most telling thing about Antonelli's Miami debrief was not what he said about Norris, his pole lap, or his third straight win. It was that, asked what he wanted to fix, he picked the one thing the leaderboard does not yet show.
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*Originally published on [News Formula One](https://newsformula.one/article/antonelli-championship-leader-targets-race-starts-clutch-drop). Visit for full coverage.*
