Second-year Mercedes Formula 1 driver Kimi Antonelli entered the 2026 season with three career podium finishes and no victories. Through the season's first three races, he's already doubled his career podium tally, and two of those podium finishes were victories.
After starting the season with a runner-up finish in Melbourne, he became the sport's second youngest winner of all-time with his victory in Shanghai. With his second victory in Suzuka, he is the youngest driver in Formula 1 history to win back-to-back races, and he is also the youngest world championship leader of all-time.
The 19-year-old Italian entered the 53-lap Japanese Grand Prix around the 18-turn, 3.609-mile (5.808-kilometer) road course in Suzuka, Mie Prefecture, Japan trailing teammate George Russell, who won in Melbourne, by four points, a difference stemming squarely from the results of the Chinese sprint race.
But with Russell's disappointing fourth place finish in Japan, Antonelli now finds himself ahead by nine points, and while there are still 19 races (plus five sprint races) left on the 2026 calendar, it has quietly put him in position to achieve something not achieved since 1982.
Kimi Antonelli entered 2026 winless
You have to go back 44 years to find the most recent instance in which a driver won his first Grand Prix and his first world championship in the same season. Keke Rosberg pulled it off that season, in what was only the 33rd all-time season of Formula 1. Rosberg only won a single race that year.
Before Rosberg, the only three drivers to pull it off, aside from Giuseppe Farina in Formula 1's inaugural FIA World Championship of Drivers back in 1950, were Jack Brabham in 1959, Graham Hill in 1962, and Denny Hulme in 1967. None of those drivers won more than four races during those years, although seasons were much shorter back then.
There's a long way to go, and Antonelli isn't actually the betting favorite yet at FanDuel Sportsbook; Russell is still listed at -105, ahead of his teammate at +140.
But given Antonelli's hot streak, the fact that he has seemingly closed the wide gap to his teammate that existed a year ago after he replaced seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton, and the strength of the Mercedes car in year number one of the sport's new regulations, it's hard not start talking about him as a legitimate world championship threat.
And if he's able to do it in a year that once saw him without a single career victory, it would add to the history he's already made through just three starts, and it would add to it in a way that transcends era.
After Formula 1 had off for all of April due to the cancellations of the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix, the next race is scheduled to take place on Sunday, May 3 in Miami. Apple TV is set to continue to provide live coverage in the first year of the sport's new media deal.