Antonelli is the son of sportscar racing driver Marco Antonelli, founder of AKM Motorsport. He joined the Mercedes Junior Team at age twelve in 2019 and completed a dominant karting career, winning back-to-back FIA Karting European Championships in the senior OK class in 2020 and 2021. He won both the Italian and ADAC F4 Championships with Prema in 2022 as a sixteen-year-old, setting a then-record of thirteen wins in a single Italian F4 season as a rookie. He bypassed FIA Formula 3 and instead claimed the Formula Regional European Championship and the Formula Regional Middle East Championship in 2023, both with Prema, before stepping up to Formula 2 for 2024.
Antonelli entered the 2024 FIA Formula 2 Championship alongside Ferrari Driver Academy member Oliver Bearman at Prema, bypassing the FIA Formula 3 level entirely — a route that reflected Mercedes' confidence in his readiness and their urgency to develop him for Formula One.
The season began poorly. Prema struggled to adapt their car to new ground-effect regulations introduced for 2024, and Antonelli claimed only a single point from the Bahrain opener. He finished ahead of Bearman in both races at Sakhir and Jeddah, but the results were modest for a driver being spoken about openly in the paddock as a 2025 Formula One candidate.
His season turned at Silverstone. Qualifying tenth, he started from pole position in the rain-affected sprint race by virtue of the reverse-top-ten format. Through three safety cars and a red flag, Antonelli managed the conditions and won his maiden Formula 2 race. He retired from the feature following a first-lap collision with Kush Maini. In Budapest, he arrived on option tyres to lead much of the sprint, then delivered his first feature race victory the following day from seventh on the grid — a measured performance on a track that rewarded tyre management.
He showed an award-winning overtake on Franco Colapinto through Eau Rouge at Spa-Francorchamps in the curtailed sprint, which earned praise from drivers and commentators. The second half of the season was disrupted by a ten-place grid penalty applied to Prema for using dry ice as a cooling agent, a multi-car collision in Monza, and retirements in Lusail after collisions in successive races. He withdrew from the Yas Marina season finale with illness.
Antonelli finished the 2024 Formula 2 season sixth in the drivers' standings with 113 points, two victories from three podiums, 38 points ahead of teammate Bearman in twelfth. His pole positions and fastest laps during the season — including a near-miss at Baku where he was denied pole by seventeen-thousandths of a second — underscored the underlying pace that Prema's car sometimes obscured in the races.
Toto Wolff stated during the season that Mercedes were "unfazed" by Antonelli's mid-year results and that "a champion needs to be thrown in the cold water", characterising the Formula 2 year as a learning exercise in an underpowered car rather than a definitive measure of his ability. Mercedes had already run Antonelli in a private test at the Red Bull Ring in April 2024 in the W12, and he appeared in two free practice sessions during the season — at the Italian Grand Prix, where he spun the W15, and at Mexico City. His Silverstone sprint win coincided with the paddock announcement that he would replace Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes for 2025.
Antonelli made his Formula One debut at the 2025 Australian Grand Prix aged 18 years and 203 days, becoming the third-youngest driver in Formula One history. His single Formula 2 season, framed by team adversity and a steep learning curve, nonetheless demonstrated the speed and racecraft that Mercedes had identified in his karting and junior formula results across the preceding five years.
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