Toto Wolff pokes fun at botched F1 Japanese GP start that left Kimi Antonelli “very mad”

Kimi Antonelli says he was left “very mad” with himself after making a poor start at the Formula 1 Japanese Grand Prix.

The 19-year-old Italian recovered from a slow start and capitalised on a fortunately-timed safety car period to take his second consecutive victory at Suzuka and move into the lead of the F1 world championship for the first time.

Antonelli had claimed a brilliant pole position but dropped to the back of the top six with a terrible start after suffering from wheelspin off the line in his Mercedes.

Despite scoring the second win of his F1 career, Antonelli was not happy about his blunder.

“It’s nice to be back on the top step,” Antonelli said. “Obviously a very special win, a very special track. On one side I’m very happy but on the other side I’m a bit disappointed with how the start went.

“It’s an area where I need to work a lot because it’s definitely not good enough and I’m just making my life a lot harder. So definitely a lot of work to do still but I was very lucky with the timing of the safety car. But the pace was very strong and I’m really happy with that.”

Explaining his issues off the line, he continued: “I think I dropped the clutch a bit too deep, deeper than what I should have.

“Obviously the tyres were also a bit colder. I went beyond the grip that was available and just lost a lot of places.”

After the race, Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff joked to Sky Sports F1: “A botched start; these kids learn in the driving schools with automatics, so we need to teach them how you release a clutch - slowly, steadily and not too quick.

“I thought, ‘not again’, because obviously we’re not giving them the easiest of tools so our starts have generally been a bit on the mediocre side and we need to improve that, but in that case, the driver had massive influence of that car not going away. Looked good with the wheelspin, but it isn’t fast.”

Antonelli, who has lost ground at the start of every race so far this year, acknowledged this is an area he needs to improve.

“Today was completely my fault,” he acknowledged. “But together, me and George, we’ve been struggling a bit more than what we would have anticipated since the start of the season, and today the McLaren got a really good start.

“So they’re clearly doing something better, for sure also on driver input. In this case, Oscar did much better than me because… I cannot say, but I ‘effed’ it up pretty badly. I just need to keep working on that area.”