Andrea Kimi Antonelli said he didn’t explore his car’s limits in his second appearance in an official Formula 1 practice session, after crashing on his debut at Monza.
The Mercedes junior driver, who will take over from Lewis Hamilton in the team’s line-up next year, took over the seven-times champion’s car in the first practice session for the Mexican Grand Prix on Friday. Antonelli said his priority was to stay out of trouble.
“It was definitely much better than Monza,” he told the official F1 channel. “I drove much calmer today.
“I didn’t want to take any risks. I just wanted to do a clean session, just to get some laps, understand the car a bit more, understand the tyres.
“I think overall it was pretty decent. Of course I could feel I wasn’t on the limit but just because it was my choice, I just wanted to get a clean session overall.”
He switched from the hard tyre to the soft at the end of session but Antonelli said he was “not on the absolute limit” even at this stage.
“I was trying to build the confidence lap by lap,” he explained. “It was my first time in the track, so I was trying to learn as much as possible.
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“Of course, on the soft, the step in grip was quite big. Also, because on hard I was doing consecutive laps, I wasn’t really doing one push and then cool and push again. I was doing consecutive, so I couldn’t really try the single-lap work. So I went on soft and I felt a lot more grip and I didn’t really use it because I was really surprised by the amount of grip.”
He didn’t enjoy a trouble-free session as he damaged his car’s floor on a piece of debris which Max Verstappen also ran over. “To be honest, I didn’t really see it,” Antonelli admitted.
“It was a shame because I got quite a bit of floor damage from it, it was quite big damage. So of course it wasn’t ideal but still managed to get a few laps in the bag.”
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2024 Mexican Grand Prix
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