“Then I start to interact and get my first impression, my feeling of how the kid interacts with you, how he answers questions. I observe how he is with his team, how he handles the weekend through the good and bad moments, the complete process.”
With Antonelli, that process didn’t need long.
“With Kimi, I saw almost from day one that I was dealing with a different kid,” Lagrue says. “What impressed me — well, amazed me — was his natural presence.
“Everyone liked Kimi, everyone was hugging him. He was like the Kimi you see today when he was 11.”
That’s the part of the story easy to romanticise, and Lagrue is careful not to let it stand alone. He measured Antonelli against machinery, against bad luck, against how he recovered from a poor heat — not against a scoreboard that, on paper, didn’t yet mark him out.
“He was not dominating because he didn’t have the right equipment,” Lagrue recalls, “but he was by far the best of his team and maximised what he had.”
The proof came once the equipment caught up: switched to a front-running team for 2018, “he was just flying, dominating everything. Whatever the conditions, rain, hot, cold, he was at the top of his game in Minis that year.”
A jump that typically unsettles young karters — from Mini to Junior category, with its higher grip and faster kart behaviour — barely bothered him.
“He adapted after two sessions,” Lagrue says, citing a Kart Republic boss who “hadn’t seen something like that for years.”
Antonelli made the jump to F2 straight from karting
Grand Prix Photo
The Mercedes contribution, in Lagrue’s account, wasn’t really about spotting the talent. That was, relatively speaking, the easy part.
It was the shaping of it afterwards: physical development from a driver he calls “a little bird” fresh out of karting, and tellingly, teaching a people-pleaser to say no.
“He likes to please people,” Lagrue says, “and sometimes we need to teach him to say no.”
The toughest test wasn’t a crash or a slump in machinery, it was Antonelli’s F2 season, skipped into straight from karting, where Mercedes’ junior struggled to adapt to a new car.
“That’s the first time I saw Kimi dealing with difficult times,” Lagrue says. “He was winning — not easily — before, but in F2 it was tough.”
What Lagrue took from it wasn’t the results, but the response: Antonelli “became a clear leader, trying to find the solutions to get the team back in front.”
It’s a theme that recurs when Lagrue talks about Antonelli’s on-track style now: a driver who has to be reined in rather than pushed.
“He was sometimes overpushing a little and we had to teach him instead of always being at 110%, just be at 100%,” Lagrue says. “He’s someone who will always try, he will try harder, he will explore a bit more than others where the limit is.”