Antonelli ‘spoils’ Mercedes plans
Andrea Kimi Antonelli will start from the back of the grid on Sunday in Monza. The Mercedes driver commented on this prospect in the usual pre-race media appointment: “Let’s say it’s not ideal to take the penalty in the race before home, especially such an important penalty, but in the end, as a team, we look at the championship and this is definitely one of the best tracks to do it. So it’s better to change everything now to avoid problems later”, said the World Championship leader.
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Antonelli also ‘spoiled’ Mercedes’ plans regarding the ADUO: “We will take another five-place penalty to introduce a new engine, this time with ADUO“, explained Kimi, thus anticipating that Mercedes is preparing a new ICE, a thermal engine, with a performance increase.
So this is good news for Red Bull, which could thus see itself overtaken and therefore ‘unblocked’ from the standstill position dictated by the fact that to date Red Bull has the best engine on the starting grid.
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Antonelli expects a very complicated weekend also because Ferrari will make a quality leap due to the new engine equipped with ADUO: “I believe that this weekend Ferrari will also be very strong with the ADUO engine, so it will be tight and for this reason it will be important especially in these races where we do not bring updates to maximize the result, do the best possible and then later when it is our turn to bring updates hopefully it will still help us gain some performance. The team believes a lot in the package it is preparing for Malaysia.”
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