Kimi Antonelli got his driver’s license a few weeks before his first Formula One race. He’d spent half his life getting ready for that race. Mercedes spotted him at a go-kart track when he was 11. It paid for everything from then on. Seven years and $10 million later, he drove his first Grand Prix lap.
Joshua Robinson tells the story on the Journal’s sports page. Toto Wolff, who runs the Mercedes (MBG) team, says you can see it in the small ones. How a kid drives in the rain. How much courage a 10-year-old has at speed. Ferrari (RACE) looked at the same boy from Bologna and passed. Too young, too small, it thought. Wolff took the gamble. From then on Mercedes pays 100% of the bills. That runs through karting, the move to cars around age 14, and the junior open-wheel series. Travel, fitness coach, nutrition coach, shoes, suit, gloves, helmets. In Wolff’s words, “You just go and drive.”
That deal exists because the sport is brutally expensive. One season of karting can run a family more than $200,000. Mercedes has only six kids aged 11 to 17 in its program. Most other families pay their own way. Antonelli kept earning his spot. By his mid-teens the team was flying him to races, coaching his image and making sure he learned proper English. In the spring of 2024 he had his first F1 test, in Austria, in the snow. A few months on, he took his first win in F2, one rung below F1. That summer Mercedes named him Lewis Hamilton’s replacement. The salary was widely reported at around $2 million.
The year they didn’t fire him
His rookie year was rough. His debut in Australia ended in fourth place. Then he went six races out of seven without scoring a point. At the Belgian Grand Prix he cried in the media pen after qualifying. Wolff says other teams would have fired him. Mercedes had built its plan around 2026, when the rules changed, and it stuck to it. Now Antonelli is barely 20. Robinson wrote on Saturday that he could clinch the title as early as the Austin race that weekend. Either way, he’s on course to be the youngest F1 champion in nearly eight decades, beating Sebastian Vettel’s record by three years.
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This is cash flow (M5), and it’s really about your own kid. Most families don’t get the Mercedes deal. They get the $200,000 season, or the travel-team version of it, and they pay for it themselves. That bill can land on a home-equity line, or in a retirement account. The dream is fine. The dream needs a budget line, a ceiling and a date. Decide up front how many seasons you’ll fund and what would earn the next one. That’s what Mercedes does. Its kids stay in the program as long as they keep delivering, and the team knows what each year costs. There’s a second lesson in the bad rookie year. Mercedes built a plan for 2026 and didn’t tear it up after one hard season. A retirement portfolio deserves the same patience. You judge it against the plan you wrote, and you give it the years it was built for.
The line in your plan this touches is the kids’ activities budget, the one that quietly grows every season. Here’s the check for this week. Add up what this year’s sport or lessons really cost, travel included, and write down where the money came from. If any of it came out of retirement savings, that’s the drip to fix before it’s a leak. A yearly plan review keeps the umbrella by the door.