Kimi Antonelli Put It in Reverse, Hit a Fence — and His Own Team Posted It: ‘Championship Leader BTW’

MONDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2026

Let’s rewind the tape to Austin, Texas, in the days before the United States Grand Prix, because Andrea Kimi Antonelli had the whole weekend in his hands. Twenty years old. Leading the Formula 1 world championship. One good Sunday from standing on the edge of history. Mercedes handed him the keys to a brand-new Mercedes-AMG GT 4-Door Coupé, pointed a camera at him for a promotional shoot, and asked him to do the simplest thing a racing driver can be asked to do: drive forwards. He put it in reverse and backed into a fence. His team-mate laughed until he couldn’t talk. And then his own team posted the video.

The shoot: two personalised cars, one burnout, zero forward gears

The setup was pure sponsor choreography. Antonelli and his Mercedes team-mate George Russell had driven to the Circuit of the Americas in personalised AMG cars, and the pair were filming with the new GT 4-Door Coupé — the range-topping road car Mercedes claims makes 1,153 horsepower and hits 60 mph in two seconds. By every account of the clip, Antonelli set himself up to perform a burnout, the oldest crowd-pleaser in the book: hold the car, light the rear tyres, make some smoke for the cameras.

There was one small problem, and it was sitting on the gear selector. The car was still in reverse. When Antonelli hit the accelerator, the Coupé did exactly what it was told to do — it shot backwards and slammed into the wooden fence behind him with a loud thud. Not a tyre wall at 200 mph. Not a rival’s front wing. A fence, at parking speed, in a car park, on a promotional shoot, in front of the cameras that were there to make him look good. The most basic check in driving — the one an instructor covers in the first five minutes of a first lesson — is the one that got away from the championship leader.

“You need to put in drive! Forward!”

What saves the moment — and what makes it sing — is that nobody involved pretended it was anything other than hilarious. Russell was alongside him in his own car with a front-row seat, and he lost it completely, laughing as his team-mate sat in a moment of pure shock. Antonelli, to his credit, did not storm off, blame the car, or ask for the footage to be deleted. He found the right gear, did the planned burnout anyway, and then turned to check on the only thing he was worried about: “Is it OK? The car?”

That was when Russell, still giggling, delivered the single most helpful piece of driving instruction ever given to a Formula 1 championship leader: “You need to put in drive! Forward!” Antonelli had a chuckle at his own expense. The fence took the only real damage of the weekend. Everybody else walked away with a story.

His own team posted it: “Championship leader BTW”

Here is where a normal embarrassment ends and a Rewind begins. Most teams would have buried that clip in a shared drive and fired whoever suggested releasing it. Mercedes did the opposite. The team shared the video across its own social media accounts with a caption of three words and an abbreviation: “Championship leader BTW.” The club did not just decline to protect its star from the joke — it wrote the joke’s headline, aimed it at its own driver, and published it to the world.

The world responded the way the world does. By the time Crash.net wrote it up on Monday, the clip had already been viewed more than 54 million times and liked more than 2.2 million times. The comments wrote themselves: one fan joked that Antonelli had “put it in R for race,” another predicted the wunderkind “knows no one will forget this for the rest of his racing career.” The team’s own YouTube channel carries the moment under the same title — “Championship leader BTW” — because when the content is this good, even the marketing department knows not to overthink it. It is preserved at the top of this story, straight from the team’s official channel, so the record can speak for itself.

Context: this is not some rookie finding his feet

The reason 54 million people stopped to watch is the gap between the two versions of the same driver. The man in the fence video is not a pay driver, a celebrity guest, or a junior getting his first taste of a fast car. He is the 20-year-old Italian who leads the Formula 1 world championship — the driver every other team on the grid has been chasing all season, in the middle of a year so dominant that the title fight is now a maths problem about when, not whether, he finishes it. He needs, by WhichCar’s count, just two more points to be crowned the youngest world champion the sport has ever had.

That is the whole comedy engine. Formula 1 drivers are supposed to be the finest car controllers alive — athletes who can feel a tyre letting go at 180 mph and catch it in a tenth of a second. The fence clip is what happens when that superhuman skill set meets the one control in the car that does not care who you are. The gear selector does not know his name. It does not know the standings. It just says R, and R means backwards, for champions and learners alike.

Then he went out and won the Grand Prix anyway

And now the kicker, because Antonelli wrote it himself. Come Sunday at the Circuit of the Americas, the same driver who had backed into a fence on camera started from pole position and was, in WhichCar’s words, rarely troubled all afternoon. He beat Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc into second place and took a dominant victory — his ninth win of the season, per Crash.net — turning the most embarrassing clip of his career into a footnote by teatime.

He knew exactly what it meant, too. “We’re very close but we’ll try to finish on a high, and hopefully we can clinch it very soon,” Antonelli said after the win. “I’m very excited. I would love to clinch the title in style with a great result. That’s the mindset. That’s always the mindset, and that’s what the mindset is going to be from now until the end of the season. I’m just going to try to enjoy every moment because they’re moments that will always be remembered.” He is right about the remembering. It is just that one of the moments being remembered involves a fence.

The maths: Mexico City can crown him

The championship now travels to Mexico City next weekend with the finish line in sight and five races left in the season. Antonelli will be crowned champion there as long as he does not lose more than 23 points to Russell or more than 24 points to Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton — a ninth-place finish would be enough to wrap it up even if Russell wins the race. The youngest champion in Formula 1 history is, barring a collapse, a week away. None of which will stop anybody from showing him the fence video at the coronation. Least of all his own team, which has already posted it once.

Fair’s fair — the fence was the only casualty

So the target stays where it belongs, because this desk punches up and punches accurately. The donkey here is not a 20-year-old’s talent, which spent Sunday afternoon re-establishing itself beyond argument. It is the beautiful, self-inflicted, institutionally amplified own goal of it all: a promotional shoot designed to sell the idea that Mercedes drivers make driving look easy, producing the single most relatable driving clip of the year — and a social media team so secure in its driver’s dominance that it could caption his worst parking moment “Championship leader BTW” and be right on the facts. Antonelli laughed at himself before anyone else could. Russell laughed loudest. Mercedes laughed all the way to 54 million views. The fence, unavailable for comment, is expected to make a full recovery.

File this one in The Rewind collection, next to this morning’s entry — a man restarting a song seven times until a stadium learned it — and the midday entry, where an award spoiled its own secret three times in an afternoon. Austin’s entry needed no spoiling and no restarts: the championship leader did it in one take, backwards. Keep it with Previously’s sports coverage for the night in Mexico City when the maths runs out and the title is his.

THE VERDICT — After review: the championship leader’s toughest opponent in Austin was a gear selector — and his own team’s social account made sure 54 million people saw it.