Toto Wolff says it took him five minutes to decide on Kimi Antonelli as Lewis Hamilton's replacement when he first learned the seven-time champion was leaving Mercedes for Ferrari last year.
It's unlikely such decisiveness allowed for an analysis of all the potential consequences of thrusting an 18-year-old in a front-running Formula 1 car, but the Mercedes boss made clear from the start that deep lows would inevitably be mixed in among the joyful highs.
One year on from Wolff's decision being made public at last year's Italian Grand Prix, and the logic of putting a teenager in such a high-pressure position is being questioned. Antonelli has scored just a single championship point from the last five rounds, and the raw pace that was evident at the start of the season seems to be harder to tap into regularly.
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Combined with the very visible mistakes Antonelli has made colliding with Max Verstappen in Austria and again with Charles Leclerc in the Netherlands, those questions are not without foundation.
But for Wolff, the messaging remains the same: Mercedes fully believes in its star of the future and is happy to weather the storm of Antonelli's rookie season.
"When we made it clear last year in Monza that we would give him the opportunity, we were also saying that we would give him a year of learning," Wolff said on Sunday after Antonelli's nightmare weekend at the Dutch Grand Prix.
"And then there would be moments where we'd tear our hair out and there would be other moments of brilliance. And I think this weekend [in Zandvoort] pretty much sums that up.
"So, up and downs, but I was absolutely expecting that from this season and every one of those days is going to be a learning for next year."
If Wolff is right, the question now is whether Antonelli can use the remaining races of 2025 to improve himself and rediscover his true potential before the tremendous challenge of 2026.
The Monza scar that took time to heal
Where Wolff admits Mercedes may have made a mistake is with the pressure it has heaped on Antonelli this year.
Rewind 12 months and the team decided to bundle the 18-year-old's Friday practice debut and his confirmation for 2025 in a hectic 24 hours. What was supposed to be the realization of a childhood dream and a celebration of Antonelli's talent quickly turned into a living nightmare -- all in front of his home fans and under the glare of the media.
As has so often been the case in his short career, Antonelli's speed was undeniable. On just his second flying lap of his first practice session in F1, he was 0.7 seconds faster than Hamilton through the first two sectors of the Monza lap, with his telemetry registering a speed 8 mph faster than the sister car through the tricky Ascari chicane.
Eyebrows started to raise among Mercedes' engineers as they tracked their young star's progress towards the final corner of the lap -- Parabolica -- knowing he was pushing the car much harder than anyone had expected.
Had Antonelli completed the lap, it would have gone nearly a second clear at the top of the timing screens and likely remained among the top-six times by the end of the session. But as Antonelli turned into Parabolica, his rear tires -- still running hot after his mesmerizing left, right, left through the Ascari chicane -- started to slide sideways and within the blink of an eye set the Mercedes into an irrevocable 130-mph slide towards the barriers.
The impact registered a force 52 times greater than gravity, meaning Antonelli was immediately taken to the medical centre for precautionary checks while his wrecked car was lifted onto a flatbed truck and taken back to the garage in pieces.
In a Netflix documentary about his rise to F1 released earlier this year, Antonelli admitted he cried in the aftermath of the accident and felt he'd let the team and his family down. Mercedes made every effort to play down the incident at the time, but there's now a belief that it left a mental scar that continued to impact Antonelli's confidence in his debut season.
"We talk about this internally, and it may be more gossip than reality, but the trip into the barrier in Monza in free practice, I think that may have just left him approaching race weekends with a degree of caution as a result," technical director James Allison said at this year's British Grand Prix.
"And actually, we have been encouraging him to trust his talent and that he can lean into that more than he thinks he can."
Although the mistake was undoubtedly Antonelli's, Wolff agrees that the way the team has handled its protégés' arrival in F1 has not always been conducive to getting the best results.
"I think we have put Kimi under maximum pressure, to be honest," Wolff said as recently as last weekend's Dutch Grand Prix. "At the time, I felt it was a great idea to have him in FP1 in Monza and present him there, but that was maybe a mistake.
"Not because he wasn't capable of driving the car, because if he would have finished that lap without crashing, it would have been sensational and it would have built the confidence.
"He's in a Mercedes, he's very visible, his results are very visible, his teammate is great and is maximizing the car. Therefore, he feels himself under the magnifying glass. The team -- we just continue to believe in him. He needs time.
"We've embarked on this route, so you can say, 'Was it right to put him under so much pressure by putting him in the team?' We've taken that trajectory; we've taken that route.
"We are fully on the mission, and single race weekends or a session like we had before is not going to change our opinion. Yeah, short term, we're going to say, 'that's not good,' but Kimi is a long-term investment."
A struggle to adapt
Even with the Monza crash at the back of his mind, the good bits outweighed the bad during the first six races of Antonelli's 2025 season. A fourth-place finish on debut in the wet showed off his remarkable car control in Australia, while a pole position for the Miami sprint race on a circuit he had never driven before offered proof of his undeniable speed.
The trajectory seemed to be tracing upwards for Antonelli as F1 headed to its European heartland, but then Mercedes introduced a new rear suspension package that derailed his progress. Despite Antonelli scoring the first podium of his career with the new suspension two races later in Canada -- a race George Russell won -- at the vast majority of circuits, it made the car twitchy and unpredictable.
While Russell's experience in previous cars helped him drive around the issues, Antonelli struggled to adapt, and it wasn't until the team reverted to the old specification in Hungary that he felt comfortable again.
"In the first six races of the season, I've had basically the same car [without major upgrades]," Antonelli explained in Zandvoort. "So the car was very consistent, and having the same car really helps you to build your confidence and understanding with its behaviour.
"I arrived in the sixth race of the season in Miami with great confidence. I was able to build up and qualify on pole to express the potential. And, yeah, it was great.
"And then we moved on to the new suspension, and that's when the struggle came. Right after Miami, I went to Imola with really high hopes but then, with the new suspension, I struggled massively.
"And I started to really struggle with my driving and having to really chase a way of driving that was not natural for me. And I think, on my side, I couldn't really adapt that well. And that's why I struggled so much.
"When I reflect, it's very clear. The first six races, I've had the same car. And then, since we went on the new suspension, I've just lost confidence more and more. Now that we're back on the car at the start of the year, that hopefully will help me to build that kind of confidence again."
A chance to see the real Antonelli
The remaining nine races of 2025 present an opportunity for Antonelli to get back up to speed before further pressure is heaped on him next year. A regulation change for next season will present Mercedes with the opportunity to return to the front of the grid in 2026, and many in the paddock think Wolff's team are the favorites to capitalize on the changes.
In such a scenario, Antonelli would be under an even brighter spotlight and mistakes like his collision with Leclerc in Zandvoort would be all the more costly. For that reason, Wolff is willing to treat the remainder of 2025 as a learning year -- something Antonelli has not had the luxury of since he left go-kart racing for formula cars in 2022.
"I think what plays a part is that it's not only the rookie season, what we forget is the decision we took was to put an 18-year-old in the car that had barely two and a half years of single-seater racing in him," Wolff said. "When you see him, he's still a boy that we've thrown into this environment.
"You just want to hug him and cuddle him because he has that talent -- the raw speed that is in him.
"You always wish that the learning curve has less humps and bumps than he has today, but it's there. It just needs to be unpeeled like an artichoke -- and at the end, there is the gold. We have no doubt about that.
"In a way, why we're taking it with a certain easiness is that we're not fighting for a world championship this year -- we're fighting for P2 and P3, and we owe it to give it the best shot for ourselves.
"But I can cope with the ups and downs easier now than if it was for a championship."
Just as he was five minutes after losing Hamilton, Wolff remains unwavering in his belief in Antonelli's ability. It's a refreshing show of support in a world where drivers are all too often cast aside during slumps in performance, but one Antonelli knows he can only ever truly repay with on-track results.