Every Country Has A Kimi.

On Sunday, in Mexico City, a twenty-year-old from Bologna finished third in a race he did not need to win, and became the youngest world champion in the seventy-seven-year history of Formula 1. Twenty years and sixty-eight days. He took the record from Sebastian Vettel by more than three years, with four rounds still to run, in only his second season. And he gave Italy — the country that gave this sport Ferrari, Monza and Imola — its first champion since Alberto Ascari in 1953. Seventy-three years.

I wrote in July that my son and I don't watch Formula 1, and that in F1 they rarely race. I'll stand by both. Sunday still mattered, and not for the racing. It mattered for what it said about who gets to stand on that podium at all.

Think about what seventy-three years means. Italy is not a country that lacks racing. It has the most famous team in the sport, the fastest circuit on the calendar, and more racing in its blood than any country I can name. If that country had to wait seventy-three years for a champion, what are the odds for everyone else?

Here are the odds. In seventy-seven seasons, drivers from fifteen countries have won the title. Fifteen. The FIA has member organizations in 149 countries. This year's grid holds twenty-two seats, and the drivers who have filled them carry sixteen flags between them. Most of the planet has never had a name to root for — not a champion, not a race winner, not a seat.

It is worth being precise about how Kimi Antonelli got there, because the path is the point. He started driving at five, on a kart track in Forlì. His father raced sports cars and has run a race team since 1993. Mercedes signed him to its junior program at twelve. At sixteen he won two Formula 4 championships in one year; at seventeen, Formula Regional. He skipped Formula 3 entirely, did a single season of Formula 2, and was handed Lewis Hamilton's seat at eighteen. His first win came in March, in Shanghai, the second round of this season. Then he won the next four.

None of that diminishes him. He is, by every account, the real thing — and when he climbed out on Sunday the first words out of his mouth were "we did it." We. And then: "without them, I wouldn't be here — without Mercedes, without my family." He is right, and that is the uncomfortable part. A father in the sport. A works team that picked him before he was a teenager. A country where the karting never stops. Multiply the talent by all of that and you get a champion at twenty. Take any one of them away and you get a kid with the same hands who never gets past the first rung.

That kid exists in every country. I would bet on it. The hands are evenly distributed. The seats are not.

We have written on this site about what happens to a country when one of its own reaches the top of a sport. The Netherlands, seventeen million people, put twelve million of them in front of Formula 1 for one man. Australia's audience jumped by half in a single season for another. When Robert Kubica came back to the grid in 2019, Poland's Formula 1 audience grew more than sixfold in a year, to 8.4 million. Italy will find out this winter what a twenty-year-old from Bologna does to a Sunday afternoon in Milan.

It works in reverse too, and nobody measures it. The countries whose kids never see their flag on a podium don't watch, don't build tracks, don't fund programs, and don't produce the next one. Seventy-three years is a long time to go without a reason.

Eighty-two nations sent drivers to the FIA Motorsport Games in 2024 — Angola, Botswana, El Salvador, Lebanon, Namibia and the Philippines among them, for the first time. Eighty-two nations with licensed drivers. Fifteen with a champion. Twenty-two seats, and not one of them belongs to a country.

That last line is the reason this championship's Sunday grid is built the way it is. GT3 is the apex: the teams, by invitation. GT4 is the Nations Grid, and every entry on it belongs to a country. One entry per country, sixteen nations a round, held under license by a national body — or, until one steps forward, by a national ambassador: a person or company of that nationality who carries the flag one season at a time. Nothing is ever paid for a flag.

Crews of two or three share it. A driver qualifies for a flag by passport, or through a parent or grandparent born in the country — so a kid raised in Atlanta with a grandmother from Lagos carries Nigeria — and the flag scores only when one of its own is in the car. A new entry may run named development drivers in its first two seasons, which is the plain-language way of saying a country can put its best teenager in the car while it finds its feet. Every driver's points count for the country on the Nations Trophy, and at the end of the season the winning country's program takes home the $500,000 Nations Champion's Fund, to come back the next year.

And on the Friday night of the weekend there is a Nations Dinner, because the flags are supposed to sit at the same table before they race.

We chose GT4 because it is the fastest car a whole country can actually afford to show up in. Formula 1 has twenty-two seats, and the price of one is a childhood most families cannot buy. A GT4 is a production-based race car that a national body can run on a national budget — and it races on the same Sunday, on the same track, in the same six hours as the GT3 teams.

If you were watching on Sunday from a country that has never had a name on that podium, this part is for you.

You do not need Formula 1 to need you. You need a flag with a seat, and a seat you can reach. Find your national body and ask whether your country has requested its entry. If it hasn't, find the ambassador — the person or company of your nationality who would carry the flag until the federation steps in — or be the reason one does. Then get into whatever you can race this year and keep it clean, because on this grid clean driving is counted, and it is noticed.

Kimi Antonelli waited fifteen years for Sunday. Italy waited seventy-three. The first green flag of this championship flies in 2027, with a place on the grid for sixteen flags, one per country, and the founding grid is forming now. One of them should be yours.

— Peter Saddington, Founder