Why Mercedes Is Testing Antonelli at Jerez with a 2020 F1 Car

Mercedes brings Antonelli to Jerez, leveraging a 2020 F1 car to navigate new restrictions on testing previous generation vehicles.

Haas F1 won’t be the only team running at the Jerez circuit this week to get their regular drivers back up to speed (read more here).

Andrea Kimi Antonelli, making his Formula 1 debut this year, will also be present, driving a Mercedes F1 car. However, despite already being accustomed to ground-effect F1 cars, he will be behind the wheel of a 2020 W11.

The choice seems somewhat puzzling; it might have been more logical to put him in a 2022 or 2023 car to ensure the effort this week aligns as closely as possible with what will be required in 2025.

But Mercedes’ decision is deliberate and stems from the new restrictions introduced this year on the use of older F1 cars. Until the end of last year, teams had almost unlimited opportunities for running sessions with older cars.

Under what is officially classified in F1’s sporting regulations as TPC (Testing of Previous Cars), there were no mileage limits for activities involving cars that were at least two years old.

This is why some young drivers—like Oscar Piastri with Alpine in 2022 and Antonelli himself last year—conducted extensive testing programs to familiarize themselves with circuits and F1 cars.

However, after discussions sparked by a test Red Bull conducted with Max Verstappen in a 2022 RB18 at Imola before last year’s Spanish Grand Prix, aimed at better understanding handling issues with its RB20, the subject of TPC running became a hot topic.

Amid threats from some teams to launch separate TPC programs for their race drivers to gain technical advantages, new rules were introduced to restrict what would be permitted.

The newly approved regulations imposed a series of restrictions, including a maximum of 20 TPC days per year for each team. Additionally, current race drivers are limited to just 1,000 kilometers of running in TPC cars.

These restrictions theoretically left the door open for Mercedes to use its TPC mileage by running Antonelli in its 2023 F1 car at Jerez.

However, since TPC mileage is highly valuable—and Mercedes is likely to utilize it for Antonelli during the season on other tracks or for additional training—it was decided not to waste this quota this week on what is essentially a re-acclimatization test.

Mercedes therefore opted to field the 2020 F1 car, using what is officially classified as Testing of Historic Cars (THC).

This is defined in the regulations as testing any car that was “designed and built to comply with the technical regulations of one of the three calendar years immediately preceding the year prior to the championship year.”

For the 2025 season, this means cars from 2021, 2022, and 2023 qualify for TPC, while 2020 falls under THC. The current cars are categorized as the 2024 and 2025 F1 cars.

Given the limited regulatory changes between 2020 and 2021, the W11 is not far removed from what Antonelli became familiar with during his initial F1 tests last year with the W12.