Under the radar: How Antonio Giovinazzi makes quiet waves at Alfa Romeo

Antonio Giovinazzi’s favorite animal is the bumblebee. You could say it’s pretty apt.

“It’s an elegant and beautiful creature, small but terribly dangerous,” he says. “It shows that appearances can be deceiving – what looks harmless has a big sting! It is also a very strong animal that works in teams. “

These are the attributes Giovinazzi has been striving for since he made his full-time Formula 1 racing debut at Alfa Romeo in 2019.

It is also these attributes that Sergio Marchionne could see in the Italian, which is why the then Ferrari boss brought him to the Ferrari Driver Academy (FDA) with the aim of one day driving one of his Prancing Horses.

READ MORE: Giovinazzi Says Alfa Romeo’s first spot of the season marks a turning point after the “bad luck” at the inaugural races

It’s fair to say that the 2016 GP2 runner-up wasn’t quite as stellar as expected. The 27-year-old made a solid but unspectacular impression in his first season. But quietly, under the radar, the insiders will tell you that Giovinazzi has played a role lately, since he got over a slow start in 2020 to reinforce himself and regularly beat his more seasoned teammate Kimi Raikkonen in the closing stages Half of the campaign.

“[The bee] shows that appearances can be deceptive – what looks harmless has a big sting! “says Giovinazzi

Even after some strong performances last season, it remained unclear whether he had done enough to earn a third year with the Swiss team, especially given the performances of FDA colleagues Mick Schumacher and Callum Ilott in F2 – the duo ended those last season first and second.

But to the surprise of many, Ferrari decided to leave Giovinazzi next to Raikkonen in the Alfa Romeo seat they control as part of their technical relationship with the Swiss team and instead put Schumacher in the role of test driver for their factory team at Haas and Ilott .

It was a bold move, but it is gradually paying off. His performance in Monaco was outstanding. You might ask, “How can you say that? He only got one point. But what he achieved this weekend is proof of his growing star – and the culmination of a work that has been in progress for almost a year.

READ MORE: 9 Things You May Not Know About Antonio Giovinazzi

He was in the top 10 materials all weekend in Monte Carlo and built a rhythm during qualifying to comfortably reach Q3 on a track that requires absolute confidence – or it will bite you. And bite hard.

Monaco GP qualification 2021: Giovinazzi celebrates Q3 success

Sources within the team tell me that they believe he had the pace to finish seventh had the session not been red flagged because of the fall of Charles Leclerc. For context, his lap in Q2 would have been good enough for eighth if he had repeated it in Q3. That’s impressive speed in a car that was 8th out of 10 for most of the season.

He didn’t go wrong in the race by making a brave and brilliant move on the outside of Esteban Ocon on the first lap at Mirabeau, on a track where, let’s face it, nobody really overtakes. His point put Alfa Romeo in a clear eighth place in the championship, and in a year when points are likely to be a bonus for them, Williams and Haas, that was a significant result.

READ MORE: Giovinazzi Says Alfa Romeo’s first spot of the season marks a turning point after the “bad luck” at the inaugural races

His Monaco result is the result of an upward trend that started last summer – when something clicked – and has accelerated since then. That season he was the better driver at Alfa Romeo – a driver who shows himself to be capable of leadership.

The Italian was an average of 0.05 seconds faster than Raikkonen in qualifying last year. After five races in this campaign, this lead has grown to an impressive 0.31 seconds. Last year he won the qualifying head to head with 9-8. This year he is already 4-1 in the lead.

Antonio Giovinazzi “satisfied with the first point of the year” at the Monaco GP

In last year’s races he scored as many points as Raikkonen – four – and ended up on average 0.85 places behind the Finn. This year he kept that average exactly, finishing five races behind Raikkonens (Raikkonen was eliminated when he stabbed Giovinazzi in Portugal).

And in our Power Ranking, which evaluates riders who take machines out of the equation, Giovinazzi’s performances this season put him seventh overall, ahead of Gasly (who narrowly beat him to the GP2 crown in 2016), Russell and Perez.

WATCH: Raikkonen and Giovinazzi scare each other on the Nürburgring’s Nordschleife

But it’s not just his performances on the track that are impressive. I’ve spoken to sources within the team and close to the Italian who say Giovinazzi has gotten more out of his shell this year and has shown his leadership skills in engineering meetings. He is more confident in his expression of opinion, which speaks not only about how comfortable he feels in the team and in Formula 1, but also about his own abilities.

Perhaps he was a little in awe of his teammate Raikkonen, whom he looked up to as he crossed the junior ranks when he first joined and was therefore a little scared as a new boy to express his opinion and make his contribution, if he took a direction for the team. And that’s understandable, the Finn is after all world champion.

Now, however, he’s showing the colors Marchionne saw in him, and that has the positive impact one would expect his team to have. It electroplates them around him. He gets along very well with Raikkonen – and together they both drive the team forward.

Giovinazzi and Raikkonen are in their third season as teammates

Raikkonen is undecided about his future, but the reality is he won’t be here much longer.

This is Giovinazzi’s chance to reward the trust Alfa Romeo and Ferrari have placed in him – and to prove that he has what it takes to lead the team forward. The drivers who have been most successful over the past few decades are those who have built teams around them – Schumacher at Ferrari, Vettel at Red Bull, Hamilton at Mercedes.

Giovinazzi may not be able to reach these heights. But there is no reason why he shouldn’t become team leader and keep himself in the ring in the years to come, maybe one day move up to Ferrari to fulfill Marchionne’s plan for him.

This is just a race, of course. But there’s a growing love for Giovinazzi within Alfa Romeo – and the statistics back up a belief that he’s just getting better.

Repeating his Monaco Top 10 result again this year won’t be easy given the pace of the car, but it did show us a glimpse of the big sting that the bee – taking pride of place on the back of his racing helmet for occupies – is famous for and could very well be something that we will become more familiar with in the future.