A 20-Year-Old Champion, and Italy's Motor Valley Takes Note

CBS News reported this week that Italy is revelling in Kimi Antonelli, the 20-year-old who has become Formula One's new champion. The network's account treats him as a national hero as much as a driver, and its headline speaks of supremacy.

The claim on Italian attention is easy to place in Emilia-Romagna. The corridor between Bologna and Modena — the Motor Valley — holds Ferrari's works at Maranello, Lamborghini at Sant'Agata Bolognese and Ducati at Borgo Panigale, and the region's mechanical engineering base runs well past those names into component makers, foundries and machine builders.

The CBS item is short. It does not say where Antonelli is from, which team he drives for, or where the title was settled. What it does record is the framing: a champion of twenty, and a country that treats the result as its own.