You might not have noticed but Kimi Antonelli had a rather embarrassing prang last week. The 20-year-old rising star of F1, who will almost certainly be crowned the sport’s youngest world champion this weekend at the Mexican Grand Prix, managed to reverse his Mercedes-AMG GT Coupe into a wooden fence at a promotional event in Austin, Texas.

The Italian had failed to spot that the car was in reverse as he prepared to do some burnouts, much to team-mate George Russell’s amusement. “You need to put it in drive! Forward!” Russell advised, while the pair of them giggled. Mercedes F1 posted footage of the shunt on their social channels along with the caption: “Our championship leader BTW”.

It was a rare misstep in a season in which Antonelli has emerged as a potent force. His subsequent victory in Austin – Antonelli’s ninth in 18 races this season – was another consummate performance from a driver who is now being spoken of as a generational talent.

It also marks a stunning turnaround for a youngster who couldn’t hold back the tears following a poor qualifying performance in Spa just over a year ago, when he was enduring a tricky rookie season.

“Yeah I mean, life has changed massively,” Antonelli reflects with some understatement of his journey since then.

It is about to change even more. Antonelli needs just two points to be crowned champion on Sunday. And if anyone but Russell or Lewis Hamilton wins, he won’t need any. Even the after-effects of what his team called a “viral illness”, which saw him excused from his media duties on Thursday, should not stop him.

Italy, which has been waiting 73 years for a successor to Alberto Ascari, is ready to explode.

We are speaking in the paddock in Sepang, Malaysia. Mexico and the title denouement is still a few weeks away, but everyone knows the championship is his even if Antonelli cannot admit it yet.

The Italian bounds up enthusiastically and shakes hands. He looks impossibly young. Not for the first time I’m reminded of a line from Mercedes’ technical director, James Allison, in the Netflix documentary The Seat, about his first meeting with the team’s new young star at the factory in Brackley. “A child came up to my desk and said hello,” Allison recalls. “I thought they’d lost their dad.”

Antonelli grins. He is still riding the wave of his breakout season. Everything is still fun and fresh. Even a sponsor event the previous night at the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur – the type of do that older drivers tend to grin and bear after a few years – holds an appeal for him. “It was incredible to see the support, so much energy from fans,” he says. “Honestly, I had goosebumps.” Either he’s a good liar or he was genuinely thrilled to be there.

Antonelli is engaging company. Do not expect him to say anything edgy or controversial – he’s far too polite for that. But neither is he boring. He’s charming. He is also well aware that he is enjoying a honeymoon phase in his F1 career. That his fame is growing almost as fast as he can drive. He knows that in this era of camera phones and social media, this lifestyle could rapidly become suffocating. But he seems well prepared for what is about to hit him.

“Not really, to be fair. I really love the life I do,” he says when I ask whether he envies his school friends, who are all now at university or getting jobs, and going out at weekends. “If you would have asked me this question when I was 10, 11, I would have probably said, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll miss it’. But once you grow up and you become sure of what you want to do in life, then, you know, you’re also willing to make these sacrifices.

“The only thing that maybe I miss is probably the privacy. When going outside the house, or going to a restaurant, just knowing that you don’t have a camera pointing at you the whole time, that you can just relax. But other than that…”

Antonelli says he and his team make a conscious effort to try to keep things fun; to retain a bit of youthful innocence and playfulness. He was, after all, a teenager until a couple of months ago.

A few days before we speak he was at SplashMania, a waterpark in Malaysia, with his trainer and performance coach Sergi Ávila.

Sergi will try to organise fun things for them to do around every race, Antonelli’s press officer Rosa Herrero Venegas advises.

Antonelli also retains a youthful love of pranks, with his pit crew and particularly his race engineer Peter ‘Bono’ Bonnington favoured targets. During pre-season testing, Antonelli secretly put chilli sauce in Bono’s drink. He has also soaked Bono, Lewis Hamilton’s former engineer – who has clearly been hugely influential in developing him – with a water pistol, as well as convincing security staff at Brackley to disable Bono’s access card. His team got their own back at Monza this year, luring him to a fake interview organised by Rosa, donning protective ponchos, before ambushing him with multiple plates of whipped cream to celebrate his 20th birthday.

Antonelli ended that weekend covered in champagne, the first home winner of the Italian Grand Prix for 60 years, having scythed through the field from 19th on the grid because of an engine penalty. “My most special win,” he says. “It changed everything.” He spent that night with friends and family, playing pool and having fun until 4am or 5am. “My mum, unfortunately, had to go back home to San Marino with my sister because she had school the next morning.” The next day he took his team go-karting.

Antonelli has clearly learned as much off the track as he has on it during his brief period in the sport. How to cope in the goldfish bowl that is F1. How to have fun. How to get your team onside.

He is acutely aware of the pitfalls of fame, of burnout. It is why he makes no apology for booking private rooms in restaurants or travelling by private jet on short-haul flights. “For the long ones I go normal,” he assures me. “You know, business [class] is very nice. Very nice. But for the short ones, when I go to the team in the UK or the European races, then yeah, I go private. It’s something I pushed for this year because it’s making a big difference. Massive. I mean, I did a count of last year how many hours I spent on a plane, and it turns out I spent basically a month in a plane, like 26 days, which is mad if you think about it.”

It is why he regularly goes home to San Marino, where “everyone knows everyone”, to spend time with the friends with whom he grew up. Although even then, he is careful. “Definitely when you go out, especially in the summer, you have to think twice before you do something,” he says. “Because I always have someone pointing a camera at me. But you know, it’s part of the game. You just have to be smart with how you behave in public. Still, I’m not someone that anyway at night goes all-out crazy because it’s not really in me.” Antonelli laughs, recalling how he was the designated driver on his summer holidays in Sardinia, dropping his friends back home in his Mercedes G-Wagon. “I was the only one drinking water the whole time. Which is fine for me, you know. I’m not a drinker. I was still having a lot of fun.” James Hunt eat your heart out.

As he closes in on his first world title, about to fulfil his life’s dream at the age of just 20, I wonder where Antonelli sees himself in another 20 years. Or even 25 years. Can he imagine himself, at the age of 45, still grinding away like Fernando Alonso? Still having to book private rooms and private jets and avoiding camera phones?

“I mean, 25 years is a very long time to be fair,” he grins. “But, you know, I have a very strong passion for this. I love the sport and I love the feeling of when you win, you just want more and more of that. So, yeah, you probably will see me doing this for the next 20 years or so.” His rivals have been warned.