Kimi Antonelli is set to end Italy's 73-year wait for an F1 champion. Here's why it's been so long

Kimi Antonelli is on the verge of becoming Formula 1's youngest-ever champion, and the first Italian to win the title since Alberto Ascari in 1953.

For a country full of passionate racing fans , the 73-year wait for an Italian champ is puzzling.

Over decades without a title contender to cheer, Italy's legions of passionate “tifosi” fans have worn red to support Ferrari as a team, rather than individual Italian drivers.

Now the 20-year-old Antonelli, reportedly rejected by Ferrari as a child before joining Mercedes, is changing Italy's racing story.

Ahead of Antonelli almost certainly securing the title Sunday in Mexico City, here why it's taken so long for an Italian to win again.

Italy was the center of the racing world when the World Drivers’ Championship began in 1950.

Just five years after the end of World War II, the fledgling Ferrari brand was one of a clutch of teams in Italian racing red fighting for wins.

Italian Nino Farina won the first title for Alfa Romeo, and Ascari added two more for Ferrari in 1952 and 1953. The decade was dominated by Juan Manuel Fangio, F1’s first superstar driver and an Argentine of Italian heritage, who won five championships in his 40s, a feat never seen since.

Financial issues forced Alfa Romeo, Lancia and Maserati out of F1, leaving Ferrari as the sole Italian constructor by 1960 with fewer opportunities for Italian drivers.

Small British teams, mocked by founder Enzo Ferrari as “garagistas” for being run out of backyards and garages, revolutionized F1 with light and nimble designs with the engine behind the driver. By the late '60s, they were dominant.

There have been other teams based out of Italy — including Racing Bulls today — but Ferrari has remained the country's only genuine title contender.

Until the late 1970s it was rare for a season to pass without at least one Formula 1 driver being killed after crashing in races or tests.

Deaths of Italian auto racing stars — including Ascari, killed testing a Ferrari sportscar in 1955 — caused a backlash in Italy.

The influential Catholic Church newspaper L'Osservatore Romano issued a blistering condemnation of auto racing after the 1958 death of Italy's Luigi Musso, who was driving for Ferrari.

The newspaper likened auto racing to the ancient Roman god Saturn who “continues to devour his own children,” with Musso as one of the victims of a quest to make money regardless of the human cost.

“It is a matter of morality if we consider that, beyond any pretext of science and progress, there is an immediate, concrete industrial and economic interest in such appalling undertakings — an interest that turns the stopwatch into a means of advertising, even if it is linked to the statistics of the victims,” the newspaper wrote.

When a fiery crash left Ferrari's latest Italian star Lorenzo Bandini with fatal burns in 1967, it was a turning point.

“Enzo Ferrari swore after the death of Bandini that he’d never again hire an Italian driver,” American driver Mario Andretti told a conference in Italy last year.

In the 59 years since, only one Italian has driven a full F1 season for Ferrari. Michele Alboreto raced five years for the team in the mid-1980s, finishing second in the 1985 standings. That was shortly before Enzo Ferrari died aged 90 in 1988.

At the same time, the team let other title contenders pass it by, like six-time race winner Riccardo Patrese. That made it harder for Italians to make the step up to F1, faced with the choice of an uncompetitive local team or taking the risk of moving to Britain at a young age.

The most recent Italian to drive for Ferrari in F1 was Giancarlo Fisichella in 2009, standing in for the injured Felipe Massa, but he spent almost all of his career with teams based in England.

Born to an Italian family in what is now Croatia, Andretti won the title with Lotus in 1978 and drove for Ferrari before that. As an Italian American, hiring him was a loophole in Enzo Ferrari's self-imposed restrictions, Andretti has said.

Three-time champion Ayrton Senna of Brazil, widely considered a contender for F1's greatest-ever talent, had Sicilian heritage. Emerson Fittipaldi, a two-time champ in the 1970s, was another Italian Brazilian.

In the 1990s, France's Jean Alesi — born Giovanni in an Italian family — was a race winner for Ferrari. More recently, Massa from Brazil and the Australians Daniel Ricciardo and Oscar Piastri have been F1 title contenders with Italian heritage.

Nicole Winfield in Rome contributed to this report.

See AP’s full auto racing coverage here