Six of 20 Formula One drivers this year are rookies. It’s a whole new reality.
Summary
These F1 newbies are young and unfamiliar with the limelight. Their lives have been upended.
To become a Formula One driver is to gain membership in one of the most exclusive clubs in the world.
At any given time there are only 20 people who can truthfully say that it’s their job to race F1 cars. So when a newbie or two arrive on the scene, it never goes unnoticed. And this year, there are six—more than a quarter of the drivers who will line up for each race.
“Everyone in the world wants a seat," says Jack Doohan, a driver for the Alpine F1 team. Doohan is one of the lucky few who got one this year, during a wild offseason of F1 musical chairs. Team bosses selected the newcomers from the most promising stars of the lower racing categories and from the talent marinating in each team’s driver-development programs.
Doohan, age 22, is joined by fellow rookies Kimi Antonelli, Ollie Bearman, Gabriel Bortoleto, Isack Hadjar and Liam Lawson. These six have an average age of 20. The 18-year-old Antonelli earned his license to drive on the road mere weeks before he made his F1 debut, for the Mercedes team.
To come this far, each of them began by racing go-karts around the time they were learning to count. Yet no amount of racing could prepare them for the circus that is Formula One.
Adapt or go away
Up to this point, the rookies had mostly toiled in obscurity. Now, they’ve been thrust into a world of multimillion-dollar stakes, constant scrutiny and even reality TV as the newest cast members of Netflix’s “Drive to Survive." They not only need to know how to handle a car at 200 miles an hour—they are also expected to uphold the sport’s glamorous image, which includes speaking several languages, looking the part in photo shoots and being fluent in social media.
“Life has certainly changed," Bearman says.
How long they stick around depends on how quickly they can adapt to the grind at the pinnacle of motor racing and to cars that they’ve barely driven. Preseason test-driving is limited to a handful of days, which means that most of the rookies came to the season’s first race in March having spent at least twice as many hours inside simulators as they had in the cars they’d be driving.
Through the first five races, Antonelli has delivered the best showing of the rookie class, finishing in the top six four times. That’s no small feat considering the pressure he is under as the driver picked by Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff to take over the seat vacated by Lewis Hamilton when he left.
Wolff made the choice to bet his team’s long-term future on a teenager with great confidence—and great expectations. “I made up my mind five minutes after Lewis Hamilton told me that he’s going to Ferrari," Wolff says.
Defeat and demotion
At the other end of the spectrum, no one has had a rougher time of it so far this season than Liam Lawson, the 23-year-old New Zealander who was dropped into Red Bull Racing’s second seat to join with four-time world champion Max Verstappen. His tenure with the team lasted all of two races.
Lawson crashed out of the season opener in Australia and then finished 16th in China, more than a minute behind the leaders. At that point, the Red Bull brass decided he wasn’t good enough. The team demoted him to its secondary F1 outfit, known as Racing Bulls, where he can continue to gain experience in a less-prominent position.
Many F1 observers viewed the switch as a stunning lack of patience with a driver who had graduated from Red Bull’s own junior programs. But Red Bull Racing principal Christian Horner knew that with tens of millions of dollars at stake in the season’s team standings, there was no time to lose.
“It has been difficult to see Liam struggle" in the first two races, Horner says. “This is a purely sporting decision."
Joshua Robinson is a Wall Street Journal editor in New York. Email him at joshua.robinson@wsj.com.
