Kalinaukas: Why F1’s rookie drivers aren’t being given the chance to shine

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Liam Lawson and Jack Doohan woke up on New Year’s Day back in January still in a Formula One promotion dream state. Lawson was heading into the new campaign with Red Bull, the team that has won six of the past eight drivers’ and constructors’ titles. Doohan was excited to make his proper Alpine debut.

But almost immediately, those dreams became nightmares.

Concerns over Lawson’s ability to drive a Red Bull car even their four-in-a-row reigning world champion Max Verstappen detests arose within the team during pre-season testing in Bahrain.

Just eight days further into 2025, Doohan suddenly faced an uncertain future when Alpine signed Franco Colapinto as one of its many reserve drivers. Rumors swirled immediately that Colapinto wouldn’t be on the sidelines for long. That the clock was ticking on Doohan’s time in F1.

By just the third grand prix of the season, Lawson had been bundled back to Red Bull’s sister F1 team, Racing Bulls, and as F1 heads into round seven next week in Imola, Italy, Colapinto has indeed replaced Doohan as Pierre Gasly’s Alpine teammate.

Lawson and Doohan helped comprise a bumper 2025 rookie class of six newbies — over a quarter of the grid (although Lawson and Haas counterpart Ollie Bearman aren’t technically rookies by F1 rules, given they’d started more than two races before this season).

That was a complete turnaround from 2023 and 2024, when the driver lineups at each team stayed the same across an off-season for the first time in F1’s history. But the sudden (some would argue ruthless) demotions of Lawson and Doohan suggest something has changed in how F1 teams treat young drivers.

When you add in how Colapinto got his 2024 bow in the first place (replacing Logan Sargeant at Williams with nine races left), it’s a far cry from the established wisdom that newcomers need time to flourish at motorsport’s top level.

Franz Tost, who ran Racing Bulls for 18 years through its various guises before retiring in 2023, regularly stated he would want a driver in the team for a minimum of three years before rendering a final verdict.

“The first year flies by and there’s no way young drivers can keep up with the pace,” Tost wrote on Red Bull’s site in 2020. “They may not like hearing it, but in their early days, they’re just passengers in Formula 1 who can keep the cars on the road thanks to the good grounding they’ve had in karting and smaller series, but no more than that. Everything else overwhelms them.”

In the modern era, the race-start totals for such a three-year period amount to just over 70 grands prix. Doohan’s F1 career seems likely to be capped at seven — although Alpine has claimed Colapinto has been installed for an initial five-race stretch as it feels “the need to rotate our lineup”, according to team executive director Flavio Briatore. Sargeant departed Williams after 36 grands prix starts.

To understand this change, it’s important to understand how F1 got here.

Lewis Hamilton and Carlos Sainz have plenty to do with it.

First, Hamilton’s blockbuster Ferrari move to replace Sainz turbocharged the 2024-25 driver market — a year when 11 drivers were also facing contract renewal negotiations before the first race. Then Sainz missed the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix last March through illness, allowing Bearman the unexpected chance to shine as his stand-in at Ferrari that weekend.

Bearman’s seventh place on debut opened the eyes of many team managers to the benefits of promoting a youngster to a race seat for 2025. They are generally well prepared enough by simulator training these days to avoid early disasters.

Bearman translated a surprise debut into a full-time seat (Hector Vivas/Getty Images)

Most teams now also have dedicated Testing of Previous Cars (TPC) programs, which allow them to conduct limited track testing with older-generation machines under strict regulations and provide experience to new drivers. Such runs are, however, very restricted compared to the nearly 5,000 preparation miles that Hamilton completed before his 2007 debut with McLaren. In 2025, each team can only complete 621 miles of total TPC running (and they can choose to give it all to the two regular race drivers, over another four-day limit, while reserve drivers can do more mileage within a total limit of 20 days overall). 

F1 team academies are also far more widespread and successful than 20 years ago, when, really, only Red Bull was providing a fast path for young driver progression. Of the 10 F1 teams, only Haas doesn’t have a formal young driver development program. It does, however, have close ties to technical partner Ferrari. Had team principal Ayao Komatsu been in charge when the decision over the team’s 2024 driver lineup was decided the previous August, rather than Guenther Steiner still being the boss, then Bearman may well have made his full-time debut a year early. Komatsu had been wowed by Bearman’s technical feedback and attitude during a rookie practice outing in Mexico late in 2023.

These days, F1 teams prefer to rely on the data gathered in such rookie practice outings, their simulator sessions or TPC days rather than results in spec-championships such as Formula Two or Formula Three. And these (as ever in F1) combine with commercial realities. For example, Haas makes a saving this season by running Bearman compared to paying the salary commanded by the vastly experienced Kevin Magnussen, because Ferrari pays the Briton’s salary as he remains one of its juniors. Haas’ contract with Bearman will run until at least the end of 2026.

Such advantages, highlighted by Bearman’s fine Jeddah debut for Ferrari 14 months ago, convinced other teams to follow a similar route — Doohan gaining his Alpine berth from its academy and Sauber signing Gabriel Bortoleto against the backdrop of urgent financial restrictions for its fledgling Audi rebranding. Bortoleto, a former McLaren junior, does, however, possess the sort of junior resumé that used to seal such rapid promotions almost automatically, having won F3 and F2 titles in successive years prior to 2025. He is yet to score a point this year, but Sauber is again F1’s backmarker team.

While the Red Bull/Racing Bulls path is protected from the need to prioritize commercial aims — which arguably makes it just as volatile, as decisions can be made almost on whims supported by little data, such as in the case of Nyck de Vries’ short-lived promotion to AlphaTauri in the first half of the 2023 season — F1 team financial matters make rookies vulnerable even as they boost their promotion cases.

Doohan still had the chance to save his drive with strong early results, but his lack of points combined with several big accidents just when Briatore was already favoring Colapinto and his Argentine backing. The 21-year-old’s initial arrival at Alpine led to e-commerce platform Mercado Libre joining the team’s sponsor decks. The fervor for Colapinto in his homeland is already well-documented.

Colapinto will make his second in-season F1 career promotion at the upcoming Imola race (Kym Illman / Getty Images)

F1 team junior drivers don’t necessarily always come boosted by sponsor cash. The investment stems from within the squads if their wards deliver on-track results. Winning in F3 and F2 meant Ferrari and Mercedes backed Charles Leclerc and George Russell respectively to the top level late in the 2010s.

But as Sainz explained when discussing his struggles to adapt from racing Ferrari cars to Williams ones this year, the simulators, so key to rookies rising, can only do so much for any driver. He also claimed they “are not as good as some of the engineers or people tend to believe they are” compared to real-life testing.

For Lawson and Doohan, the student turnaround in fortunes rests on specifics that may not be obvious at first glance.

Demoting Lawson is of course the latest in a long line of ruthless Red Bull driver calls, but the team in fact acted as fast as it did because it realized in preseason testing its mistake in choosing him over the more experienced Yuki Tsunoda (someone who was given Tost levels of time and flourished as a result) at 2024’s end.

At Alpine, almost everything the team has done since re-hiring (for a third stint in charge of the team) the once disgraced Briatore seems to have been geared towards prioritizing commercial success over on-track progress. Be it via downsizing staff numbers or the abandonment of the team’s works DNA from 2026 by signing up to be a Mercedes customer team.

McLaren proved last season that such arrangements can bring title success in the modern era, but so far this is the exception rather than the rule — and it had a far stronger car package overall.

But these two decisions go against the grain of what new F1 drivers really need: time.

The intricacies of getting the tires alone to work best at this level can take several years to learn, especially with pre-, post-, and in-season testing so restricted. And both Lawson and Doohan had shown more than flashes of real potential — the New Zealander with his AlphaTauri points in Singapore in 2023 and the Australian out-qualifying Gasly in Miami last week. After all, Red Bull justified dropping De Vries two years ago by team advisor Helmut Marko claiming he “didn’t do one super lap that really amazed us.”

There is also a very different approach being directed towards another of the current rookie class — Kimi Antonelli at Mercedes.

The Italian does owe much of his F1 fast-tracking to his family’s close bond with Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff, but he has also delivered results immediately — amid intense pressure to do so in a frontrunning car. Similar things can be said of Isack Hadjar in the other Racing Bulls car. (Melbourne warm-up lap crash aside.)

Wolff’s joyful reaction to Antonelli’s fightback fourth place in that tricky Melbourne race — let alone his Miami sprint pole — was wrapped in a feeling of vindication for promoting the 18-year-old so fast. In doing this, Wolff was prepared to have seven-time world champion Hamilton walk out of the Mercedes fold early by handing him a contract both sides could exit after 2024 if Antonelli continued to show promise in the junior ranks. So far, that bet is paying out.

In a sport increasingly defined by immediate results — especially from its rookies — Wolff’s satisfaction with Antonelli may show what is possible when a team principal combines faith in raw talent with patience during the growing pains of an F1 education.

(Top photo: Modd Rasfan/ AFP / Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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