Why rookies are suddenly back in fashion in F1

Following several successful cameos in recent months, Formula 1 is set to reverse a trend by welcoming an influx of rookie drivers in 2025.

For the first time in history, the 2024 Formula 1 grid featured an unchanged driver line-up compared to the one that saw out the previous season, with zero newcomers lining up in Bahrain. The contrast with 2025 could hardly be much bigger, with four expected rookies – and possibly a fifth – on the grid in Melbourne amid a flurry of drivers changes.

Following the Singapore Grand Prix, Red Bull confirmed Liam Lawson would replace Daniel Ricciardo at its RB team for the remainder of the season and while no mention was made of 2025, the New Zealander will likely line up in a Red Bull-backed car next year for his first full-time campaign. He will join fellow rookies Andrea Kimi Antonelli at Mercedes, Alpine’s Jack Doohan and Oliver Bearman at Haas. There is also potential for a fifth debutant at Sauber, with incumbent Valtteri Bottas being weighed up against Williams’ surprise star Franco Colapinto and McLaren protege Gabriel Bortoleto.

There are several reasons for why 2025 could be billed as the ‘Year of the Rookie’, and naturally, coincidence is one of them. Teams are limited to the talent pool that is available and ready for the jump at the right time and a generational talent like Antonelli, that Mercedes decided to promote earlier than planned, doesn’t come around every year.

But if one aspect connects the drivers mentioned above, it is their astonishing level of preparation, dovetailing a career scaling the FIA’s junior ladder with untold hours of simulator running and private testing duties. It helped explain why McLaren’s Oscar Piastri was so quick to adapt to F1 last year, and it has also paid dividends for Bearman’s Ferrari cameo in Saudi Arabia or Colapinto’s performances aboard the Williams recently.

“I think it is a testament to all of the academies,’ Jock Clear, who heads Ferrari’s Driver Academy and coaches Charles Leclerc, told the F1 Nation podcast. “How on earth is it possible that Bearman can get in a car that he virtually hasn’t driven and qualify P11 and race to P7 in his very first event, having never tested that car? I think the simulators now are very good, and that is a natural progression of the technology.

“As soon as you say to an F1 team: ‘You can no longer go testing’, then F1 teams will be quite aggressively developing some other way to do exactly the same…