There will be as many as six rookies taking to the track on Friday in the FP1 session that will open the Bahrain Grand Prix weekend. For Dino Beganovic, a driver from the Ferrari Driver Academy, it will be his absolute debut in a race weekend at the wheel of a Formula 1 car, and he will do so in Charles Leclerc’s car. As for the others, the names are already known: Ayumu Iwasa (Red Bull), Frederik Vesti (Mercedes), Felipe Drugovich (Aston Martin), Ryo Hirakawa (Haas), and Luke Browning (Williams).
Starting this season, the FIA has increased from two to four the number of Friday morning sessions that each team must allocate to a ‘rookie’, meaning a young driver who has never raced in Formula 1. There is an exception for those who have taken part in a maximum of two Grands Prix, but for the most part, these are drivers still competing in the feeder series and part of junior programs of the various teams.
The doubling of the sessions dedicated to rookies has forced teams to plan well in advance which weekends they will have to ask one of their two regular drivers to take on the role of spectator. And despite the calendar featuring as many as 24 rounds, the number of weekends suitable for putting a rookie on track is not actually that high.
The first weekends to be ruled out are obviously the six with the sprint format, as they include only one free practice session. Then come the first two GPs of the season, weekends during which the regular drivers are still looking for the best feeling with the new cars.
Then it’s the turn of the street circuits. It’s very rare for a team to take a regular driver out of a free practice session where feeling with the track is crucial for performance. On weekends like Jeddah, Miami, Monaco, Montreal, Baku, Singapore, and Las Vegas, complaints would not be lacking if a team asked one of its regular drivers to give up a free practice session. That leaves nine weekends, but a team tends to exclude those weekends where new upgrade packages are scheduled to debut or when there are technical novelties in general.
It’s no surprise, then, that there are six rookies in Bahrain. The Sakhir track hosted pre-season testing and, although the cars were doing their first kilometres, all regular drivers had the chance to put in many laps. The setup work required during the race weekend will be less extensive than usual (teams already have a lot of data available), and even those bringing technical upgrades to the track will have more time than usual to evaluate them.
With the Bahrain weekend, all teams will have carried out at least one rookie test except for McLaren, which is postponing its rookie outings to the European season. Mercedes, Racing Bulls, and Sauber have already completed two rookie sessions by exploiting a loophole in the sporting regulations that will likely be corrected for next season. In the Melbourne and Shanghai weekends, Antonelli, Hadjar, and Bortoleto were, in all respects, rookies, not having yet competed in two Grands Prix, so their respective teams declared the FP1 sessions as rookie tests.
Curiously, Alpine did not do the same, even though in Melbourne it could have recorded Jack Doohan’s FP1 session as a rookie test (Jack has only raced in one Grand Prix in 2024), probably to leave room for the large group of drivers under contract with the team.
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