There shall be as many as six rookies taking to the monitor on Friday within the FP1 session that may open the Bahrain Grand Prix weekend. For Dino Beganovic, a driver from the Ferrari Driver Academy, it will likely be his absolute debut in a race weekend on the wheel of a Formulation 1 automotive, and he’ll achieve this in Charles Leclerc’s automotive. As for the others, the names are already identified: Ayumu Iwasa (Crimson Bull), Frederik Vesti (Mercedes), Felipe Drugovich (Aston Martin), Ryo Hirakawa (Haas), and Luke Browning (Williams).
Beginning this season, the FIA has elevated from two to 4 the variety of Friday morning classes that every crew should allocate to a ‘rookie’, that means a younger driver who has by no means raced in Formulation 1. There may be an exception for individuals who have taken half in a most of two Grands Prix, however for probably the most half, these are drivers nonetheless competing within the feeder collection and a part of junior applications of the varied groups.
The doubling of the classes devoted to rookies has compelled groups to plan properly upfront which weekends they should ask one in every of their two common drivers to tackle the function of spectator. And regardless of the calendar that includes as many as 24 rounds, the variety of weekends appropriate for placing a rookie on monitor is just not really that prime.
The primary weekends to be dominated out are clearly the six with the dash format, as they embrace just one free follow session. Then come the primary two GPs of the season, weekends throughout which the common drivers are nonetheless on the lookout for the very best feeling with the brand new vehicles.
Then it’s the flip of the road circuits. It’s very uncommon for a crew to take an everyday driver out of a free follow session the place feeling with the monitor is essential for efficiency. On weekends like Jeddah, Miami, Monaco, Montreal, Baku, Singapore, and Las Vegas, complaints wouldn’t be missing if a crew requested one in every of its common drivers to surrender a free follow session. That leaves 9 weekends, however a crew tends to exclude these weekends the place new improve packages are scheduled to debut or when there are technical novelties on the whole.
It’s no shock, then, that there are six rookies in Bahrain. The Sakhir monitor hosted pre-season testing and, though the vehicles have been doing their first kilometres, all common drivers had the prospect to place in lots of laps. The setup work required throughout the race weekend shall be much less intensive than normal (groups have already got lots of knowledge out there), and even these bringing technical upgrades to the monitor could have extra time than normal to judge them.
With the Bahrain weekend, all groups could have carried out a minimum of one rookie check apart from McLaren, which is suspending its rookie outings to the European season. Mercedes, Racing Bulls, and Sauber have already accomplished two rookie classes by exploiting a loophole within the sporting rules that may seemingly be corrected for subsequent season. Within the Melbourne and Shanghai weekends, Antonelli, Hadjar, and Bortoleto have been, in all respects, rookies, not having but competed in two Grands Prix, so their respective groups declared the FP1 classes as rookie exams.
Curiously, Alpine didn’t do the identical, regardless that in Melbourne it may have recorded Jack Doohan’s FP1 session as a rookie check (Jack has solely raced in a single Grand Prix in 2024), most likely to go away room for the massive group of drivers underneath contract with the crew.
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