There will probably be as many as six rookies taking to the monitor on Friday within the FP1 session that can open the Bahrain Grand Prix weekend. For Dino Beganovic, a driver from the Ferrari Driver Academy, it is going to be his absolute debut in a race weekend on the wheel of a Components 1 automobile, and he’ll achieve this in Charles Leclerc’s automobile. As for the others, the names are already identified: Ayumu Iwasa (Pink 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’, which means a younger driver who has by no means raced in Components 1. There’s an exception for many 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 sequence and a part of junior applications of the assorted groups.
The doubling of the classes devoted to rookies has compelled groups to plan effectively upfront which weekends they should ask one among 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 will not be truly that prime.
The primary weekends to be dominated out are clearly the six with the dash format, as they embody just one free observe session. Then come the primary two GPs of the season, weekends throughout which the common drivers are nonetheless searching for the perfect feeling with the brand new automobiles.
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 observe 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 among its common drivers to surrender a free observe 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 normally.
It’s no shock, then, that there are six rookies in Bahrain. The Sakhir monitor hosted pre-season testing and, though the automobiles had been doing their first kilometres, all common drivers had the possibility to place in lots of laps. The setup work required in the course of the race weekend will probably be much less intensive than traditional (groups have already got plenty of information accessible), and even these bringing technical upgrades to the monitor can have extra time than traditional to guage them.
With the Bahrain weekend, all groups can have carried out not less than one rookie take a look at aside 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 can seemingly be corrected for subsequent season. Within the Melbourne and Shanghai weekends, Antonelli, Hadjar, and Bortoleto had been, in all respects, rookies, not having but competed in two Grands Prix, so their respective groups declared the FP1 classes as rookie assessments.
Curiously, Alpine didn’t do the identical, regardless that in Melbourne it might have recorded Jack Doohan’s FP1 session as a rookie take a look at (Jack has solely raced in a single Grand Prix in 2024), in all probability to go away room for the massive group of drivers beneath contract with the crew.
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