Karun Chandhok: Max and Lewis have raised the bar for F1 rookies: this year’s intake face a brutal reality

The 2024 season started with the exact same driver line-up as we ended 2023 and frankly that was a bit dull. Fortunately Lewis Hamilton spectacularly kicked off the silly season last year and I love the fact that we not only have 80% of the teams with a new line-up for 2025 but also almost one-third of the drivers will be full-season rookies. Of course, Liam Lawson, Oliver Bearman and Jack Doohan have done some races but being dropped into a seat in the middle of the season is different to having a full winter and pre-season to prepare for the year ahead.

In Formula 2, the drivers are able to fly under the radar but there’s nowhere to hide in Formula 1. Every sector of every lap will be analysed and judged by people like us in the commentary boxes as well as millions at home. Drivers such as Hamilton and Max Verstappen, as well as more recently Charles Leclerc and Oscar Piastri, have raised the bar in terms of expectations for a rookie. There’s really not much grace period afforded to drivers any more and I guess nor should there be – as my friend Mark Webber always says, F1 isn’t a finishing school. You’re there because you’re ready to fight with the best albeit with some slack to gain experience.

“Isack Hadjar had some spectacular rants on the radio last year”

Lawson’s graduation to the top Red Bull seat has been the most recent talking point but Kimi Antonelli is the one coming into F1 with the biggest amount of hype. Last year, I wrote that I felt Mercedes should have signed Carlos Sainz while farming Antonelli out to Williams for two seasons, allowing him to gain experience without the pressure of a top seat.

There’s no doubting Antonelli’s underlying talent. Pretty much everyone who has worked with him or watched him up close in the junior categories will tell you that he’s something special but that doesn’t mean that he’s guaranteed to succeed straight away. There’s no shortcut for experience – Red Bull placed Max at Toro Rosso for 18 months, McLaren forced Hamilton to do several seasons in the junior categories and Leclerc spent a year at Sauber before getting into the red car.

Mercedes has opted to have him straight into the high-pressure environment of a top seat while preparing him with an intense test programme using a two-year-old car. The testing will be invaluable but the problem with private testing is that it’s hard to have a true gauge of performance without any other cars there for reference. The pressure of a grand prix weekend is completely different to testing on your own and I’m fascinated to see how Antonelli goes. I love seeing young rookies do well so I genuinely hope that I’m proved wrong.

Lawson is the latest driver to pick up the poisoned chalice of being Verstappen’s team-mate. Again, I would have expected Sainz or even Red Bull-affiliated Alex Albon to have been ahead of Lawson in the queue for the seat but Red Bull seemed pretty clear that neither of them were ever an option in their minds, for some reason. Lawson is a very fast driver who showed last year that he’s not afraid to get his elbows out in battle. He’s got that extra fire in his belly that any young athlete who has sacrificed their home life to live halfway around the world will have. That mental toughness will face a test like never before.

In his cameos last year for Ferrari and Haas, Bearman made a strong impression on the paddock. Like Lawson, Bearman will now have the benefit of a full winter of preparation as opposed to being dropped into a seat midway through a season. Winter testing, despite only being a day and a half for each driver, is a chance to try things out and understand how to use the tools available in the cockpit without the same time pressures of a race weekend.

Alongside the incoming Esteban Ocon, Haas has got a new line-up but one which has potential. Team principal Ayao Komatsu is good at working with drivers to try and get the best from them and that mentality will permeate throughout the team.

At Alpine judging by the rumour mill, Doohan seems to be under pressure for his seat even before the season has started! By signing Franco Colapinto and hailing him as a future star, Flavio Briatore has sent a clear message to Doohan that he’s got a small window of opportunity to prove he deserves his seat for the season while keeping one eye over his shoulder at the Argentine driver lurking in the garage. F1 can really be the most brutal of sports sometimes.

For the long-term credibility of the junior formula ladder, it’s great that the top two drivers from the F2 championship, Gabriel Bortoleto and Isack Hadjar, are graduating to F1. They’re clearly very talented and deserve their places. Going alongside established drivers in Nico Hülkenberg and Yuki Tsunoda will be helpful as a way to benchmark them for the future. Hadjar had some spectacular rants on the radio last year, much like Tsunoda in his early F1 years, so the combination of the two of them could be fun to watch and listen to.