The litmus test for Lindblad after his rapid rise to F1

Arvid Lindblad’s ascent to Formula 1 has seemed almost inevitable, even before former Red Bull team principal Christian Horner mentioned him in dispatches during that fraught period in late 2024 when Sergio Perez’s future hung in the balance. His rise up the career ladder has been electrifyingly quick: this year will be only his fourth full season of single-seater racing. Over the past quarter-century, just a handful of other drivers have reached the top tier with this kind of rapidity: think Kimi Raikkonen, Jenson Button, Sebastian Vettel, Max Verstappen.

Lindblad was born just a couple of months after Vettel became the youngest-ever driver to score a point in F1, when he stood in for the injured Robert Kubica at the 2007 US Grand Prix at Indianapolis, aged just 19. Red Bull pounced and Vettel duly became a full-time F1 driver at the Hungarian GP that August with Toro Rosso, forerunner of the Racing Bulls squad in which Lindblad is making his debut.

Arvid grew up in leafy Surrey and went to school in Guildford, the son of a Swedish father and a mother of Indian heritage. His father had done some motocross in his youth, but four-wheeled sport became Lindblad Jr’s metier after some early arrive-and-drive experiences at nearby Sandown Park, the kart track that nestles incongruously within the horse racing course. He proved quick enough to catch the eye of professionals and soon joined the Zip team founded by the late Martin Hines, mentor to the likes of David Coulthard and Lewis Hamilton. One of his coaches was Oliver Rowland, then an up-and-coming GP2 racer, now a Formula E champion.

Lindblad won the 2018 National Cadet title with Rowland’s team and the connection persists to this day, since Rowland is involved in his management and continues to act as a mentor. In early 2021, aged just 13, Lindblad was tapped up by Dr Helmut Marko to join Red Bull’s driver-development programme, and in successive years he was fast-tracked from karting to Italian Formula 4, then F3, then F2, winning Formula Regional Oceania and the Macau F4 event along the way.

Despite a strong start to his Italian F4 season with the crack Prema squad in 2023, his first full season in single-seaters, Lindblad didn’t win the title, losing ground late on to rivals Kacper Sztuka and Ugo Ugochukwu (then a McLaren protege). Nevertheless, Lindblad did enough to impress the notoriously demanding Marko, and his Macau win at the end of the season did much to rebuild his confidence.

Insiders cite Lindblad’s ability to weather adversity, despite his relative youth, as one of his defining characteristics; they also suggest that the late-season slump in Italian F4 wasn’t entirely of his own making. Sztuka was also picked up by the Red Bull Junior Team and elevated to F3 but then dropped just months later. Ugochukwu made the move to F3 for 2025 but was let go by McLaren after finishing 16th.

Lindblad celebrates karting success alongside mentor Rowland

Photo by: Chris Walker

Lindblad, meanwhile, continued to enjoy Dr Marko’s confidence – and others’, too. In 2023 he was one of the Aston Martin Autosport BRDC Award finalists with Joseph Loake, Taylor Barnard and Callum Voisin, narrowly losing out to Loake. A year later, having finished fourth in his rookie F3 season, Lindblad became one of the few drivers to be shortlisted again for what was now known as the Silverstone Autosport BRDC Award. It was agonisingly close but, after much debate on the judging panel, British F4 champion Deagen Fairclough got the nod based on his performance over the assessment days, in which the candidates tested a wide variety of machinery.

By that point, though, Lindblad’s momentum was carrying him to F2 anyway and his name was entering the mix as an F1 candidate as Red Bull considered its options. At this time – late 2024 – the civil war raging between Horner and Marko was reaching a peak, and Verstappen had clinched the F1 title seemingly against the run of form since Red Bull’s car had become peaky and difficult to drive. Perez was about to become the fall guy for that, and the team needed a replacement urgently, but its young driver pipeline was stuttering: having terminated Juri Vips in mid-2022, it had even briefly evaluated the possibility of bringing Daniel Ricciardo back into the fold, until it became apparent that he was a member of that constituency of driver who struggled to wring a decent lap time from the ground-effect cars.

The timing therefore worked out well for Lindblad since he was too young at that point to be brought on, and it was the hapless Liam Lawson and then Yuki Tsunoda who slotted into the spot vacated by Perez, acting almost as human sacrifices to demonstrate that the car was the problem rather than Red Bull’s second drivers. Still, mid-way through Lindblad’s F2 year, Red Bull negotiated an exemption from the FIA to grant him a superlicence before the age of 18, as Mercedes had done with Kimi Antonelli the previous year.

"I’m enjoying being on the grid, but at the same time, obviously, I’m also very focused on the performance and stuff, because enjoying being here is not going to help me go faster" Arvid Lindblad

Lindblad claimed one pole position and three wins during his rookie F2 season with Campos Racing, finishing sixth. You might think this would warrant another season in the support category rather than immediate promotion to F1, but F2 has rather lost its lustre as a measure of driving ability since the latest generation of cars was introduced. After all, Antonelli’s performances in his first year of F1, having also finished sixth in his single F2 season, suggest he didn’t suffer through being fast-tracked.

In any case, Tsunoda was reaching the end of the road so far as his tenure with Red Bull as a race driver was concerned and Marko had decided that Isack Hadjar was worthy of promotion from Racing Bulls to the senior team, so there was a vacancy that had to be filled. Lindblad was the natural candidate. It’s understood that these moves were signed off by Marko without approval from above, hence he is now a gentleman of leisure.

Had the ground-effect ruleset still been in place, Lindblad might have faced an almost insurmountable challenge in 2026, the sole rookie in a mature technical formula in which the cars had become difficult, uncomfortable and uncompromising to drive. But this unloved format has now been consigned to the bin in favour of a new one that brings unique challenges. Now all the drivers are in the same proverbial boat, having to learn the discipline of energy management as the chief arbiter of race pace, as well as the handling characteristics of looser, lighter cars whose behaviour is more akin to those in F2. Little wonder that he hasn’t chosen to join the ranks of those who have been moaning about the new ruleset.

A first public F1 outing came at last year's British GP as he took on an FP1 drive for Red Bull

Photo by: Erik Junius

“If I’m being honest, it’s not really something I think about,” he said at the Bahrain test, “because it’s something I can’t control. It is the way it is. I’m just very focused on working hard with the team to try to understand the package, understand the power unit and get the most out of it. It’s an exciting new challenge. I think for all of us the change is very different…There’s a lot I still want to experiment with. And just try to build up that knowledge pool in my head to start the season.

“In all sports, sometimes when you get so caught up in the moment, sometimes you forget to enjoy. But for me, I wouldn’t really say that’s been the case so far, at least so far this year, just because I’ve worked my whole life to get to Formula 1, and the fact that that’s coming true is obviously something I’m very proud of.

“I’m enjoying being on the grid, but at the same time, obviously, I’m also very focused on the performance and stuff, because enjoying being here is not going to help me go faster…”

Long-term questions remain about the organisation of the Red Bull Junior Team now that Dr Marko, who ran it like his personal fiefdom, has been ushered into retirement. It’s likely to be managed along slightly less harder-edged lines, less brutally up-or-out. The likes of Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies think along pragmatic, engineering lines, and are perhaps more inclined to throw an arm around the shoulder of a struggling driver rather than cast them overboard.

But at the same time, F1 isn’t a soft play area. You deliver or at some point your employers decide the options are exhausted and it’s time for the next candidate. Don’t forget that Racing Bulls team principal Alan Permane has worked with Michael Schumacher, Fernando Alonso and Raikkonen, and knows the difference between a great driver and one who is merely good. He’s also the guy who overrode Raikkonen’s engineer to scream “get out of the f****** way” in the Kimster’s ear when he was holding up his team-mate and putting a podium finish in jeopardy during the 2013 Indian GP.

This season Lindblad will partner Lawson, who has already had his turn in the senior team and been found wanting. There are extenuating circumstances for sure, but no other Red Bull junior has been invited back to the top table after being demoted.

For those reasons, then, should Hadjar fall short of expectations – or indeed Verstappen decide that energy-management racing isn’t for him, and GT3 is much more fun – then Lindblad is going to be the next cab off the rank. No pressure, Arvid…

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Lindblad has enjoyed a meteoric rise to F1, but now he must prove he belongs there

Photo by: Alastair Staley / LAT Images via Getty Images