The rookies looking to make their mark on F1 in 2023

Three young men – one perhaps not quite so young – get to realise their dream of competing in Formula 1 this year. Hype is enveloping them already, each for different but compelling reasons.

One carries F1’s hopes of consolidating its US growth, another is a late starter who’s already proved his worth at the top level, while another is so highly rated that there was an ugly fight over his services. Question is, can they all live up to that hype?

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Oscar Piastri

Piastri replaces countryman Daniel Ricciardo at McLaren for 2023

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

Not since Charles Leclerc blew into the F1 paddock in 2018, fresh from a winning streak in the feeder formulas, has a rookie driver generated quite such a collective fever. Even team bosses have been losing their heads in giddy excitement over Oscar Piastri’s immense talent, to the extent that McLaren and Alpine went to the Contract Recognition Board last year in a well-publicised tussle to secure him.

With typical understatement, the Melbourne native describes this rancorous period as “the drama”. Piastri had been part of Alpine’s driver-development programme but overachieved, winning the F2 championship in 2021, a season earlier than the Anglo-French operation had anticipated. There was no seat for him last season and, when Alpine’s bosses tried to arrive at a contractual fudge for this year, aiming to park him at Williams while tying in Fernando Alonso for one more season, the result was a meltdown.

"Oscar is a man of few words but the right words. That’s become very apparent. He’s focused and also demanding" Andrea Stella

Behind the scenes, Piastri and his manager, ex-Red Bull driver Mark Webber, had been fulminating about the lack of movement on the contract front and had quietly done a deal with McLaren. To be parked as a ‘reserve driver’ for a season was difficult enough for a young man bursting with career momentum, to be consigned to the back of the grid was unthinkable.

The move to McLaren was lubricated by the fact that Alpine had failed to proceed beyond ‘heads of terms’. It’s difficult to know which is the least edifying element of this saga for Alpine – failing to properly take care of such pressing business in the first place, or the salvo of sloping desks as sundry denizens of the C-suite tried to evade taking responsibility for the gaffe.

The centre of a contract wrangle between Alpine and McLaren, Piastri is keen to put "the drama" behind him

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

McLaren’s approach to getting Piastri ready for F1 seems to have been more methodical so far. Testing restrictions have limited him to just one proper outing in a contemporary car, in the post-season Abu Dhabi young driver test. But he has driven McLaren’s 2021 car at Paul Ricard and Barcelona to enable him to familiarise himself with the controls and get accustomed to cornering speeds.

PLUS: Why Piastri being "almost constantly a little unhappy" pre-F1 debut pleases McLaren

“Obviously there’ll be a bit of rust having not raced for a year,” he says. “Putting a number on how many races it will take [to shake off the rust] is a hard task. In Bahrain, I’ll have a good idea of where I’m at.”

While he is keen to maintain that he’s under no pressure to deliver immediate results, expectations for Piastri remain high. And with good reason. Like his manager, he is a steely competitor under that outward layer of laid-back bonhomie.

“Oscar is a man of few words but the right words,” says team boss Andrea Stella. “That’s become very apparent. He’s focused and also demanding.”

Nyck de Vries

A Formula 2 and Formula E champion, de Vries finally gets his full-time break in F1 with AlphaTauri

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Hendrik Johannes Nicasius de Vries – thankfully Nyck for short – arrives in a full-time F1 seat fashionably late at the age of 28. A racing contemporary of the likes of Daniil Kvyat, Pierre Gasly, Alex Albon and Carlos Sainz on the junior single-seater ladder, this one-time McLaren protege has proved to be a slow-burn talent.

By his own admission, he struggled to properly get to grips with the transition from karting to single-seaters owing to his diminutive frame; he then put too much pressure on himself to overcome the physical challenges. So, while his trophy cabinet includes Formula Renault 2.0, F2 and Formula E championships, he took rather too long (three seasons in F2 alone) getting there to generate much buzz about his prospects of making an impression in F1. McLaren released him at the end of 2018, which was rather unfortunate timing since he won the F2 championship the following year.

It was Albon’s indisposition at the Italian GP last year that facilitated de Vries’s big break. For once in his career, timing was on his side

Even this didn’t open any doors, leading de Vries to move sideways into Formula E, and the beginning of a relationship with Mercedes that ultimately enabled him to fulfil the F1 dream on which he’d almost given up. Having impressed Merc during the 2020 Abu Dhabi young driver test, he was granted a simulator gig and further FP1 outings at grand prix weekends with Mercedes and Aston Martin. The wider F1 world remained unconvinced, though, and he lost out to Albon in the race to replace George Russell at Williams last season.

De Vries has already impressed AlphaTauri with his feedback and work ethic

Photo by: AlphaTauri

It was Albon’s indisposition at the Italian GP last year that facilitated de Vries’s big break: famously, he had completed his Aston Martin F1 duties and was enjoying coffee ahead of an engagement with Merc VIPs when he got the call-up to race. For once in his career, timing was on his side.

PLUS: How F1's new determined Dutchman got his long-awaited break

Monza was a rarity among F1 circuits, one very much in the wheelhouse of the low-downforce FW44. De Vries skilfully piloted it to ninth place in his maiden F1 race outing and parlayed that into a full-time drive for AlphaTauri this season. Mercedes might have done the right thing in abiding by an agreement to let him go if it couldn’t place him with a Merc-affiliated team, but it may come to rue being so honourable.

Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin has claimed – albeit in a potentially partisan Dutch-language book entitled Max and Nyck – that de Vries could even end up at Red Bull’s senior team racing alongside Max Verstappen within a year.

“We might regret letting him go,” he said.

Logan Sargeant

Sargeant is F1's first American driver since Alexander Rossi in 2015

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

Formula 1’s commercial rights holder has grown borderline desperate to add an American driver to its paddock portfolio. Netflix’s Drive to Survive show has helped F1 succeed where previous attempts to establish an audience in the US have failed, and the aspiration is that a home-grown star will add yet more momentum.

Whether Logan Sargeant is the man to make this happen is open to question. It’s fair to say that the preferred US option of many of the paddock’s movers ’n’ shakers was Colton Herta but, since he failed to meet the superlicence criteria, it falls to Sargeant, who got it over the line with fourth in F2 last year.

Sargeant spent 2021 treading water with Charouz in F3 before an opportunity arose with the Williams young driver programme; US-domiciled Dorilton Capital was understandably keen to get an American driver on the books

Netflix will have to be typically economical with the actualite to construct its preferred underdog narrative around Sargeant, who hails from wealthy stock (although, since Logan’s father and uncle once had 14 different lawsuits buzzing between one another, the Sargeant family soap opera could fuel a series by itself). Despite this, ‘funding issues’ in 2020 meant Sargeant was unable to progress to Formula 2 after finishing third behind Piastri and Theo Pourchaire in F3.

Having evaluated sportscars and IndyCar, he spent a year treading water with Charouz in F3 before an opportunity arose with the Williams young driver programme; US-domiciled Dorilton Capital, the owner of Williams, was understandably keen to get an American driver on the books. After a promising start to the 2022 F2 season with Carlin, building to two race wins, Sargeant’s campaign then wilted slightly with five retirements.

After just one season in F2, Sargeant earned a move to F1 thanks to Williams's support

Photo by: Williams F1

Lack of seat time – he ran in four free practice sessions at GPs last year plus the Abu Dhabi test before the three-day pre-season running in Bahrain – means Sargeant has had limited experience in contemporary ground-effects F1 machinery. He’ll also be driving one of the slowest machines on the grid, even if Williams has successfully debugged its car. This would be no problem for Netflix if Sargeant brought a rock star persona to the table; however, he’s very much of the Mick Schumacher school, personable enough but giving very little away.

PLUS: Why F1's 'missing piece' won't play on his nationality for success

No less an eminence than Red Bull team principal Christian Horner has adumbrated the challenge facing Sargeant and his chances of wowing the US.

“The problem is that if you’re finishing 14th or 15th it doesn’t really turn people on,” Horner told the New York Post. “If he was fighting at the front in a competitive car, then you’d see what happened with Fernando [Alonso] in Spain, or Checo [Sergio Perez] and the reaction in Mexico. Imagine if there was an American Max Verstappen.”

Can any of 2023's rookie crop get off the mark in Bahrain?

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images