F1's best young driver...was released by McLaren this year

Here's a weird quirk of this F1 season: it may well be that the best young driver slipped through the hands of the team who go on to win the title.

2025 started with four rookies on the grid, and two more drivers who had less than a season's experience. By Imola, one of those rookies had been swapped out for another driver with just a handful of races under his belt.

All that is to say, it's hard to stick out from the crowd as a new driver this year. Kimi Antonelli's got a bit of cache because he's the kid who replaced Lewis Hamilton at a good team, and Liam Lawson was practically a seasoned veteran when he stepped into that Red Bull seat. And hey, Jack Doohan has a famous name!

Oliver Bearman, too, has a bit of name recognition thanks to his one-off Ferrari race in 2024, and nobody's been able to miss Franco Colapinto's name – from the reported off-season wrangling over release clauses to him replacing Doohan after just six races.

That's left a bit of a crevice for the two other names on the list to fall into. Isack Hadjar has kept himself in the mix for some attention by being the leading rookie points-scorer not called Kimi and taking his belt to Liam Lawson's stinging behind, while Gabriel Bortoleto...kindly, has been an afterthought.

Gabriel Bortoleto: The new Senna, just some guy, or something in between?

He hasn't got the car under him that Antonelli or Hadjar do. He hasn't been involved in any kind of drama over the status of his seat. He's never driven for Ferrari. He's just Gabi.

He's also, maybe, the most impressive of the newbies this year. One of just three not to have raced an F1 car before this year, he's steadily improved his race performances beyond the scope of the normal rookie learning curve. That's encouraging, but that's not the standout note.

With his seventh place in Hungarian Grand Prix qualifying (ahead of Max Verstappen and the Racing Bulls, if you're keeping track), he extended his qualifying head-to-head lead over Nico Hulkenberg to 8-6 (plus 2-1 in sprint qualifying).

Racecraft can be learned but, as any Pakistan cricket fan will tell you, pace is pace yaar. And Bortoleto has that pace in spades. Within half a season, he's rocking up on Saturdays and beating a veteran driver who just last season was skating around with a reputation as a qualifying specialist.

McLaren saw something of this pace less than two years ago, when they signed him to their driver development programme in October of 2023. 18 months later, he was signing to race for Sauber and McLaren were relinquishing their hold on him.

Of course, McLaren would do it all again given the chance. Bortoleto was nearly F1 ready, and they had (and have) two of the best drivers in the sport. They aren't Red Bull, able to stash a young driver in a Racing Bulls car to learn bad habits and ward off advances from other teams. Sauber had a race seat, McLaren didn't (and have the prodigiously talented Alex Dunne coming through too), and that was that.

Predicting the next ten years of the sport is a fool's game, and McLaren will probably never regret their choice to cut the cord. If Audi can put together a competitive car under the incoming regulations though, the one-time papaya-clad star could come back to haunt his old team sooner than they think.

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