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After bringing no fresh blood to the grid for the start of the 2024 season, Formula 1 has overcorrected in a big way for the upcoming year, with nearly a third of the grid refreshed.
Teams' increasing willingness to gamble on young talent probably owes much to two drivers in particular in 2024, Ollie Bearman and Franco Colapinto, but specifically Bearman: a driver who put on a clear-as-day demonstration that someone can be having a deeply disappointing Formula 2 season and then step up into F1 and run at the pace of a seasoned veteran.
Because of this, the nature of Bearman's and Colapinto's successes, the F1 rookie revolution doesn't have to be a one-off, as it's telling teams that it's not just the right time to refresh their rosters but that there are hidden gems to seek out - and that the only way to know if you've got one is to have them race.
But for a lot of drivers that comes a year or two too late. Below are seven who are now distinctly unlikely - though never say never - to make the F1 grid, ranked from least to most egregious in terms of their snub.
Juri Vips
Before it was Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda, it was Lawson, Tsunoda and Vips - and the Estonian actually handily defeated his two Red Bull peers in their sole season of Formula 3 together, albeit aided by a higher experience level and a seemingly stronger team.
But Vips's time as 'next in line' at Red Bull was never all that prolonged. Tsunoda jumped him in the queue swiftly, and Lawson was seemingly in the process of doing so anyway when Vips was suspended from Red Bull and dropped as its main team's reserve driver for using a racial slur on Twitch.
Would Vips have found his way onto the grid otherwise? In Red Bull's case, though there are four cars to speak of it is still so often about timing - but the window also closes fast, by design, so with the rise of Lawson (who himself needed a Daniel Ricciardo injury to truly make an impression) and subsequently Isack Hadjar it was perhaps never truly on the cards.
Vips has switched to the IndyCar orbit since and has given a good account of himself in three starts across two years. He has long been held in high regard by Rahal Letterman Lanigan, but not high enough for RLL to commit to him over more commercially attractive, free-of-baggage alternatives.
Zane Maloney
The whispers from the Formula E paddock had long been that Maloney would end up there sooner or later - even while he was still on the books of first Red Bull and then Sauber - so in the end it is not the most surprising outcome that he is with Lola Yamaha Abt for the 2024-25 season.
But Maloney had performed as an F1-level prospect at times at both Red Bull - nearly snatching the 2022 F3 crown - and Sauber - doing the double in last year's F2 opener - and with slightly different timing amid the latter's desperate late-2024 flailing for a team-mate to Nico Hulkenberg he may well have got himself in the mix.
There is still a theoretical pathway to F1 - a considerably older Nyck de Vries did it after winning Formula E - but for now Maloney has taken himself off the list of those F1 hopefuls in favour of ensuring a paid, professional future elsewhere in motorsport.
Victor Martins
The writing appears to be on the wall for Martins at least in terms of an F1 future with his long-time benefactor Alpine - given he never really seemed to have a shot of dislodging Jack Doohan in the fight to replace Esteban Ocon, didn't get any practice running nor got called up for the young driver test, and has been overlooked for the 2025 reserve gig in favour of new addition Paul Aron.
On the strength of his 2022 (F3 champion) and 2023 (standout F2 rookie) that's very harsh. On the strength of his 2024 - well, fair enough, because nothing really ever went right and Martins struggled to make an impression. It was a strange season with the new car, and his ART team was clearly harder-hit than most by that change, but that only buys you so much grace.
There's still a potential F1-level talent there, but it would probably take someone else in F1 to bet - at cost to itself - that Alpine has made a mistake, and those kinds of 'reclamation projects' don't seem to happen on the junior ladder all that much unless a budget is involved.
In the meantime, Martins's potential future pathways have been telegraphed by tests in Formula E and more recently the World Endurance Championship - but an expected third season in F2 suggests the F1 dream lingers in some form.
Frederik Vesti
It would've been nice if Vesti's final F2 season, in which he probably should've been champion, was rewarded with an F1 drive, but it's hard to blame his F1 benefactor Mercedes for not making it happen.
The seven- or even eight-digit fee it will have taken, or whatever engine supply discount would've come with it, would only have been obviously worth it if Mercedes projected Vesti the same way it projects Kimi Antonelli right now. It didn't - ditto for new Alpine reserve Aron, who just didn't really make sense as a Mercedes junior past a certain point.
The way for Mercedes to make it worth its while would've been to do it without significant expenditure, and probably the only way to do that would've been having a time machine and using it to go back to late-2023 and tell James Vowles that Logan Sargeant's second season is really not going to work out "so you might as well take our guy".
Vesti has remained on call as Mercedes' occasional rookie driver and reserve - though that latter role is filled by Valtteri Bottas now - and has earned himself a tasty Cadillac LMDh gig. It's worked out all right.
Ayumu Iwasa
Iwasa's ambitions of being an F1 driver seem just about over, which is a shame because out of the Red Bull camp of recent past and present it is honestly him - not Vips, not Dennis Hauger, not Tsunoda in being overlooked for a main-team spot - who might have been the most snubbed.
Iwasa delivered after being brought by Honda into the European racing scene and has been consistently productive in Red Bull colours - whether it be in F2 or now Super Formula. And he's already got a lot of mileage, credible-looking mileage, too, as part of the various rookie driver obligations spread around Red Bull's two teams.
It's tempting to feel that he doesn't have an F1 seat right now because Red Bull sees him more as an asset for soon-to-be-former partner Honda than a true Red Bull product, but if that's true at all it still won't have mattered if he made an iron-tight case for graduation.
On the basis of the results we can see, the case isn't iron-tight - but it's certainly decent. But only outright dominance in Super Formula, where he's staying in 2025, could probably change Iwasa's current trajectory in regards to F1.
Theo Pourchaire
Sauber's official release of Pourchaire at the end of last season - along with Maloney - marked the resolution of what is, taken in abstraction, a remarkable situation.
One of F1's weakest teams had one of its most productive juniors on its books, watched him nearly win F3 and then win F2, and said 'no thanks' repeatedly even while it was clearly not entirely satisfied with its current F1 line-up. That Sauber goes into its final non-Audi season with a rookie driver and yet that rookie driver isn't Pourchaire - and was never going to be Pourchaire - is genuinely astounding.
That is not to say that Sauber has clearly whiffed - there were three different regimes overseeing that team and all three decided they wouldn't bet on Pourchaire. Fred Vasseur might have at some point down the line, but both under Andreas Seidl and now Mattia Binotto it seemed out of the question, amid whispers of doubts about his feedback and the fact his three-year stint in F2 delivered the accolades but very rarely the 'wow' factor.
Equally, though, Pourchaire has every right to point to the results at every opportunity and feel that he has done enough. This is a driver who has only really flopped once in his career - in an aborted Super Formula stint - and who seemed to have set himself up for a genuine IndyCar future before that was suddenly ripped away in fairly ludicrous fashion.
We'll probably never know but it's very possible that not just Sauber but F1 as a whole has made a mistake here.
Felipe Drugovich
Drugovich's assured march to the 2022 F2 title has aged very gracefully - and he looks good virtually every time he's in Aston Martin's F1 car these days. In first practice in the Abu Dhabi finale he slotted into the top 10, while his fellow FP1 stand-ins were nowhere near doing so.
You have to wonder whether his F1 career was one sliding doors moment away - had Lance Stroll not healed up in time to drive an excellent race to sixth in the equally-excellent Aston Martin in the 2023 opener, would Drugovich have got his shot at a reputation-making drive instead? Would he, like De Vries before him, be promoted to 'next in line' via an eye-catching cameo?
Without that, a slightly-too-long F2 stint (mostly let down by a sophomore season that wasn't that bad but certainly wasn't good enough for F1) meant he just didn't do quite enough to force his way in - at that time.
Had his title-winning season come in 2024, even if it were still 'year three' of his F2 career, things would have played out differently.
But F1's rookie revolution has probably come just a little too late for Drugovich, who has committed to serving as Aston's reserve for another season in 2025.
