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Stoffel Vandoorne has another slim chance of a fairytale ending to his McLaren’s Formula 1 team after he was added to the team’s pool of reserve drivers for the 2023 season.
McLaren handed 2021 IndyCar champion Alex Palou – after failing to secure him for its IndyCar team this year – an F1 reserve driver role for 2023.
But Palou effectively won’t step into that role properly until his upcoming IndyCar season with Chip Ganassi Racing ends in September.
So McLaren was inevitably going to add further drivers to its reserve pool and that began with the news that Mercedes reserve driver Mick Schumacher will also be available to the team.
McLaren has now revealed its former protege and race driver Vandoorne along with last year’s reigning Formula 2 champion Felipe Drugovich will be added to its reserve pool for 2023.
Vandoorne and Drugovich have already been announced as test and reserve drivers for Aston Martin.
Vandoorne will juggle his reserve duties for Aston Martin and McLaren’s F1 outfits with a reserve role for Peugeot’s Hypercar programme this year as well as his ongoing (and so far tricky) Formula E title defence with DS Penske.
He had his first sample of the Peugeot Hypercar last Thursday, and the programme’s technical director Olivier Jansonnie suggested there could be longer-term designs on integrating the Belgian beyond a mere reserve role – even if, he acknowledged, it was “a bit early to tell”.
Finally got my first taste of the @peugeotsport 9X8 this week! Felt good to be back on track and discover the Hypercar class 🙌 pic.twitter.com/fP44qvurmw
— Stoffel Vandoorne (@svandoorne) February 17, 2023
McLaren has previously shared Mercedes’ reserve drivers over the past few years and also had Alpine reserve Oscar Piastri as part of its reserve driver pool during 2022 – before luring Piastri away from Alpine for a 2023 race seat.
Vandoorne has already been available to McLaren over the past three years as he served as one of Mercedes’ F1 reserves while racing for the brand in Formula E.
And he had made his F1 debut during a surprise stand-in call-up when Fernando Alonso had to miss the 2016 Bahrain Grand Prix after a hefty crash in Australia.
That was followed by a failed two-year stint with the team that he first became a protege of in 2013.
Stoffel Vandoorne was once hailed as a future world champion but the destiny that he fulfilled by being crowned the Formula E world champion last year represents a very different path to the one he once appeared to be walking, one that might have led to the very top of Formula 1.
Upon his Formula E coronation last year, Edd Straw went into detail about the potential Vandoorne promised and why he failed to deliver on it in F1.
