Arguably Red Bull’s most exciting Formula 1 protege since Max Verstappen has moved a crucial step closer to securing his F1 debut.
Last weekend 17-year-old British driver Arvid Lindblad sealed the Formula Regional Oceania Championship, formerly known as the Toyota Racing Series, title.
Lindblad maintained a commanding points lead throughout the five-round series, finishing on the podium in all but three of the 15 races.
While hardly the strongest field in the New Zealand-based championship’s history, previous champions under its former TRS guise include current F1 drivers Lance Stroll, Lando Norris and Liam Lawson.
Lindblad winning this championship is more an exercise in somewhat gaming the system for a driver Red Bull already believes in. This title won't convince Red Bull that Lindblad is F1-worthy because it's already convinced of that.
Red Bull is very excited about Lindblad as the likes of team boss Christian Horner and advisor Helmut Marko haven’t talked up a young driver this much since it courted Verstappen in 2014.
Lindblad secures 18 points for the Formula Regional Oceania Championship crown, taking him above the 40-point threshold needed to apply for an F1 superlicence.
Lindblad had already acquired 15 points for finishing fourth in Formula 3 last year and 12 points across his Formula 4 campaigns in 2022.
That will remove the pressure for Lindblad to secure the necessary superlicence points during his rookie Formula 2 season this year with Campos.
It also means he’ll be ready to make his debut in one of Red Bull’s F1 teams in 2026 or even earlier should Red Bull want to.
Lindblad drove an F1 car (Sebastian Vettel’s 2012 championship-winning RB8) for the first time in late-2024 during a showrun in Houston (pictured above) alongside Red Bull veteran David Coulthard.
He’ll likely have a private F1 testing programme this year in more contemporary machinery, an opportunity Red Bull hasn’t given to many of its juniors due to the cost of running older Honda engines.
He’ll do so under F1’s Testing Previous Cars rules and when he acquires 300km of running, he’ll tick off another superlicence requirement.
There’s also no reason why Lindblad can’t make his free practice debut this year either, especially now teams are obligated to run a young driver in each car twice over the season, instead of once in each car as it was before.
Racing Bulls rookie Isack Hadjar will satisfy that requirement for one of the cars but the team will need a rookie twice for Yuki Tsunoda’s car and Red Bull has four outings to assign for Max Verstappen and Lawson’s RB21s.
And while last year the attention over FIA passing a change to the F1 practice superlicence rules to allow a 17-year-old to be granted one at the FIA’s discretion was centred around Mercedes protege Kimi Antonelli, the change was initially requested by Red Bull with Lindblad in mind.
Theoretically, there’s a 2026 Racing Bulls seat for the taking if Lindblad can impress this year across his F1 running and F2 campaign - the latter of which F1 teams are putting increasingly less emphasis on when deciding who to give a seat to.
Tsunoda is already entering an unprecedented fifth successive season in Red Bull’s junior team and his primary backer Honda is departing for Aston Martin at the end of this year.
That leaves his future vulnerable if he continues to be ignored by Red Bull when it’s deciding who should be Verstappen’s team-mate.
Racing Bulls' Hadjar will be afforded some patience given it's his rookie year but as Red Bull’s shown plenty of times before, it has no issue with making a ruthless change to find out if the next driver in line is up to it.
Lindblad is central to Red Bull’s continuing course-correcting of its F1 driver strategy, a young driver far more in the mould of its two champions Verstappen and Sebastian Vettel and a further shift away from signing experienced drivers from other teams or giving another chance to drivers that it’s dropped.
Additional imagery from Toyota Racing NZ
