The top 10 F1 rookie crops of the 21st century
How will the class of 2025 rank against these outstanding newcomer packs?
Over a quarter of the drivers on the 2025 Formula 1 grid at the beginning of the year were going into their first full season, with the ‘rookie’ crop encompassing complete grand prix racing novices Kimi Antonelli, Gabriel Bortoleto and Isack Hadjar plus grey areas Jack Doohan, Ollie Bearman and Liam Lawson who ranged from one to a mammoth 11 previous F1 starts.
Antonelli showed his potential with sprint pole in Miami, Bearman has continued impressing at Haas and Hadjar and Bortoleto have both had eye-catching moments, while Doohan's rookie season proved shortlived but another highly-rated quasi-rookie is taking his place in the shape of Franco Colapinto.
Given the high hopes for some of the drivers on that rookie list and what some of them are showing already, there’s a good chance 2025 will be remembered as a great year for new F1 talent.
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We asked our F1 team to assess every ‘rookie crop’ of the 21st century and produce a top 10 ranking.
With several big names initially coming into F1 mid-season, we made our admittedly imperfect criteria for a driver’s rookie season to be a year when they made at least three grand prix starts and hadn’t started more than three grands prix before that. Which means - for instance - Robert Kubica’s 2006 part-season counts as his rookie campaign in our eyes not 2007, and we count Sebastian Vettel’s rookie year as his mid-2007 arrival rather than 2008. And under that ruling, Lawson is not a rookie anymore either.
10th - 2023
Full-season rookies: Oscar Piastri (McLaren), Logan Sargeant (Williams)
Part-season: Liam Lawson (AlphaTauri), Nyck de Vries (AlphaTauri)
While Nyck de Vries and Logan Sargeant had only perfunctory F1 careers, and are therefore condemned like so many to footnote status, Oscar Piastri and Liam Lawson made big impressions in 2023.
At McLaren, Piastri had one of the more eye-catching rookie campaigns of the 21st century, leading some to compare it (slightly over-enthusiastically) to Lewis Hamilton’s at McLaren.
Meanwhile, Lawson was in danger of F1 drifting away from him when Daniel Ricciardo’s injury let him jump into the AlphaTauri for five races. Lawson seized that opportunity, leading directly to last year’s late-season return.
That's since turned sour with the brief Red Bull stint, but if he can find his feet again at RB then Lawson still has chance to remind F1 of what it first saw in him.
Maybe he can then join Piastri in flying the flag for the '23 rookie crop for the next decade or more.
Piastri already had two wins before this season and has raised his game again to establish himself as early points leader and championship favourite. Ice-cool and with a ruthless streak, the pace of the McLaren means there's no reason why he couldn't be world champion in only his third F1 season. - Edd Straw
9th - 2011
Full-season: Paul di Resta, Sergio Perez, Pastor Maldonado, Jerome d’Ambrosio
Part-season: Daniel Ricciardo
None of F1's 2011 intake conclusively proved themselves as championship material in the end - although you could certainly make the argument for early-hybrid era Ricciardo (or, I guess, street circuit-only Sergio Perez) - but they definitely made for a compelling cast of characters.
Three winners - one of them the ever-enigmatic Pastor Maldonado whose 2012 Spanish Grand Prix triumph feels ever more like a fever dream every year that goes by - is already impressive. And given the right gig I have little doubt Paul di Resta would've been a fourth. Whether he warranted that race-winning opportunity is a complicated question, but he warranted more than the three inconclusive seasons he got.
Jerome d'Ambrosio is the odd one out here, a driver whose record before F1 and in F1 was served appropriately by him getting just the one campaign before eventually moving on to a reasonable Formula E career.
But it feels ironic, then, that d'Ambrosio is the only driver of the crop 'left standing' in F1, by virtue of his new role as Ferrari's deputy team principal. - Valentin Khorounzhiy
8th - 2018
Full-season: Charles Leclerc, Sergey Sirotkin
Charles Leclerc arrived in F1 with Sauber in 2018 amid much fanfare as Formula 2 champion. After the first three races, some wondered what all the fuss was about but he kicked his rookie season off with a great run to sixth place in Azerbaijan and never looked back.
Ten points finishes made him one of F1’s midfield stars, with his crowning moment somehow banging in a lap at Interlagos to get him into Q3 when others had given up because it had started to rain. Backed up by the under-the-radar qualities of Sergey Sirotkin at struggling Williams, who deserved to stay in F1 longer, that made for a good, if light-in-numbers, rookie crop.
Since then, Leclerc has carried the ‘class of 2018’ single-handedly. His success has been sporadic, primarily thanks to Ferrari’s fluctuations. He keeps getting better and he appears on the brink of making the step from race winner to world championship threat once Ferrari's cars allow him to, meaning 2018 might be looked back on as heralding the arrival of one of the greats.
For now, however, there’s an air of unfulfilled potential that needs to be shaken off with the sustained success he’s unquestionably capable of. - ES
7th - 2002
Full-season: Felipe Massa, Takuma Sato, Mark Webber, Allan McNish
The 2002 rookie crop had a really tough job following up on the impact 2001’s rookies made (more on them later), particularly because none of them had the machinery to consistently shine.
That didn’t stop there being plenty of flashes of brilliance, however.
At the very first race Mark Webber took a memorable fifth place for Minardi on home soil, truly Minardi’s last great F1 giant-killing.
Although there weren’t any more points to show for it, Webber continued to mark himself out during the rest of his rookie year. Nobody probably thought he’d have to wait seven more seasons to get the kind of frontrunning machinery he deserved.
Rookies don’t come much rawer than Felipe Massa in 2002. There were plenty of incidents - a collision with Pedro de la Rosa’s Jaguar at Monza infamously led to Sauber parking him for Heinz-Harald Frentzen to avoid having to serve a 10-place grid penalty - but also plenty of speed.
Just not enough speed to prevent Sauber from benching him completely for 2003 before he returned in 2004 a more rounded driver who earned the right to be Michael Schumacher’s apprentice at Ferrari in 2006.
Scratch our previous claim because Takumo Sato was 2002’s rawest rookie. But if you only look at his heroic Suzuka finale (where he raced to fifth to help Jordan leapfrog BAR and Jaguar in the constructors’), you’d be convinced this was the start of a sparklingly successful F1 career, not a frustratingly average one.
His time in sportscars showed Allan McNish warranted better than being one of Toyota’s early scapegoats for a failure that history would show wasn’t down to the driver line-up. - Josh Suttill
6th - 2000
Full-season: Jenson Button, Nick Heidfeld, Gaston Mazzacane
Williams’s bold choice of 19-year-old Jenson Button - with only two seasons of car racing behind him - to replace Alex Zanardi for the start of its BMW era in 2000 was an inspired gamble.
A late engine failure when on course for a point (from 21st on the grid) in his first ever race was cruel, but he got that sixth place next time out and looked like he’d been reeling off grands prix like that for years. Fourth at a wet Hockenheim, third on the grid at Spa and qualifying fifth for his Suzuka debut told you everything else you needed to know about Button’s potential and the only surprise was that it took nearly a decade (and a lot of strange circumstances) for him to translate it into a title.
Yet fellow 2000 rookie Nick Heidfeld entered F1 looking a more likely bet for a quick route to a championship given his long-time Mercedes/McLaren backing and his absolute domination of Formula 3000 the previous year. An awful Prost shattered his confidence. He’d eventually be a 13-time podium finisher, but his F1 career never truly lived up to the sky-high junior expectations.
Expectations were much lower for Minardi pay driver Gaston Mazzacane. And he pretty much lived up to them. - Matt Beer
5th - 2006
Full-season: Nico Rosberg, Scott Speed
Part-season: Robert Kubica, Yuji Ide, Sakon Yamamoto, Franck Montagny
The member of the class of 2006 who ultimately became world champion wasn’t the greatest talent of the crop, though both made sensational starts to their F1 careers.
Williams signing Nico Rosberg’s surge from last after a first-corner tangle to seventh (with fastest lap along the way) on his debut in Bahrain set a bar the rest of his rookie season couldn’t quite live up to, even though his career eventually did when his move from Williams to Mercedes opened the door to 23 grands prix wins, the 2016 title and an iconic shock F1 exit.
But how many titles could Robert Kubica have won without his career-wrecking arm injury? His speed in Friday practice appearances for BMW Sauber convinced it to drop 1997 world champion Jacques Villeneuve mid-season and Kubica justified that faith with a podium in only his third F1 race.
Those two headlined a group that also included the disappointing beneficiary of Red Bull’s efforts to develop an American F1 driver (Toro Rosso’s Scott Speed) and the occupants of the revolving door second seat in the very, very poor Super Aguri. Franck Montagny deserved a better F1 career than that. - MB
4th - 2015
Full-season: Max Verstappen, Felipe Nasr, Carlos Sainz, Will Stevens
Part-season: Roberto Merhi, Alexander Rossi
There's no real need to dwell much on the two protagonists of this crop - and if the rookie class was just Max Verstappen and Carlos Sainz, it may well have ranked higher.
But what of the others?
Felipe Nasr was the likeliest bet to pan out besides the two (and at the time you could make the argument he'd come in with a stronger reputation than Sainz), but it just never quite came together, his F1 career extinguished by a failure to definitively assert himself over Marcus Ericsson at Sauber.
But perhaps that was for the best anyway, as it allowed Nasr to blossom into one of the true giants of IMSA SportsCar racing.
And there's no 'perhaps' in the case of Alexander Rossi, whose few appearances in 2015 were genuinely compelling enough but whose hypothetical future F1 prospects that never materialised would've anyway struggled to live up to the instant immortality of his debut Indianapolis 500 win.
Fellow Manor drivers Will Stevens and Roberto Merhi can have little complaints over being one-and-dones. Stevens carved himself out a more-than-good career in endurance racing, whereas Merhi's has been more nomadic - to the point where he is perhaps best known to the F1-viewing public as a close confidant of his fellow 2015 grand prix rookie Sainz. - VK
3rd - 2019
Full-season: Alex Albon, Lando Norris, Antonio Giovinazzi, George Russell
This 2019 trio (sorry Antonio Giovinazzi) really broke the trend of the 2010s only mostly drip feeding us with one or two good F1 rookies across multiple years.
Lando Norris is already into his second realistic world championship challenge and George Russell ended up on top of the Mercedes intra-team battle against Lewis Hamilton and looks capable of fighting for titles too.
Both excelled in different ways in 2019. Norris was dropped straight into a close midfield fight at a rebuilding McLaren and appeared to be an immediate great fit.
Coming off second-best against team-mate Sainz was no great failure, particularly given his lack of experience and the fact Sainz was one of 2019’s best performers.
Russell was the most positive thing about Williams’s dire 2019 season, beating (an unfortunately limited) returning Kubica by a sizable margin at almost every race weekend - bar Hockenheim, the only race that offered a points chance for Williams, which Kubica took.
Alex Albon’s stock was never higher than in 2019 either. He made a solid start to life with Toro Rosso and earned the quickest promotion to the senior Red Bull team of any driver, replacing Pierre Gasly after just five months.
It all went very wrong in 2020 but in 2019 Albon was a perfectly respectable team-mate to Verstappen. He was 0.429s slower than Verstappen on average in qualifying but was consistently in the top six in his nine races - only going point-less in Brazil because Hamilton punted him out of podium contention.
Giovinazzi showed more potential in both his standout GP2 title campaign against Gasly and his early F1 cameos than he ever delivered on during his three years alongside Kimi Raikkonen at Alfa Romeo.
His first year was unfortunately simply a frustration template for the rest. Solid peaks but never enough consistency to warrant a longer F1 career. - JS
2nd - 2001
Full-season: Juan Pablo Montoya, Kimi Raikkonen, Enrique Bernoldi, Fernando Alonso
Part-season: Luciano Burti, Tomas Enge, Alex Yoong
This group was only narrowly pipped to the top spot in this list even though it boasts just three world championship wins compared to the 11 achieved by the rookie crop that came first in our vote.
That’s because the potential was so much more - though the failure to achieve that potential was mostly self-inflicted in all cases.
Juan Pablo Montoya and Kimi Raikkonen took all the immediate headlines - Montoya as he so boldly took the fight to Michael Schumacher and Ferrari in the Williams-BMW, Raikkonen for looking so sensational from the outset for Sauber despite his entire car racing career up to that point comprising a few Formula Ford starts and a Formula Renault season. Montoya won the Italian GP and should’ve won more - his errors meaning a season of deeper troughs than Raikkonen’s despite also having higher peaks.
And yet it was the much lower-profile rookie in the hastily-assembled Minardi who’d go on to become the greatest of this pack and one of the greatest of all-time. Though he never got near scoring a point, what teenager Fernando Alonso was doing in that ultimate backmarker machine defied belief and set the scene for what should have been far more than two world championships - and maybe still could be.
Raikkonen and Montoya lacked nothing to Alonso in raw speed, they just proved to be less relentlessly dependable in the longer term.
Judged in that company, Enrique Bernoldi, Luciano Burti and Tomas Enge looked like nobodies. Yet while it’s fair to say none of them lived up to the best moments of their junior careers during their brief F1 stints, all were worthy F1 drivers (which you couldn’t necessarily say for Alonso’s late-season team-mate Alex Yoong). - MB
1st - 2007
Full-season: Lewis Hamilton, Heikki Kovalainen, Adrian Sutil, Anthony Davidson
Part-season: Sebastian Vettel
It’s a close call between the top two but this is a rookie crop that would go onto deliver 11 of the next 15 drivers’ championships.
Given all of his success since, it’s really easy to forget just how mighty impressive Lewis Hamilton’s rookie season was. Against the backdrop of a nation’s hopes on his shoulders (no British F1 champion in 15 years), McLaren’s damaging Spygate scandal and intra-team animosity with the reigning two-time champion Alonso, Hamilton was dazzling.
His early season run (nine straight podiums from Australia to Silverstone) has to go down in history as the single greatest start to an F1 career ever.
And it was pretty good thereafter too with only a horrendous Nurburgring weekend and the one-two punch of dramas inside and outside of his control across China-Brazil costing him a rookie title.
In the same Shanghai chaos that ensnared Hamilton, his future rival Sebastian Vettel marked himself out as another next big thing with a fourth place in a Toro Rosso that had no right to be anywhere near there.
He wasn’t quite as polished as Hamilton but his peaks were just as impressive as he’d show when he first got a frontrunning car two years later.
In any normal season Heikki Kovalainen’s rookie season with Renault would have earned far more plaudits. He put his more experienced team-mate Giancarlo Fisichella in the shade and genuinely earned his ill-fated (but ultimately far more promising than it looked) two-year McLaren stint.
Anthony Davidson deserved far better than a season a bit in a Super Aguri while Adrian Sutil was genuinely talked about as an underrated future race winner at the time, even if he never got anywhere close to consistently delivering the kind of peaks that earned him Spyker’s sole F1 point at Fuji. - JS
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