Several drivers over the years have graduated from Formula 2 to F1, with Oliver Bearman and Andrea Kimi Antonelli set to be the next stars from the feeder series.
Sometimes a driver’s graduation is a foregone conclusion due to how dominant they have been in the championship, which is what happened with Charles Leclerc when he won seven races on his way to the 2017 title.
Since it started, it has seen 15 drivers graduate to become full-time F1 drivers including Lewis Hamilton, Nico Rosberg, Alex Albon, Lando Norris, and George Russell.
When discussing some of the famous names that have come through the ranks on the Beyond the Grid podcast, series CEO Bruno Michel named one of the graduates who had a surprisingly short career.
Stoffel Vandoorne had short career in Formula 1 after F2 dominance
Stoffel Vandoorne had a surprisingly short F1 career after dominating his year in F2 (then known as GP2 in 2015), winning half of the 22 races on the calendar.
The Belgian driver made his debut with McLaren in 2017, a year after they started using Honda power units which proved to be a spectacular failure.
Despite the problems, Michel believes it was surprising that Vandoorne only lasted another season before being ousted by McLaren altogether.
“Sometimes there are surprises like this. There’s another driver that I rated extremely high, it was Stoffel Vandoorne,” said Michel.
“Stoffel didn’t do as well in F1 as he should have done and finally had a quite short career in F1. So sometimes you have difficulties for their careers and it’s not working the same way.”
Stoffel Vandoorne had difficult F1 start with McLaren Honda
Vandoorne was a curious case when he joined the F1 grid after much hype around his feeder series career.
Despite the problems facing McLaren with their unreliable Honda power unit, Vandoorne was regularly outqualified and outscored by teammate Fernando Alonso.
Things were worse in 2018 when he only scored points on three occasions in the opening races, before going on a run of finishes outside of the points midway through the race.
He has since found refuge in Formula E, where he drove for Mercedes and won the title in 2021/22, before switching to DS Penske in the last two years alongside former F1 driver Jean-Eric Vergne.
After a couple of years out of F1 driver roles, Aston Martin is letting Vandoorne drive the AMR24 in a post-race test following the upcoming Belgian Grand Prix.
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