Haas put the reigning F2 champion in one of its cars. His own team could not..
Leonardo Fornaroli spent June 17 and 18 driving a Formula 1 car that belongs to a team he does not work for. The reigning F2 champion ran Haas's 2025 challenger, the VF-25, through a Testing of Previous Cars day at Jerez, the American team confirmed, and the detail that matters is whose car it was.
His credentials are not in question. Fornaroli won the FIA Formula 3 title in 2024 and the Formula 2 title in 2025, back-to-back championships that made McLaren sign him as a reserve, and last weekend he took his first FP1 outing in Lando Norris's McLaren at Barcelona, fifth fastest and six-tenths off Oscar Piastri. A driver with that record and no race seat is the most credentialed junior on the grid without one.
Before Barcelona, the Italian had only sampled McLaren's 2023 car in a private run earlier in the year. The Spanish FP1 hour was his first official Formula 1 session, and he called it an emotional one, sharing a track with drivers he had watched on television. A reserve contract had bought him simulator work and a single old-car test; it had not bought him a competitive future.
Haas is the first team other than McLaren to put Fornaroli in a car, and the move reads across the paddock as a 2027 audition rather than a favour. McLaren has no vacancy to offer, with Norris and Piastri holding both seats on long contracts, which leaves a champion the team rates with nowhere inside it to go. A private test with a rival is precisely how the market appraises a driver before it commits to one.
The look a rival is taking
For Haas, the calculation is cheap. A TPC day costs a set of old tyres and an engineer's afternoon, and it buys a first-hand read on a driver every rival has watched win two titles from the outside. The previous-car format sits beyond the in-season testing ban, so a team can log real mileage and form a private judgement that a race weekend never allows. For Fornaroli, it is the first sign that his next seat might be found by someone other than McLaren.
Cadillac's arrival this season took Formula 1 to eleven teams and 22 race seats, and even that expansion has not cleared the queue. The credentialed juniors still outnumber the openings, most of the grid is locked on multi-year deals, and a reserve role is the holding pattern that results. A TPC test is how a driver signals he is ready to leave it, and how a team signals it might be the one to let him.
What a day like this actually measures is the gap a championship cannot show. F2 and F1 share little beyond the shape of the cockpit: the grip, the energy deployment, the brake-by-wire feel and the tyre's working window are all different, and an engineer learns more from how a driver adapts across a long run than from one fast lap. That is why a single FP1 hour and a borrowed test do not settle a seat, and why a driver in Fornaroli's position keeps collecting them.
Pairing him with a known quantity sharpened the exercise. Haas ran its own reserve, Ryo Hirakawa, in the same test, back in F1 machinery three days after finishing third at the Le Mans 24 Hours in the No. 8 Toyota. Measuring an unproven driver against one the engineers already trust gives them a reference point, and it folds an endurance result into an F1 evaluation in the same week.
Austria is the next read
The audition continues at the Austrian Grand Prix on June 28, where the junior traffic does not stop with Fornaroli. Williams reserve Luke Browning takes over Carlos Sainz's car for FP1 at the Red Bull Ring, a run that turned from milestone into makeup session after he lost his scheduled Barcelona mileage to an electrical failure. F2 resumes at the same circuit the same weekend, returning the feeder championship to the calendar after a fortnight dark.
Spielberg could be where the 2027 picture starts to clarify, with driver announcements that have stayed quiet through the spring still pending. The grid that gathers there is small and largely spoken for, which is what makes a midfield team's willingness to spend a test day on someone else's reserve worth noticing.
A non-points test at Jerez does not change a grid. It is, though, the kind of move that tends to precede one, and the question it sharpens is the one Fornaroli's results were supposed to have answered already: if the reigning F2 champion has to borrow a rival's car to keep his case alive, where exactly does the ladder end?