Ayumu Iwasa Drives at Red Bull’s Home Race Still Waiting on the F1 Call That May Never Come

• Ayumu Iwasa, the reigning Super Formula champion, takes over Liam Lawson’s Racing Bulls car for first practice at the Austrian Grand Prix, his latest run in a Formula 1 car with no race seat to show for it.
• The 24 year old has logged a string of FP1 outings for Red Bull’s two teams since 2024, including a turn in Max Verstappen’s car at Barcelona, yet reports suggest the senior squad does not see him as a future grand prix driver.
• It leaves Iwasa in one of the sport’s loneliest positions: trusted with a race car on a Friday morning, but seemingly stuck on the outside looking in.

On Friday morning at the Red Bull Ring, while six teams handed their cars to young drivers for the opening hour of practice, one name carried a quiet ache the timing screens could never show. Ayumu Iwasa lowered himself into Liam Lawson’s Racing Bulls, fired up the engine and rolled out for the first session of the Austrian Grand Prix. For the team that owns this circuit, the home weekend is a celebration. For the Japanese driver borrowing the seat, it was another reminder of how close he sits to Formula 1 and how far away the start line still feels.

Iwasa is not a teenager being blooded for the first time. He is a champion. He arrives at these sessions having already beaten the best drivers Japan has to offer, and he leaves them in the same place he started: as a reserve, a stand-in, a name on a list of rookies even though he stopped being a rookie in any meaningful sense some time ago. That contradiction is the story of his year, and it was on full display in Austria.

Watch every race of the 2026 season live on Apple TV

A Champion Stuck on the Sidelines

Iwasa won the 2025 Super Formula title, the most competitive single-seater championship outside Formula 1 and a series that has launched the careers of several grand prix drivers. He is now in his third campaign in the category, a benchmark performer in machinery that rewards bravery and precision in equal measure. On talent alone, the 24 year old has done what a young driver is supposed to do to earn a Formula 1 chance. He has won.

Yet the reward has not come. Instead of a race seat, Iwasa has been handed the role of test and reserve driver for both Racing Bulls and the senior Red Bull team, a position that keeps him close to the action without ever quite letting him into it. He travels, he prepares, he sits ready in case one of the four contracted drivers cannot take part. And every few races, the call comes for a single hour of running on a Friday, in a car he will then climb out of and hand back.

The FP1 Treadmill

Austria is far from his first taste. Iwasa has now made several FP1 appearances since 2024, a number that puts him among the more experienced young drivers on the grid even though he has never started a race. Formula 1’s rules force every team to run a rookie in four practice sessions across the season, two in each car, and Red Bull’s two outfits have leaned on Iwasa to help fill that quota.

The most eye-catching of those runs came at the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix, where he climbed into Max Verstappen’s Red Bull for first practice. It is hard to imagine a heavier seat to fill. Iwasa set the 14th fastest time of the session, around 1.9 seconds off the pace set by George Russell, a respectable showing for a driver dropped into the most demanding car on the grid with limited mileage and no chance to build up to it. The point of these sessions is not to win them. It is to prove you belong. On that score he has rarely embarrassed himself.

In Austria the assignment was Lawson’s Racing Bulls rather than the championship-chasing senior car, a slightly gentler introduction at a circuit Iwasa knows from junior racing. The brief stays the same regardless of which car he is in. Run the team’s programme, gather data, give the engineers clean laps and useful feedback, and do nothing to remind anyone why a reserve is a reserve. It is precise, pressured work, and almost nobody outside the garage notices when it is done well.

What makes the treadmill so testing is the lack of rhythm it offers. A race driver builds across a weekend, learning the car through practice before committing in qualifying and the grand prix. A reserve gets none of that arc. Iwasa steps in cold, often in conditions and on tyres he has barely sampled, knowing that the engineers studying his data are also, quietly, studying him. One scruffy lap, one moment of hesitation, and the narrative writes itself. He has to be sharp from the first corner, every single time, with no warm-up and no second weekend to make amends.

The Verdict That Stings

Here is where the story turns from frustrating to genuinely difficult. Despite the title, despite the steady FP1 form, reports out of the paddock suggest Red Bull does not view Iwasa as a future Formula 1 racer. The programme that hands him these Friday runs appears to see them as the ceiling of his involvement rather than a staircase toward something more. For a driver who has done everything asked of him, that is a brutal message to read about yourself.

It also speaks to the cold arithmetic of the modern grid. There are only 22 race seats, and the teams with development pipelines are stacked with teenagers carrying enormous backing and even bigger reputations. Red Bull’s own academy has produced Isack Hadjar and Arvid Lindblad in recent seasons, drivers younger than Iwasa and earlier in their journeys. In that traffic, a 24 year old Super Formula champion can find himself quietly reclassified from prospect to useful asset, valued for what he can do on a Friday rather than what he might become on a Sunday.

Japan’s Long Wait for Its Next Star

Iwasa’s situation carries an extra resonance because of where he comes from. Japan has a deep love of Formula 1 and a long history in the sport, yet a Japanese driver winning races at the front remains a distant dream. The country has produced quick, respected competitors, but the breakthrough star has never quite arrived. Iwasa has spoken of wanting to be the one who changes that, to give Japanese fans a driver to follow week in and week out at the highest level.

That ambition is exactly what makes his current limbo so poignant. He is good enough to be trusted with a Formula 1 car in front of a global audience, and he keeps proving it, and yet the door to a permanent place stays shut. Every FP1 outing is both a privilege and a tease, a glimpse of the life he wants that ends the moment the chequered flag falls on the session.

For now, Iwasa keeps showing up, keeps delivering the laps, keeps banking the experience in case the landscape shifts. Reserve drivers have forced their way onto the grid before when injury, retirement or a sudden vacancy changed everything in a weekend. Staying ready for that moment is the only path he can control. In Austria he did his job again, handed the car back, and waited. The hardest part of his role is not the driving. It is the waiting that follows.

Want more F1Chronicle.com coverage? Add us as a preferred source on Google to your favourites list for the best F1 news and analysis on the internet.

Written by

Jack Renn

Jack Renn is an editor at F1 Chronicle and a veteran motorsport journalist with 25 years of experience covering Formula 1 and international motorsport. A member of the Association Internationale de la Presse Sportive (AIPS), the global body representing accredited sports journalists, Jack has spent his career reporting from paddocks and press rooms across the F1 calendar. His work spans race analysis, technical insight, and in-depth features, giving readers authoritative coverage grounded in decades of firsthand experience at the highest level of the sport.

More articles by Jack Renn →