Leonardo Fornaroli Lands Surprise Haas Test as McLaren Pushes for a 2027 F1 Seat

• Leonardo Fornaroli, the reigning Formula 2 champion and a McLaren reserve, drove Haas’s 2025 VF-25 across a two-day test at Jerez on 17 and 18 June.
• The run came barely a week after his first official Formula 1 session in Barcelona, where he set the fifth fastest time and finished six tenths behind Oscar Piastri.
• McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has confirmed he is working to place the 21-year-old Italian on the grid for 2027, and Haas looks like the most natural opening.

Most reserve drivers spend a season carrying a kit bag and waiting for a phone call that never comes. Leonardo Fornaroli has spent the past ten days doing something very different. He drove a current Formula 1 car in front of a watching paddock in Barcelona, then climbed straight into a rival team’s machine for two days of testing in southern Spain. For a 21-year-old who was racing in Formula 3 less than two years ago, the speed of it all has been dizzying.

On Tuesday it was confirmed that Fornaroli would drive Haas’s 2025 challenger, the VF-25, during a Testing of Previous Cars day at the Circuito de Jerez on Wednesday the 17th and Thursday the 18th of June. The reigning Formula 2 champion is on McLaren’s books as a reserve, yet here he was being handed the keys to an American team’s car. In the careful, slow-moving world of the F1 driver market, that is rarely an accident.

The Jerez run is best understood as an audition. McLaren has more talent than it has seats, and Andrea Stella has been open about wanting to find Fornaroli a home elsewhere on the grid. Haas, a team that has built its recent identity around developing young drivers, is the obvious place to start the conversation.

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The week that changed his standing

Fornaroli’s leap from promising junior to genuine prospect can be traced to a single hour. Ahead of the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix, he took over reigning World Champion Lando Norris’s car for first practice, the first official Formula 1 session of his life. He did not look like a passenger. He posted the fifth fastest time and ended the hour just six tenths of a second behind Oscar Piastri in the sister McLaren, a benchmark that turned heads up and down the pit lane.

What stayed with people, though, was how openly he spoke about the emotion of it. There was no manufactured cool, no attempt to pretend he belonged as if by right.

“Was amazing, incredible feeling, I was very emotional before the session,” Fornaroli said afterwards. “First official F1 session, sharing the track with all the drivers that I’m watching on the TV every race weekend, saying ‘those guys are amazing, super fast’. To stay on track with them was incredible.”

It is the kind of honesty that endears a young driver to a team, and to fans. He had grown up watching the grid he was suddenly racing against, and he was not too guarded to admit it. The result on the timing screens did the rest of the talking.

Why Haas opened its door

The Jerez test was run under Haas’s Testing of Previous Cars programme, a mechanism that lets teams put drivers in machinery at least two seasons old. It is one of the few legal ways a team can put real mileage into a driver outside the tightly restricted official test calendar, and it has become a quiet but powerful tool in the talent market.

“TGR Haas F1 Team has the capacity to test and appraise drivers through its TPC (Testing of Previous Cars) program,” the team said in a statement. “Leonardo Fornaroli, the 2025 FIA Formula 2 Champion, has subsequently been offered the opportunity to drive its VF-25 at the Circuito de Jerez, Angel Nieto, Spain, 17-18 June, with TGR Haas F1 Team reserve driver Ryo Hirakawa also in attendance at the test.”

Hirakawa’s presence added an extra layer of interest. The Japanese driver jumped back into F1 machinery only days after finishing third at the Le Mans 24 Hours, a reminder of how many careers now weave between sportscars and single-seaters. For Fornaroli, sharing the garage with an established reserve gave Haas a useful reference point. Engineers were not just measuring his lap times against a stopwatch, they were measuring him against another driver they already trust.

Back-to-back titles that forced F1 to look

Fornaroli did not arrive at this point by chance. He took the Formula 3 title in 2024 and followed it with the Formula 2 crown in 2025, back-to-back championships in the two categories that sit directly below Formula 1. Winning either is hard. Winning both in consecutive years marks a driver out as something more than quick.

It was that 2025 F2 success that brought McLaren to the table. The Woking team signed him as one of its reserve drivers for this season, then gave him a taste of its 2023 car earlier in the year before the Barcelona FP1 outing. Each step has been deliberate, a ladder built one rung at a time rather than a single dramatic promotion. The Haas test is simply the next rung, and arguably the most important one yet.

Stella’s plan and the 2027 puzzle

The complication for any McLaren junior is that the senior team is not exactly short of drivers. Norris is the reigning World Champion and committed for the long term. Piastri is one of the most coveted talents on the grid. There is no vacancy in orange, and there will not be one soon. Stella has accepted that reality and turned it into a strategy rather than a roadblock.

The McLaren principal has confirmed he is actively looking for a place in Formula 1 for Fornaroli in 2027. The message is that while the Italian may one day drive for McLaren, the smarter path is to explore opportunities elsewhere on the grid together, rather than letting a champion stagnate on the sidelines. A loan-style arrangement, where a team like Haas takes a McLaren-backed driver, is one well-worn route to making that happen.

The timing helps him too. The 2027 market is only beginning to form, with a large chunk of the current grid out of contract at the end of next year. A driver who can show adaptability, composure and raw pace in unfamiliar machinery right now puts himself near the front of the queue when seats open up. Every clean lap at Jerez is a line on a CV that team bosses will be reading closely.

An audition that is really a statement

For Fornaroli, the strategic weight of these two days is hard to overstate. He is not fighting for points or trophies at Jerez. He is fighting for the impression he leaves behind, the data trace, the feedback to the engineers, the sense that he can walk into a strange team and make himself useful from the first installation lap. That is a different skill from winning a Formula 2 race, and it is exactly the skill that wins F1 contracts.

There is something refreshing about watching a young driver who still describes an F1 car as an incredible feeling rather than an entitlement. The hard-headed business of the driver market will test that wide-eyed enthusiasm soon enough. For now, Fornaroli has done everything asked of him. He starred on his FP1 debut, he answered Haas’s call without hesitation, and he handed his backers at McLaren every reason to keep pushing on his behalf.

Whether that push ends with a 2027 race seat is out of his hands. What is in his hands, he has so far gripped tightly. The reigning Formula 2 champion has spent ten days proving he is ready. The grid, slowly, is starting to agree.

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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.

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