Leonardo Fornaroli’s summer just got a lot busier — and, quietly, a lot more interesting.
Haas has confirmed it will run the McLaren reserve in a two-day Testing of a Previous Car outing at Jerez, with Fornaroli scheduled to drive the team’s 2025 VF-25 on Wednesday and Thursday. Haas reserve Ryo Hirakawa will also be present across the test.
On the face of it, a TPC run is a fairly straightforward line on a young driver’s CV. In reality, it’s one of the few meaningful ways a team can look beyond the polished theatre of a Friday practice cameo and see what a driver does when the programme becomes properly engineering-led: long runs, set-up changes, repeatability, discipline on tyres and brakes, and the unglamorous graft that mirrors a race weekend’s working rhythm.
Fornaroli arrives with the kind of junior record that makes F1 people sit up — and not just because it looks good in a press release. The 21-year-old is the reigning Formula 2 champion and part of that small, telling club to win F3 and F2 back-to-back, a path previously followed by Charles Leclerc, George Russell, Oscar Piastri and Gabriel Bortoleto before they established themselves on the grid.
McLaren has already been putting mileage into him this year. Fornaroli completed his first current-car taste with the team during FP1 at the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix last Friday, and he’s also had earlier TPC running for McLaren at Silverstone in April and at the Circuit of The Americas in May. That steady drip-feed of opportunities is particularly relevant in a season where he doesn’t have a full-time race seat — a familiar limbo for an F2 champion, given series rules prevent the title winner from returning the following year. Piastri’s own year on the sidelines as Alpine reserve before his eventual McLaren race break remains the recent reference point everyone in the paddock reaches for.
What’s different here is the badge on the garage door. Haas only began operating a TPC programme last year, and it’s been enabled in large part by its technical partnership with Toyota Gazoo Racing. That relationship has expanded the team’s capacity to run tests away from the grand prix treadmill — and, crucially, to offer opportunities like this without having to distort its race-team priorities.
For Fornaroli, it’s another step into the real economy of Formula 1 careers: being seen by more than one organisation. A driver can be loved inside one camp, but the grid isn’t built on affection — it’s built on timing, contracts, and the ability to convince multiple decision-makers that you’re ready when the window opens.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has been openly impressed by what he’s seen so far. After Fornaroli’s Barcelona debut, Stella pointed to something teams value almost as highly as raw lap time: the way a driver works.
“It’s a very deserved opportunity,” Stella said in Barcelona. “We have worked with Leonardo for some months now. We have appreciated massively his attitude as a person and as a driver.
“He’s actually a very interesting character. He looks timid, but by far is the most proactive driver in asking the engineers [questions].
“He goes around with his notebook, takes several notes, and as soon as he has an idea, he shares it.
“So he’s a very interesting character, and then when he gets in a car, be it either the simulator, be it in the TPC testing car, or here in a Free Practice 1 session on a current car, is fast.
“Very happy with the attitude, the speed, the consistency. Leonardo is certainly an asset for Formula 1 in the future.”
That description matters because it aligns with what TPC is designed to expose. Over two days, the lap time is only part of the judgement. Teams want to know if a young driver can build a tyre run rather than just spike a sector, whether they can translate feedback into a coherent direction, and whether they understand the difference between “quick” and “useful”. Jerez, with its old-school flow and demand for patience in medium-speed corners, is a good place to see those traits without the distractions of a modern grand prix weekend.
And while nobody at Haas is going to frame this as a live job interview, the timing invites its own conclusions. This is 2026, and the team’s longer-term picture naturally sits in the background of every meaningful mileage opportunity it offers. Esteban Ocon is out of contract for the coming year and has been under pressure from team-mate Oliver Bearman. Haas also has Jack Doohan on its books as reserve this season, but the Australian is still waiting for real-world seat time with his new team.
So yes, Fornaroli’s week at Jerez is “just” a test — but it’s also exactly the sort of test that can turn a driver from an impressive name on a list into a credible option when the driver market starts moving. If he does what Stella suggests he’s been doing all year — ask the right questions, give the engineers something they can build on, and be properly fast when it counts — he won’t just be adding mileage. He’ll be adding leverage.
