Ferrari will hand Dino Beganovic another meaningful slice of Friday running at the Austrian Grand Prix, with the Swede set to take over Charles Leclerc’s car for FP1 at the Red Bull Ring.
It’s becoming a familiar rhythm at Maranello. Beganovic, now 22 and racing in Formula 2, has quietly been one of Ferrari’s go-to choices whenever the regulations force a seat swap. He made two FP1 outings last season — both in Leclerc’s car in Bahrain and Austria — and returned earlier this month in Barcelona, this time replacing Lewis Hamilton.
That Barcelona cameo wasn’t a token gesture either. Beganovic ended the session classified eighth, within roughly nine-tenths of Leclerc, who was third. In modern F1 practice terms, that’s a respectable day’s work for a stand-in who’s being asked to jump into a front-running car, learn the tyre behaviour on the fly and still deliver usable feedback.
The timing is notable because Barcelona was also the weekend Hamilton finally snapped his two-year winless run, converting a Friday that began with him watching from the garage into a record-extending 106th grand prix victory. It was a result with a broader significance for Ferrari too: their first win since Carlos Sainz triumphed at the 2024 Mexico City Grand Prix.
Austria will be Beganovic’s next step in that same story — not because it directly affects Sunday, but because these mandatory rookie sessions are no longer a mild inconvenience teams can shrug off. Under the current rules, each team must run a rookie — defined as a driver with no more than two grand prix starts — on four occasions during the season, split evenly across both cars. Ferrari are working through that requirement in a structured way, and this outing means Leclerc and Hamilton will each have to sit out just one more FP1 across the remaining 14 rounds of 2026.
For Leclerc, the interruption comes at a slightly awkward moment. He started the season sharply with podiums in Australia and Japan, but the last few weeks have been messier. Monaco ended with a crash after the track surface began to break up, and Barcelona brought another stumble when he had an accident in qualifying following a mistake. None of that is catastrophic in isolation, but it’s the sort of run that forces a driver into damage limitation mode — and giving away Friday mileage, however brief, doesn’t help.
There’s also been a technical undercurrent to Leclerc’s recent weekends. In Barcelona he tried Carbone Industrie brake discs for the first time, and Ferrari’s current mix of brake materials — switching between CI and long-time supplier Brembo — is understood to be an important part of the performance picture. It’s been linked in the paddock to Hamilton’s recent upswing in form, which only increases the sensitivity around how Ferrari split their development and how quickly each side of the garage converges on the same solutions.
That’s the slightly uncomfortable reality of Ferrari in 2026: the team finally has a win on the board again and a seven-time champion who’s found some momentum, but it’s happening during a stretch where Leclerc has looked a touch out of sync with the machinery and the weekend flow. In that context, the rookie FP1 programme isn’t just about ticking a regulatory box — it’s another variable in an already delicate balancing act.
Elsewhere on the Red Bull Ring paddock, Ferrari won’t be the only team putting a younger driver in the spotlight. Aston Martin will run Jak Crawford in Lance Stroll’s AMR26 for FP1, Williams will hand Luke Browning track time in place of Sainz, and Audi will place Paul Aron in Gabriel Bortoleto’s car. With so many teams rotating seats at the same venue, Austria’s opening hour is likely to feel less like a conventional FP1 and more like a coordinated industry-wide audition — useful for the teams, but a compromised data-gathering session for the regulars.
Leclerc, at least, has the comfort of longer-term security. He signed a new Ferrari contract ahead of Monaco, and the agreement is understood to keep him at the team beyond the 2030 season — a major commitment in an era where even star drivers often keep their options open.
But contracts don’t score points, and they don’t create clean weekends. As Ferrari arrive in Spielberg with Hamilton freshly back in the winner’s circle and Leclerc needing a reset, the team’s Friday plan tells its own story: develop the next generation, satisfy the rulebook, and try not to let the present tense slip away in the process.
