Which F1 Rookie Will Have the Biggest Impact in 2015?
On March 15 in Melbourne, three rookies will make their Formula One debuts. Carlos Sainz Jr. and Max Verstappen will be in the cockpit for Toro Rosso, while Felipe Nasr will take the wheel of a Sauber.
All three have been successful in their junior careers, and they combined for 21 wins last season in Formula Renault 3.5, Formula Three and GP2, respectively. But which driver will have the biggest impact in their first F1 season?
As highly touted (and prodigiously talented) as the 17-year-old Verstappen is, it won't be him. Not this year. He may be a future world champion, but he is really still just getting his feet wet in single-seaters. Talent alone is not enough in F1; experience is also important.
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Racing against the best drivers in the world—there will be five world champions on the grid in Australia—is a far cry from F3.
And yes, Kimi Raikkonen only had 23 car races under his belt when he made his F1 debut, but he was unpolished at that stage as well. The raw talent was there, but it needed to be refined. Raikkonen won his first grand prix in his third season, and his world championship did not come until his seventh year in F1.
In Raikkonen's rookie year, he was outscored by his team-mate, Nick Heidfeld—a good driver, sure, but nobody's idea of a superstar.
In fact, of those five champions who will race in 2015, only Sebastian Vettel outscored his team-mate in his debut season (Lewis Hamilton tied Fernando Alonso but was classified ahead with more second-place finishes).
We may see moments of brilliance from Verstappen this year, but there will also be moments when his inexperience shows. He will not have the biggest impact of the three rookies in 2015.
Felipe Nasr has significantly more experience than Verstappen: six full seasons of single-seater racing, including three in GP2.
Last year, he finally scored his first GP2 victories—four, in total—and finished third in the championship.
In 2013, while he was still looking for his first win in the series, NBC's Will Buxton wrote about Nasr on his personal blog, saying, "Good on his tyres, intelligent, consistent, supremely fast…Felipe Nasr may not deliver fireworks. But my word, he delivers."
The 22-year-old Brazilian's talent is not in question, but his killer instinct is. ESPN F1's Nate Saunders noted that "he has an uncanny ability for fading in races—which happened a little too often in GP2—or for driving too conservatively at key points in races."
The other problem for Nasr is that he arrives at Sauber after their worst performance in 22 years of F1 racing, their first without a point.
This season could be even more frustrating for the Swiss team. Without Marussia and Caterham on the grid, they could regularly find themselves last, unless both the car and Ferrari engine have made a big jump from the end of 2014.
Nasr even admitted to the official F1 website that he would rather have stayed at Williams, where he was the test driver last year, saying:
"Of course I wanted to stay here—but they have their commitment with Felipe [Massa] and Valtteri [Bottas] so I had to move on. I could not lose the momentum—I had to make the next step. Here things change very quickly so you better also move fast. One year of full racing is far better than a test role, sitting mostly at the sidelines.
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Nasr has shown that he deserves an F1 drive, but he will not make the biggest impact among the three rookies in 2015, either. His car will see to that.
So that leaves us with Sainz, Verstappen's team-mate at Toro Rosso. Like Nasr, Sainz has plenty of experience in the junior formulas and is a longtime member of Red Bull's vaunted junior programme.
He was a winner in F3, GP3 and last season took the Formula Renault 3.5 championship, which has previously catapulted drivers like Robert Kubica and Kevin Magnussen into F1.
Just 20 years old, the Madrid native is also quite young for F1. No one is talking about that, though, as he will be paired with a driver three years his junior in 2015.
Sainz could have been in F1 even sooner, but he was thoroughly beaten by his GP3 team-mate Daniil Kvyat in 2013. That result convinced Red Bull to give Daniel Ricciardo's vacant Toro Rosso seat to Kvyat in 2014.
When Sebastian Vettel left Red Bull for Ferrari at the end of last season, Kvyat was promoted to the big team and Sainz got the call for Toro Rosso. Now, he just has to prove he belongs.
With two years racing at a higher level than Verstappen has ever raced, Sainz is well-positioned to take the fight to his younger team-mate. If he can finish ahead of the Dutch teenager, it will go a long way to establishing his place in the sport. If not, his F1 career could be short-lived.
But Sainz rose to the challenge last year in Formula Renault 3.5, and his greater experience will give him the edge over Verstappen this year.
Carlos Sainz Jr. will have the biggest impact of the three F1 rookies in 2015. Whether it will translate into a successful F1 career, well, that is not guaranteed...just ask Magnussen, arguably the star of 2014's rookie class, now McLaren's reserve driver.
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