F1 Reserve Driver Explained: The Job and When They Race

On the morning of Friday 8 March 2024 Oliver Bearman, an eighteen-year-old from Chelmsford, was the Formula 2 pole-sitter in Jeddah. By the evening he had qualified a Ferrari eleventh for the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. Carlos Sainz had been withdrawn through illness, Ferrari needed a super licence holder in the car before qualifying began, and Bearman was the name on its reserve list. He finished seventh the following night.

That is the job in its rarest form. An F1 reserve driver is a super licence holder kept on standby to take over a race seat if one of the two regulars is ill, injured or suspended, and most of them never get the call. They spend race weekends in the garage with a headset on, or back at the factory, which for most of the grid means a building in England: Brackley, Woking, Milton Keynes, Grove, Enstone. There they drive the simulator through the night so the race drivers wake up to a better car. The FIA's Sporting Regulations say very little about reserves by name. What they govern is the swap itself: who may race, how many drivers a team may use, and how late a change can be made.

What the F1 reserve driver rules actually allow

The rulebook has no job description for a reserve. It has an entry system, and the reserve exists in the gaps of it.

Each team enters two cars for the championship and nominates the drivers of them. Across a season it may race four drivers in total, the two regulars included. That figure is tighter than it sounds. A team that swaps one driver for performance reasons in the spring and loses another to injury in the autumn has used its allowance, and the regulations say that further changes for reasons of force majeure will be considered separately, which is a polite way of saying the team must ask.

A change of driver may be made at any time before the start of qualifying, or before sprint qualifying at a sprint weekend. There is a cut-off on the eve of the meeting after which the stewards must consent, and when the reason is a doctor's note they do. After qualifying starts, the door is shut. A driver ruled out overnight on Saturday is not replaced; the team starts one car. Williams did exactly that at Melbourne in 2015.

The stand-in is a competitor in full. The regulations state that any new driver may score points, and those points belong to him and to the team in the usual way. What he does not get is a fresh set of hardware. For the purposes of power unit and gearbox allocation the replacement is treated as if he were the original driver, so he inherits whatever engines, turbochargers and energy stores that car has already used, along with any grid penalty coming its way. The tyre allocation carries over on the same principle. A reserve called in on a Saturday morning drives on the sets the regular driver left him.

What the regulations cover	The position
Drivers a team may race in a season	Four, including its two regulars
Latest point for a change at an event	Before qualifying, or sprint qualifying, begins
Late changes	Need the consent of the stewards
Points scored by a stand-in	Count for driver and constructor
Engine, gearbox and tyre allocation	Inherited from the driver replaced
Licence required to race	Full FIA Super Licence
Drivers used in practice only	Do not count towards the four

Two smaller points complete the picture. The stand-in does not borrow the absent driver's race number: the team is allocated spare numbers for the purpose, which is why Bearman's Ferrari carried 38 at Jeddah, and our guide to how career numbers are chosen and reserved covers the system behind that. And the requirement to hold a super licence is absolute. A team cannot promote a talented junior on the day if the FIA has not already issued the document, which is why the points and mileage needed for a super licence shape every reserve list on the grid.

1. 1Driver ruled outA regular is declared unfit by the FIA's medical delegate, withdrawn by the team, or is serving a race ban.
2. 2Team nominates a replacementThe stand-in must already hold a full super licence. No licence, no nomination.
3. 3Stewards consentA change proposed late in the build-up is put to the stewards, who approve it before the driver takes part.
4. 4Allocation carries overThe replacement takes on the car's used engines, gearbox and remaining tyre sets.
5. 5Qualifying beginsFrom this moment the entry is fixed and no further change of driver is accepted.

The sequence the Sporting Regulations imply. The stewards referred to are the panel appointed for that event.

Reserve, test, development and simulator driver: one job or four

Teams hand out these titles as they please, and that is the first thing to understand about them. None is defined by the FIA. A press release announcing a "development driver" tells you what the team wants to call the arrangement and almost nothing about what the driver will do.

There are, though, real differences underneath the labels.

Title	What it normally means	Super licence needed
Reserve driver	Named stand-in for a race seat, present or on call at every Grand Prix	Yes, in full
Test driver	Drives the real car at tyre tests, young driver tests and running in older cars	Not always
Development driver	A looser term, usually factory and simulator work with some track running	No
Simulator driver	Works in the driver-in-the-loop simulator, largely away from the circuit	No
Junior or academy driver	Racing in a feeder series with team backing and some practice outings	Free practice licence for Fridays

A reserve who cannot race is not a reserve, so that title is the only one with a hard condition attached. The others overlap freely. One person can be a team's reserve at the circuit, its test driver when Pirelli wants a day of tyre running, and its simulator driver on a Tuesday in January. Another team splits the work between a veteran who holds the licence and stands by at races, and two youngsters who do the simulator hours.

Why the names differ from team to team

Partly it is history. "Test driver" was the standard title in the years when teams tested constantly and needed someone to do it; when the testing went away the title lingered, then faded. "Third driver" had a specific regulatory meaning in the mid-2000s, described further down, and survives as a loose synonym.

Partly it is marketing. A young driver's sponsors want a Formula 1 title on the overalls, and a team can create one at no cost. The honest test of any of these roles is a single question: if a race driver is ruled out on Saturday morning, whose name goes to the stewards? That person is the reserve. Everyone else has a title.

Where these roles sit inside the wider organisation, alongside race engineers, performance engineers and the strategy group, is set out in our guide to who does what in a Formula 1 team.

A reserve's race weekend, from Thursday briefing to Sunday grid

The reserve's working week at a Grand Prix looks like a race driver's with the driving taken out.

It starts with the engineering meetings on Thursday, where the run plan for practice is set, and continues through every debrief after every session. He listens on the intercom during running, on the same channel as the race engineer, hearing tyre pressures, brake temperatures and balance complaints in real time. The point is not company. If he has to get in the car on Saturday he needs to know what the team tried on Friday and why it was abandoned.

The physical preparation is duller and matters more. A seat is made for him before the season, a carbon shell formed around his body and trimmed to fit the chassis, and it travels to every race in the freight. Pedal positions and the steering wheel grips are recorded. So is the belt adjustment. At intervals he repeats the cockpit extraction test that every driver must pass, climbing out of the car against the clock.

Then there are the procedures. A modern steering wheel carries dozens of settings across its rotary switches and buttons, and the labels differ from team to team. The reserve rehearses them: the launch sequence, the pit-lane limiter, the brake balance and differential changes a driver makes several times a lap, the response to a safety car delta. He practises the radio vocabulary too, because an engineer who says "strat mode five, default bravo one-two" needs an answer, not a question. Readers who want that vocabulary decoded will find it in our glossary of paddock and radio jargon.

1. 1ThursdayAttends the track walk and engineering meetings, and checks that seat, pedals and belts in the spare kit are current.
2. 2Friday practiceListens to both cars on the intercom, sits in the debriefs, and may drive the first session at selected events.
3. 3Friday nightSet-up options from practice are sent to the factory and run in the simulator, by the reserve or a colleague.
4. 4SaturdayOn standby until qualifying starts. After that no change of driver is possible and the pressure lifts.
5. 5SundaySponsor and hospitality duties, the strategy briefing, then the race from the garage with a headset on.

A typical pattern for a reserve travelling with the team. Some stay at the factory for the whole event and do the simulator work described below.

The overnight simulator shift at the factory

Not every reserve travels. The designated stand-in usually attends every race, because a driver who is a long flight away is no use at nine on a Saturday morning. But many teams keep a second driver at base, and for him the weekend happens in a darkened room in Oxfordshire or Northamptonshire.

The simulator is a real monocoque on a motion platform in front of a wraparound screen, running a mathematical model of the car and a laser-scanned model of the circuit. After Friday practice the trackside engineers send back the car's actual behaviour, the model is corrected to match, and the simulator driver then works through the set-up changes the team is considering for Saturday: a stiffer front anti-roll bar, a different wing level, a change of ride height. Each gets a few laps and a verdict. By the time the race drivers arrive at the circuit the next morning, the options have been narrowed.

For a flyaway race in Asia or Australia the time difference turns this into a daytime job. For European rounds it is a night shift. Either way it is the part of the reserve's role that most often changes a result, and no camera sees it. Anthony Davidson, who started 24 Grands Prix, spent years doing this work for Mercedes at Brackley, and teams value the skill separately from raw speed: a simulator driver has to describe precisely what a change did, lap after lap, without drifting. The concentration of this work in a small corner of England is one reason the sport's teams cluster in Motorsport Valley.

Why a stand-in struggles even in a quick car

Start with mileage. The regulations ban testing of the current car outside the official sessions, with narrow exceptions: a short pre-season test, tyre development days run to Pirelli's programme, and promotional filming days capped at a short distance on demonstration tyres. A reserve can drive cars at least two seasons old under the rules on testing previous cars, and those outings are themselves limited. So the stand-in typically arrives with a few hundred kilometres in machinery that is related to, and not the same as, the car he is about to qualify.

Then the cockpit. If the team has made him a seat he is fortunate. If he is borrowed from another team, or called up so late that nothing is prepared, he sits in a shell poured around somebody else's hips and shoulders, padded out with foam. At around 5g under braking that is a matter of bruising by half distance. George Russell, considerably taller than Lewis Hamilton, drove the Mercedes at Sakhir in 2020 in race boots smaller than his own, because his would not fit in a footwell shaped around Hamilton's, and he has said since that squeezing into that cockpit left him with scars.

The set-up is the third handicap and the least visible. A car's balance is developed around its regular driver across months: how much front end he wants on turn-in, how he uses the brakes, where the differential is set for his style on corner exit. The stand-in gets that car. He can ask for changes, but with one practice session, or none, there is no time to explore them, and the engineers will sensibly keep him close to a baseline they understand.

Add the things a regular has stopped noticing. Tyre preparation on an out-lap is a learned routine for each compound and each track temperature. The energy deployment settings change by session. Race starts depend on a clutch bite point found through dozens of practice launches. Pit stops require stopping on marks to within a few centimetres. None of these is difficult for a driver of this standard. All of them together, learned in an afternoon, cost tenths.

Which is why the usual measure of a stand-in is modest. Finishing, keeping the car in one piece and being within half a second of the team-mate is a good weekend's work. The performances described below are remembered because they went well beyond that.

The mandatory rookie practice sessions and the licence behind them

For a decade after the testing ban the sport had a problem it had made for itself: young drivers arrived on the grid having barely driven a current car. The answer came in 2022, when the Sporting Regulations began requiring each team to give up a car in practice to an inexperienced driver. The obligation was doubled for 2025. Each team must now do it four times a season, twice in each car.

"Inexperienced" has a tight definition. The driver must not have started more than two Grands Prix. That lets in a junior with a single emergency appearance behind him and excludes the veteran reserve, which is the intention.

• 4Outings per team each season
• 2Outings per car
• 2Most Grands Prix the rookie may have started

The requirement as set in the Sporting Regulations from the 2025 season. It began in 2022 at half this level.

Teams treat these sessions with mixed feelings. The race driver loses an hour of running at a circuit where he may need it, so the outings are scheduled where the cost is lowest: tracks the regular knows intimately, or weekends late in the year when the championship position is settled. Sprint weekends, with only one practice session, are avoided. For the rookie the hour is rarely a chance to show speed. He is given a programme of aerodynamic rakes, constant-speed runs and a long stint on hard tyres, and a firm instruction to bring the car back.

Even so, these outings are the main reason a modern reserve has any relevant experience at all. An hour in the current car at a real circuit, on real tyres, with the real steering wheel, is worth more than a week of older machinery.

The Free Practice Only super licence

A driver cannot take part in any session of a Grand Prix without an FIA licence for it, and many juniors have not yet met the threshold for the full document. Appendix L of the International Sporting Code therefore provides a lesser one, the Free Practice Only Super Licence. Its requirements have been adjusted over the years. In the version introduced in 2018 the applicant needed either 25 licence points over the previous three seasons, against the forty the full version demands, or six Formula 2 starts, plus 300 kilometres in a representative Formula 1 car.

The limit is in the name. A holder may drive on Friday and cannot be nominated as a replacement for the race. This is the trap in a thin reserve list: a team may have a junior who has done four practice sessions and knows the car better than anyone outside the race line-up, and be unable to use him on Sunday.

Shared reserves and what happens when two teams want one driver

There are more race seats that might fall vacant than there are spare drivers with a super licence, a current seat fit and nothing better to do. So teams pool them.

The usual arrangement follows the engine supply. A manufacturer team has a reserve under contract and makes him available to the customers who buy its power units, on the logic that he already knows the engine's controls and the steering wheel's logic may be related. This is how Nyck de Vries, a Mercedes reserve, came to race a Williams at Monza in 2022, and how Bearman, contracted to Ferrari, drove a Haas at Baku in 2024 when Kevin Magnussen was serving a one-race ban for reaching twelve penalty points on his licence. A year earlier Mick Schumacher, Mercedes' reserve for 2023, had been on call to race for McLaren under the same engine-supply logic.

Nothing in the Sporting Regulations governs these loans. They are private contracts, and the priority clause in them answers the awkward question. The team that employs the driver has first call. If it needs him, the customer looks elsewhere.

The sharpest illustration came in 2020, when illness protocols were removing drivers at days' notice. Racing Point, a Mercedes customer, needed a replacement at Silverstone that August and had contractual access to Mercedes' two reserves. One was committed to the Formula E finale in Berlin. The other no longer met the licence conditions, having not driven a recent car. Racing Point went outside the pool entirely and rang Nico Hülkenberg, who had no contract with anyone.

Four months later the chain ran the other way. Mercedes needed a driver for the Sakhir Grand Prix and chose Russell, who was racing for its customer Williams. Williams released him and promoted its own reserve, Jack Aitken. Haas, the same weekend, replaced Romain Grosjean with Pietro Fittipaldi after Grosjean's accident a week earlier. Three stand-ins on one grid, and each team's choice depended on who had already been taken.

A shared reserve has a practical weakness. He can have a seat made at each team that might use him, but he cannot attend all their briefings, and his simulator time belongs to his employer. When he is lent, he arrives knowing the engine and little else about the car.

Late call-ups that worked: Bearman, de Vries and Russell

Three recent appearances set the standard by which stand-ins are now judged.

Driver	Race	Team	Notice	Qualified	Finished
George Russell	Sakhir 2020	Mercedes	Midweek	2nd	9th, with fastest lap
Nyck de Vries	Monza 2022	Williams	Saturday morning	13th, started 8th	9th
Oliver Bearman	Jeddah 2024	Ferrari	Friday morning	11th	7th
Nico Hülkenberg	Nürburgring 2020	Racing Point	Saturday morning	20th	8th
Stoffel Vandoorne	Bahrain 2016	McLaren	Thursday	12th	10th

Russell at Sakhir is the one that got away. He had the luxury of a few days' notice and three practice sessions, and he used them: second on the grid, 0.026 seconds behind Valtteri Bottas in the other Mercedes, on the short outer layout of the Bahrain circuit. He took the lead at the first corner and held it comfortably. Then a safety car brought both cars into the pits together, the crew fitted a mixed set of tyres including some allocated to Bottas, and Russell had to stop again. He was recovering towards the front when a slow puncture forced one more stop. Ninth place and the point for fastest lap were all he took away. Mercedes signed him to a race seat for 2022.

De Vries at Monza had the oddest preparation. He had driven first practice on the Friday for Aston Martin, as one of that team's rookie outings, and was told on Saturday morning that Alex Albon was unwell and Williams needed him. One hour of practice in a car he had driven once before, at a different circuit. He out-qualified the regular Williams driver, started eighth after penalties for others, and finished ninth. It earned him a full-time drive the next season, which lasted ten races.

Bearman at Jeddah is the purest case, because he was a teenager with no Grand Prix start, on one of the fastest street circuits on the calendar, where the walls are close at more than 180mph. He missed the final part of qualifying by a few hundredths of a second, then drove an unflustered race to seventh, ahead of Lando Norris and Lewis Hamilton. He was the youngest driver to start a Grand Prix for Ferrari.

Bearman, Jeddah 20246points

Hülkenberg, Nürburgring 20204points

Russell, Sakhir 20203points

De Vries, Monza 20222points

Vandoorne, Bahrain 20161points

Vettel, Indianapolis 20071points

Championship points from the single race named. The 2007 figure was scored under an older system that paid eight places; Russell's total includes the fastest-lap point then on offer.

Show the numbers

Points scored by stand-in drivers on the day

Item	Value
Bearman, Jeddah 2024	6points
Hülkenberg, Nürburgring 2020	4points
Russell, Sakhir 2020	3points
De Vries, Monza 2022	2points
Vandoorne, Bahrain 2016	1points
Vettel, Indianapolis 2007	1points

What the three have in common is less romantic than the stories suggest. Each was already embedded in a manufacturer's programme, had recent laps in a contemporary car, and was racing regularly in another series at the time. They were ready because somebody had been paying to keep them ready.

The limiting case: Hülkenberg called on Saturday morning at the Nürburgring

Saturday 10 October 2020, a little before eleven in the morning. Nico Hülkenberg was in Cologne, about an hour's drive from the Nürburgring, where he was due to work as a television pundit for the Eifel Grand Prix. Racing Point telephoned. Lance Stroll was unwell and would not drive. Could he come now?

The circumstances could hardly have been thinner. Friday's two practice sessions had been cancelled because fog grounded the medical helicopter, so the whole field had only the single hour on Saturday morning, and Hülkenberg missed that too. He reached the circuit, was cleared, was strapped into the car, and his first lap of the weekend was a qualifying lap. He set the slowest time, twentieth, within a second of cars that had practised.

On Sunday he finished eighth.

Several things made that possible, and they are worth separating from the legend. He had driven the same car twice at Silverstone two months earlier, standing in for Sergio Pérez, so the seat existed and the steering wheel was familiar. He had more than 170 Grand Prix starts behind him. And the Nürburgring was a circuit he knew from junior categories. Take any of those away and the result would have been different.

The Silverstone outings carry their own lesson about what a stand-in cannot control. At the British Grand Prix, his first weekend back, the car would not fire up in the garage and he never took the start. A week later at the same circuit, in the 70th Anniversary Grand Prix, he qualified third and finished seventh.

There is one closer parallel. At the Hungaroring in 2017 Paul di Resta, Williams' reserve and by then a television commentator, was told on Saturday that Felipe Massa could not continue. Di Resta had never driven that year's car outside the simulator. He went straight into qualifying, lapped within reach of the back of the field, and retired from the race with an oil leak. It remains the clearest picture of the rule at its limit: the regulations permit a change until the moment qualifying starts, and twice in four seasons a driver's first lap of the weekend has come in the session that set his grid position.

Stand-in debuts that started careers: Schumacher at Spa, Vettel at Indianapolis

The most consequential substitution in the sport's history began in a London courtroom. In August 1991 Bertrand Gachot, who drove for the new Jordan team based at Silverstone, was jailed in England after an altercation with a taxi driver. Eddie Jordan needed a driver for the Belgian Grand Prix inside a fortnight.

He took Michael Schumacher, a 22-year-old Mercedes sportscar junior with no Grand Prix experience, after a short test at Silverstone. Schumacher had never raced at Spa-Francorchamps. He qualified seventh, well clear of his experienced team-mate Andrea de Cesaris, in a car that had no business being there. The race lasted a few hundred metres before the clutch failed. It did not matter. By the next Grand Prix, at Monza a fortnight later, he had been signed by Benetton, and Jordan was left arguing about contracts.

Vettel's case was more orderly. He was BMW Sauber's test and reserve driver in 2007, aged nineteen, when Robert Kubica crashed heavily in Montreal and was not cleared to race at Indianapolis a week later. Vettel qualified seventh and finished eighth, which under the points system of the time earned a single point and made him the youngest scorer the championship had then seen. Before the summer was out Toro Rosso had given him a permanent seat.

What those two races had in common

Neither driver was a stopgap chosen for availability. Schumacher was placed by a manufacturer that wanted him in Formula 1 and saw an opening. Vettel was a contracted junior of both BMW and Red Bull with Friday practice outings already behind him. The stand-in appearance was the public confirmation of a decision that had largely been made.

Both also benefited from an era with more track time. Schumacher could be given a private test before his debut. Vettel had done thousands of kilometres of testing. A nineteen-year-old in the same position today would arrive with four practice sessions and a great many simulator hours.

Does the reserve driver job lead to a race seat

Sometimes, and less often than the title implies.

The successes are easy to list. Oscar Piastri spent 2022 as Alpine's reserve and was racing for McLaren the next year. Bearman's Jeddah drive was followed by a Haas contract for 2025. Liam Lawson stood in for five races in 2023, went back to the bench, and was promoted the following autumn. Hülkenberg's four emergency starts across 2020 and 2022 kept his name current through three seasons without a full-time drive and led to a seat at Haas in 2023.

Look at those cases again, though, and a pattern shows. Each driver was a junior champion or an established Grand Prix driver whom a team already wanted. The reserve role held them in place until a seat opened. It did not create the demand.

The other list is longer and quieter. Gary Paffett tested for McLaren for the best part of a decade, won the DTM title either side of that stint, and never started a Grand Prix. Felipe Drugovich won the Formula 2 title in 2022, became Aston Martin's reserve, drove practice sessions and tests for three seasons, and at the end of the 2025 season had still not started a race. There are many more whose names never reached a wider audience.

A blunt judgement follows. The reserve seat is a good place to wait if a team has told you what you are waiting for, and a poor place to wait on hope. Seats open rarely, and when one does the team weighs the reserve against every driver on the market, including the one bringing a title sponsor.

Why most reserves now race somewhere else

A driver who does not race loses sharpness, and teams know it. So the modern reserve usually holds a second job. Stoffel Vandoorne won the Formula E world title in 2022 while serving as a Mercedes reserve. Lawson was contesting Japan's Super Formula series when he was called to Zandvoort. Others race in the World Endurance Championship or in IndyCar.

This suits everybody until the calendars collide. A reserve racing at Le Mans on a Grand Prix weekend is not a reserve that weekend, which is one more reason teams share: the pool has to be deep enough to cover the clashes. It also explains why the path into the role runs through the junior ladder and not around it. A young British driver who wants the job starts where the others did, in karts and then in a series such as British F4, the first rung of the single-seater ladder, collecting the licence points without which no team can name him.

How the role has changed: from unlimited testing to the simulator

In 2004 a Formula 1 test driver could cover more distance in a year than the race drivers did. Testing was unrestricted. The big teams ran separate test crews with their own trucks and engineers, and on a given winter day there might be cars circulating at Silverstone, Jerez, Barcelona and Ferrari's private track at Fiorano at once. Luca Badoer did this for Ferrari for a decade. Pedro de la Rosa and Alexander Wurz did it for McLaren. They knew the cars better than anyone, and when a race driver was hurt they stepped in fully prepared: de la Rosa finished fifth and set the fastest lap at Bahrain in 2005 as a one-race substitute.

Period	How a third driver got time in the car
Up to 2008	Private testing with full-time test teams; unlimited until 2004, then capped by agreements between the teams
2004 to 2006	A third car in Friday practice for teams outside the previous season's top four
From 2009	In-season testing of the current car banned, with narrow exceptions
From 2022	Each team obliged to run a rookie in practice twice a season
From 2025	Rookie obligation doubled to four outings per team

The Friday third car was a short-lived middle step. For three seasons from 2004, teams that had finished outside the top four of the previous year's constructors' championship could run an extra car in Friday practice, driven by someone other than the race pair. It gave smaller teams data and gave young drivers a stage. Anthony Davidson made his name in one at BAR. Kubica and Vettel both appeared in BMW Sauber's, and Vettel topped a practice session in Turkey in 2006 at nineteen.

Then the costs were cut. The third cars went, and from 2009 in-season testing was banned almost entirely. The effect on stand-ins was immediate and brutal. That summer Ferrari needed a replacement for the injured Felipe Massa and turned to Badoer, who had not raced for ten years and, under the new ban, had hardly driven the car. He qualified last at Valencia and last at Spa, and was replaced.

Simulators filled the gap, and they changed what teams want from a third driver. The test driver of 2004 was valued for stamina and consistency over hundreds of laps. The reserve of today is valued for the precision of his feedback in a virtual car and for his ability to be anonymous and competent at a few hours' notice. The first job made its holders deeply familiar with the machinery. The second keeps them close to it and mostly out of it, which is why a good stand-in performance now attracts more notice than it did when preparation was routine.

For more on how the championship works away from the race itself, see our motorsport coverage or return to the England sport guides hub.