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The original was posted on /r/formula1 by /u/Stumpy493 on 2024-08-27 18:38:29+00:00.

With the promotion of Bearman, Colapinto and likely Antonelli, this season marks a stark change to how drivers have been promoted from F2/GP2.

Historically success in the second tier didn’t guarantee an F1 drive, but failing to succeed definitely guaranteed you wouldn’t make it to F1.

This even continued last year with Pourchaire who looked nailed on for an F1 seat, failed to impress and missed out. Drugovich didn’t do enough to convince.

Looking back we had only pay drivers being promoted from outside the top 3 finishing positions in any season (and logan) :

• Vandoorne came in as champion.
• Gasly as Champion
• Giovinazzi as 2nd
• Leclerc as champion
• Russell as champion
• Norris as 2nd
• Albon as third
• De Vries as champion
• Latifi as 2nd
• Schumacher as champion
• Tsunoda as 3rd
• Mazepin as 5th
• Piastri as champion
• Zhou as third
• Lawson as third
• Sergeant as 4th
• Doohan as third

Then suddenly the only people making it out of F2 are 6th, 7th and 15th.

It will be interesting how these prospects do and see if the F1 teams assessment of them was accurate or misplaced.

But I feel the value of F2 as a competitive series will be greatly hurt by this and drivers will be wondering why should they spend the vast sums of money to race in it?