McLaren’s Formula E team announced Tuesday afternoon that F2 rookie Taylor Barnard will drive for the team in the 2024–25 season, joining returning driver Sam Bird.

By Michael McClure

Barnard, currently racing for AIX Racing in Formula 2, sits 20th after 10 rounds of the season, having taken his only win of the campaign in the sprint race at Monaco.

Barnard – who hails from Norwich, England – was announced alongside fellow Briton Bird, who is set to start his second season at the team in December. Barnard will replace Jake Hughes, who is leaving for Maserati after taking four poles and one podium with McLaren.

Barnard has served as McLaren’s reserve driver for the 2023–24 Formula E season. The 20-year-old joins the team off the back of a three-round substitute appearance this year in place of Bird, who broke his hand in an accident in free practice on the Saturday of the Monaco E-Prix weekend.

Barnard finished 14th in the race, while on his next appearance at the Berlin double-header held 11 and 12 May, he finished 10th and eighth. Those results made him Formula E’s youngest points scorer after he had already become the first driver born in the 21st century to race in the series.

Barnard’s move to McLaren means that he will miss the Formula 2 season finale in Abu Dhabi, which clashes with Formula E’s season opener in São Paulo. AIX have yet to announce a replacement.

Barnard had been a protégé of Nico Rosberg’s during what was a glittering karting career. A multiple champion in Britain, Barnard also took back-to-back wins in the WSK Open Cup and WSK Champions Cup in 2019 and 2020 while in senior karting. He placed fourth and second in the FIA Karting European Championship and World Championship respectively in 2019, followed by second- and fifth-place finishes in those same series in 2020.

After contesting eight Italian F4 races with AKM Motorsport in the second half of the 2020 season, Barnard stepped up to single-seaters full-time in 2021 for a season in ADAC F4 with BWR Motorsports. He missed two rounds because of budget issues and finished 17th in the standings with a best finish of fourth in the Spielberg season opener.

For 2022 he moved across to PHM Racing, which had bought the F4 assets of Mücke Motorsport over the winter. The nonprofit German team intended to give drivers with low budget a chance to race in junior single-seaters.

That year Barnard took part in all of F4 UAE, Italian F4 and ADAC F4. Though he scored a win in Abu Dhabi in the UAE and a podium in Vallelunga in Italy, his German campaign was his strongest. He finished with five wins, 10 total podiums and 266 points, 47 points behind Mercedes junior Andrea Kimi Antonelli.

In the winter of 2023, he reprised his rivalry with Antonelli in Formula Regional Middle East and kept the Italian driver honest in the title battle until the final round in Abu Dhabi. The PHM driver amassed two wins and five further podiums and finished second overall, 40 points behind Antonelli.

That FR season came in preparation for his main campaign in F3 at Jenzer Motorsport with support from PHM, which had also launched its own F3 and F2 teams from the ashes of Charouz Racing System.

The highlight of his F3 season was the penultimate round at Spa, where he finished second in the sprint race and won the feature race after a tyre gamble in a wet-dry race paid off. That result was Jenzer’s first victory in the series since Yuki Tsunoda’s win at Monza in 2019.

Barnard also added a third-place finish in the feature race at Monza to his tally. He scored in nine of the season’s 18 races to come 10th in the standings.

While Barnard was initially expected to continue in F3 at PHM’s own team for 2024, he instead moved up to the F2 squad, which was renamed AIX Racing in May after the Emirati investment firm’s takeover. Barnard was the last driver announced on the grid, with the news coming less than four weeks before the season opener, and had considerably less preparation than his peers after not taking part in 2023 post-season testing.

His F2 season has been a difficult one save for his victory at Monaco. In total, he has scored 18 points, 10 of which came from his Monaco win, and trails teammate Joshua Dürksen, likewise a rookie, by one place and seven points in the standings.

Earlier in 2024, Barnard had also competed in Formula Regional Middle East for a second time with PHM. He came second once again with five wins, trailing rookie champion Tuukka Taponen by 79 points.

With the McLaren announcement, Barnard becomes the second driver on the 2024 F2 grid to have his professional racing future secured, following Haas’s announcement in July that Ferrari junior Ollie Bearman would be racing for the American team on a multi-year deal beginning with the 2025 F1 season.

Antonelli, Barnard’s longtime rival and another current F2 rookie, is widely expected to be announced for a Mercedes F1 seat in the near future.

Header photo credit: McLaren Formula E Team