Arvid Lindblad was announced as a Racing Bulls Formula 1 driver for the 2026 season on Tuesday, becoming the latest Red Bull Junior Team prospect to make the move from F2 to the pinnacle of motorsport. Feeder Series traces the path the 18-year-old Briton took through the sport’s junior ranks to realise his F1 dreams.

By Martin Lloyd, Calla Kra-Caskey and Michael McClure

Lindblad, who currently sits sixth in the F2 standings for Campos Racing, will partner Liam Lawson at the Racing Bulls squad, one of two F1 teams owned by Austrian energy drinks company Red Bull GmbH.

Lindblad was listed with car number 41 in Racing Bulls’ announcement of his seat. A contract length for Lindblad, set to be the only rookie on the grid, was not announced.

As part of the same set of announcements made by Red Bull today, 2 December, current Racing Bulls driver Isack Hadjar will receive a promotion to Red Bull Racing to drive alongside four-time F1 champion Max Verstappen. The string of moves means Yuki Tsunoda, Verstappen’s current teammate, is set to be on the sidelines after five years in the sport but will remain at Red Bull Racing as a test and reserve driver.

Lindblad’s meteoric rise has perhaps only been matched by Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli in recent years. As recently as 2022, Lindblad was competing in karting; three years later, he made his F1 practice session debut at Silverstone. He now joins F1 as the youngest driver on the grid and the first Racing Bulls driver to be born after the team, then called Minardi, was acquired by Red Bull in 2006 and rebranded to Toro Rosso, Italian for red bull.

Lindblad will likely become the fourth F2 graduate in the last two years to step up to F1 without being in the top five at the time of promotion. Former Prema F2 duo Antonelli, now at Mercedes, and Ollie Bearman, now at Haas, finished the 2024 season sixth and 12th respectively, while current Alpine driver Franco Colapinto was sixth at the time of his mid-year promotion to a Williams F1 seat last August.

The top three finishing positions in the F2 standings grant 40 FIA Super Licence points – the number required to compete in F1. Lindblad, however, passed this total at the start of 2025 with an accumulation of points from previous results in Italian F4, F4 UAE, F3 and FRegional Oceania, which he won in February. 

Once Lindblad had the required licence points in hand, his F2 championship position ostensibly had little bearing on his F1 chances. The Campos driver has performed decently but has not provided the championship challenge that was perhaps expected of him. His win from pole in Barcelona represents his only feature race podium so far in the series. He has no other poles and only three sprint race podiums, one being a victory in Jeddah that made him F2’s youngest winner at 17 years and 254 days.

After 12 rounds, Lindblad was three points behind teammate Pepe Martí, who then withdrew from the series to join Kiro Race Co in Formula E. Having overtaken Martí with a fourth-place finish in the Qatar feature race on Sunday, the Briton could yet rise to fifth in the drivers’ standings, but doing so requires him to outscore Dunne by at least 28 points in the season finale in Abu Dhabi this weekend.

Despite his at times underwhelming F2 performances, Lindblad’s F1 move has been in the works for many months, as evidenced by Red Bull’s decision to send him to Oceania to secure his Super Licence at the start of this year. It marks the culmination of five years of work with the Red Bull Junior Team for the self-assured Lindblad, who – as a karting prodigy in 2021 – told current F1 points leader Lando Norris, “I want you to remember me. I’ll see you in five years.” And so he will on the grid in Melbourne in three months’ time.

Lindblad’s junior career

Surrey native Lindblad – born 8 August 2007 – has always raced under a British licence, though that fact alone belies his multinational upbringing. His father, Stefan Lindblad, is a Swedish national; his mother, Anita Ahuja, was born in England to Indian parents. The family now lives outside Lisbon, Portugal. 

Lindblad’s first steps in motorsport were in karting aged five at a local rental karting track. He began competing in bambino karts at age six and spent the next few years making his way up the karting ranks in the United Kingdom.

In 2018, at the age of 11, Lindblad won the British Karting Championships title in the IAME Cadet class with Oliver Rowland Motorsport, whose eponymous founder created the team in 2017 to support Lindblad’s karting career. The reigning Formula E champion, a highly rated prospect on the junior ladder in the mid-2010s, has mentored Lindblad ever since. 

That was also the year of his European karting debut, and the following year he began winning over there too. Individual victories in OK-Junior in the WSK Euro Series and FFSA Coupe de France preceded a dominant championship win in the pandemic-affected 2020 WSK Super Master Series. Those results, and a runner-up finish in the FIA Karting European Championship behind Ugo Ugochukwu, caught the attention of Red Bull Junior Team adviser Helmut Marko, who signed the then-13-year-old to the programme over the winter.

Lindblad’s 2021, his first year with the Austrian marque’s backing, was particularly successful. In addition to winning the WSK Euro Series and the WSK Final Cup in the OK class, Lindblad finished third in both the FIA Karting European Championship and World Championship despite being one of the youngest drivers in the senior karting field. 

While continuing to compete in karting in 2022, Lindblad began to switch his focus to car racing, testing F4 machinery extensively with Van Amersfoort Racing over the late spring and summer after recovering from a broken thumb and tissue damage sustained in a February karting crash. Just a week after finishing third in the FIA Karting World Cup’s KZ2 class, Lindblad made his single-seater debut with Van Amersfoort in Italian F4 at the Red Bull Ring, a month after his 15th birthday. 

Lindblad took a best result of seventh in the first race at Monza. Despite only competing in eight of 20 possible races, Lindblad finished 17th in the standings, ahead of teammates Jules Castro and Emerson Fittipaldi Jr, who had both competed in every round of the season, and Arias Deukmedjian, whom he replaced. 

The then 15-year-old’s talent was clear, and he joined Prema Racing for a full campaign in 2023 after starting his year in the Middle East with Hitech. This was on paper Lindblad’s real breakout year; he finished fifth in F4 UAE, fourth in Euro 4 and third in Italian F4, then capped off his F4 tenure by taking pole position for the Macau F4 invitational and leading every lap of both the qualifying race and main race.

Yet his main campaign in Italy was also the first indication of a worrying pattern of late-season slumps that would come to define his junior career.

Lindblad was imperious in the first four Italian F4 rounds, taking 10 podiums from 12 races, including six wins and a clean sweep in Monza. He was a clear favourite for the championship at this point, but thereafter, he never again stood on the rostrum, hamstringing his title charge. Both teammate Ugo Ugochukwu and eventual champion Kacper Sztuka leapfrogged him in the final three rounds, with the Polish driver’s results creating a remarkable 165-point swing during that time. 

Even though Lindblad didn’t win the Italian F4 title in the end, Red Bull had seen enough from him to place him in F3 for 2024, again with Prema. He finished fourth in the championship, with the clear highlight being his double win at home at Silverstone that made him the first driver to take both wins in a weekend in the current iteration of F3. But he did not scored again in the six races that followed as the second half of his season again proved to be his downfall.

By this point, Red Bull had begun to place their drivers with Campos in F2, and they had a vacancy emerging with Isack Hadjar set to be promoted to F1 for the 2025 season. Having proven his pace from the outset in F3 – becoming the series’ youngest-ever victor aged 16 years and 206 days when he won on debut in Bahrain – Lindblad was placed alongside fellow Red Bull junior Martí for his rookie F2 campaign in 2025.

But first, he had another series to conquer. At the postseason F2 tests in December of 2024, Marko made the decision for Lindblad to race in FR Oceania, a winter championship. Lindblad’s only prior experience at the regional single-seater level came from three rounds in FR Middle East in early 2024, a campaign as inconsistent as it was puzzling. Yet in New Zealand, Lindblad thrived, taking six victories and a further six podiums to seal the title – his first in single-seaters.

Besides helping him keep sharp over the winter, FR Oceania also offered Lindblad a vital opportunity to earn up to 18 FIA Super Licence points. It was, as Lindblad said at the time, the main reason he entered the series, and his championship victory was enough to tip him past the sum of 40 required to earn the licence needed for an F1 race seat. 

At the time, Lindblad, who turned 18 in August, was still too young to qualify for a Super Licence. But in June of this year, following a petition made three months before by Red Bull Racing, Lindblad was granted an exemption, allowing him to take part in free practice one sessions for Red Bull and serve as F1 sister squad Racing Bulls’ reserve driver before his 18th birthday. 

In 2025, he drove in the first practice sessions in Great Britain, replacing Tsunoda, and Mexico City, replacing Verstappen.

Alongside his F1 preparations, Lindblad has still had an F2 campaign to contest. He started off the season with 10 points finishes in the first 11 races, which included both of his wins, and ran as high as third in the standings after his Barcelona victory. But as in previous years, he struggled in the second half of the season, scoring in just five of 14 races since.

There’s been some bad luck in the mix as well. Lindblad was in line for another victory at Spa-Francorchamps – inherited after original winner Alex Dunne received a penalty – but was disqualified post-race for a tyre pressure infringement.

In Lusail, Campos teammate Martí was replaced by Nikola Tsolov, Lindblad’s close friend and fellow Red Bull junior. Tsolov outqualified Lindblad by 10 places on debut, but an excellent recovery drive by Lindblad from 17th to fourth meant he led his teammate to a double points finish, keeping Campos in contention for the teams’ title. Feeder Series understands Tsolov is being lined up to step up as a future reserve driver for Racing Bulls.

Lindblad holds the records for youngest winner in both F2 and F3 and could add F1 to that should he win either of the first two rounds of 2026, when F1’s technical regulations overhaul comes into effect. The soon-to-be Racing Bulls driver will become the first teenager to have raced for the Faenza-based squad since Verstappen, who made his F1 debut with the team in 2015. 

Lindblad is also set to become F1’s first-ever driver to have been born after two others on the grid made their F1 debuts, those being two-time champion Fernando Alonso in 2001 and seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton in 2007. Lindblad will join Hamilton, Norris, Bearman and George Russell as the fifth Briton on the grid, making 2026 set to be the first season since 2014 in which five or more drivers raced under the same flag in at least one race.

Header photo credit: Red Bull Content Pool