A staple of Ferrari's Formula 1 simulator team and one of its leading Hypercar drivers is finally making his F1 weekend debut at the Mexican Grand Prix.
Antonio Fuoco will replace Lewis Hamilton for the opening practice session, driving on an F1 weekend for the very first time, having made his F1 test debut more than 10 years ago.
Those familiar with Formula 2 may simply associate Fuoco with being the team-mate Charles Leclerc smashed on his way to the crown in his ultra-impressive title-winning season in 2017.
But to simply think of Fuoco as the driver Leclerc blew away would do an injustice to one of the most highly rated prospects to come out of karting in the early 2010s.
Fuoco's Ferrari journey
Before Leclerc properly caught Ferrari's attention in 2015, it was Fuoco, along with fellow Italian Raffaele Marciello (another great F1 'what if?'), who was Ferrari's leading junior light.
Ferrari signed a 16-year-old Fuoco before he'd even made his proper single-seater debut.
Fuoco emerged champion in his maiden year on the junior ladder - in the now defunct Formula Renault 2.0 Alps series - where he beat off the more experienced Luca Ghiotto and a field that included an interloping Pierre Gasly.
The following year, he raced against and regularly beat drivers including Max Verstappen - (and the likes of The Race's Ben Anderson) - in the Ferrari Driver Academy-organised Florida Winter Series and later renewed that Verstappen competition in a vintage Formula 3 season where he was team-mate to champion Esteban Ocon.
Fuoco won on his first F3 weekend and ultimately finished fifth, two places behind Verstappen, but as the other standout rookie in a stacked field.
That prompted Ferrari to give him his maiden F1 test at the Red Bull Ring in June 2015, while Fuoco was only 19 and competing in the third-tier in GP3.
That maiden GP3 campaign didn’t go to plan (no victories and sixth in the championship he expected to fight for), but he had a more respectable second season in 2016, finishing third behind Leclerc and Alex Albon, and ahead of drivers such as Jake Dennis, Jack Aitken and Nyck de Vries.
Fuoco tested for Ferrari's F1 team again in Barcelona during 2016 but by then Leclerc had been signed and quickly established himself as Ferrari's next big thing.
Then came that 2017 year where Leclerc and Fuoco - still good friends to this day - became team-mates in F2 as part of Prema's all-Ferrari backed line-up.
Leclerc's supremacy over Fuoco and the entire F2 grid secured him F1 graduation with Sauber, but Fuoco's season was far rockier. Much like in F3 and GP3, Fuoco had plenty of speed, but consistent execution proved tricky with a single, slightly fortuitous feature race win at Monza, where Leclerc and de Vries collided on the final lap, and initial victor Ghiotto was penalised post-race.
Fuoco stuck around for a second F2 season in 2018 with newcomer Charouz and did a perfectly respectable job (two sprints wins) in another stacked field, but it was clear his dreams of racing in F1 were over.
That didn't stop him from becoming a valuable part of Ferrari's F1 simulator and development team, though, as Ferrari had long rated Fuoco's ability in and out of the car.
That prompted further F1 tests, including the post-season Abu Dhabi ones in 2020, 2021 and 2024, and led to Fuoco becoming a key component of Ferrari's return to the Le Mans 24 Hours.
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Given his junior single-seater record, it came as no surprise that Fuoco was among the drivers selected for Ferrari's World Endurance Championship Hypercar programme, even though his endurance and prototype experience was rather limited.
Yet from the very start, he established himself as the undisputed benchmark for outright pace within the Italian team.
His debut came in March 2023, and so did his first pole position, on the notoriously demanding Sebring Raceway. He repeated the feat three months later at Le Mans, beating team-mate Alessandro Pier Guidi by seven tenths of a second in qualifying before setting the fastest lap of the race four days later.
Two more pole positions followed: one at Imola in 2024 and another this year at Spa-Francorchamps.
On one lap, he was absolutely untouchable in the early phase of the programme. Today, only ex-F1 driver Antonio Giovinazzi has managed to match him on raw pace.
Arguably the standout driver of the 2023 Le Mans 24 Hours, Fuoco had his hopes of victory dashed when his car suffered a mechanical issue during the night. He made amends the following year, winning alongside Miguel Molina and Nicklas Nielsen, whose consistency was instrumental in that success.
However, Fuoco has occasionally struggled to balance speed with composure. At Imola this year, for instance, his car was forced to start from the back of the grid after all four of his qualifying laps were deleted for exceeding track limits. An unforgivable mistake given Ferrari's dominant pace, particularly on a circuit where overtaking is notoriously difficult.
In the race itself, he was handed a penalty after sending Sebastien Buemi's Toyota off the track while attempting to seize fifth place, leaving Italy empty-handed. Combined with the disqualification of his car from the Le Mans 24 Hours - due to a rear wing that no longer met flexibility regulations following the loss of several screws - Fuoco is no longer in contention for the world title ahead of the Bahrain finale.
Nevertheless, he remains the Ferrari Hypercar driver with the highest reputation in the paddock, thanks to his undeniable outright speed. He is one of the benchmarks - if not the benchmark - of the 499P project.
A well-earned reward
It's not going to be career-changing, given he's already had hundreds of laps behind the wheel of F1 cars, but Fuoco being able to make his F1 weekend debut is a just reward for the hard work he's put in to Ferrari over the past decade.
It's unlikely he'll get anywhere near the mileage in a single practice session that he would in a proper test, but it's a nice bit of prestige for Fuoco to share the track with some of F1's best drivers, given he's currently one of the fastest drivers outside of F1.
You could very easily slot Fuoco into that group of drivers who, in slightly different circumstances, would have ended up in F1 in the 2010s. Think Marciello, Antonio Felix da Costa, maybe even Alex Palou.
Being at a different team at a crucial time - for example, if Fuoco hadn't joined Carlin just before it withdrew from GP3 in 2015 - could've made all the difference, and the quality of his contemporaries (Verstappen, Leclerc, Ocon, etc) only makes his performances look more impressive in hindsight.
That's not to say his career is a failure by any means. Behind the scenes, he's contributed to plenty of Ferrari's F1 successes and, more importantly, some of its early Hypercar dominance.
So while this FP1 outing isn't going to suddenly transform his F1 seat propsects, it's going to be a well-deserved, most public outing yet and end the wait for a long-overdue Ferrari debut.
