F2 title contender and McLaren junior Alex Dunne caught the eye of the F1 paddock with his superb run in FP1 at the Austrian GP, including team principal Andrea Stella.
As part of the mandatory rookie running all teams must do, the Irish driver took Lando Norris’ car for opening practice. He was the first driver to represent Ireland in an official session since Ralph Firman at the 2003 Japanese GP.
After some runs with aero rakes and doing constant speed testing, the 19-year-old got his opportunity to showcase his speed on lower fuel later in the session. He started on hards, before switching to lightly scrubbed softs.
On the hards, Dunne was 0.106s slower than Piastri who used mediums for run 1. When they turned to the softs, the gap was only 0.069s as the Irishman went 4th. Although his time came 6 minutes later than the Australian’s, he had already done a timed lap before that. The first soft tyre attempt was good enough for P9.
While there is the strong possibility he ran a bit less fuel and had a tad more power, the fact Alex Dunne was the fastest driver through high speed corners was eye-opening.
Andrea Stella discusses the performance of Alex Dunne in FP1 at the F1 Austrian GP
Asked about the job performed by Alex Dunne in a print media session at the Red Bull Ring, Andrea Stella lauded the Irishman for what he did. Alongside his rapid lap, he also praised his diligence in the first 25 minutes of FP1.
“Well, you give me the opportunity to definitely praise and congratulate with the work that Alex has done yesterday in the free practice one session.
“He’s been first of all very precise with the work that we have prepared for him, which wasn’t necessarily work aimed at performance, it was more data acquisition and some testing.
“And there’s a difficulty that we cannot see from outside when you do this kind of work, which is actually operating all the changes on the steering wheel while you’re doing some constant speed and you have all the other cars going, and Alex has executed this perfectly, like all the changes they were absolutely spot on.
“Then once we gave him the possibility to express some of his speed in performance runs, that was simply nothing short of impressive.
“I have to say, in terms of the lap times that he was able to achieve, and also in terms of the increments and improvements from one lap to the other, especially when engineers were giving suggestion and he was able to make that.”
Andrea Stella credits various McLaren programmes for helping Alex Dunne
Alex Dunne joined the McLaren junior programme during his 2024 F3 season ahead of the Imola round. While the results on paper last year were not great, the Irishman showed a lot of speed and promise. Mistakes by driver and team cost him quite a few points.
In fact, according to highly respected BBC F1 journalist Andrew Benson, McLaren had considered dropping Dunne from their programme at the end of 2024.
He ultimately stayed on into 2025 as driver coach Warren Hughes persuaded them that he has the speed to be a serious candidate for F1. His current form in the Formula 2 season is showing that.
Dunne did TPC running at Zandvoort and Austin ahead of his FP1 debut at the Red Bull Ring.
“But let me also take the opportunity to praise the work of the teams we have around our young talents, first of all the driver development programme, which seems like to be very effective in growing the talents that entered our programme.
“Then Alex has been exposed also to the activities with the TPC team, testing the previous cars in a couple of occasions, and this has put him up to speed in terms of driving a Formula 1 car.
“And then there’s been quite a lot of work at the simulator, with Alex spending a few days there, and like you say, this has helped us in terms of his testing from a simulator point of view, but there’s also been good work to develop his driving characteristics, driving precision, such that when you have a day like yesterday, and you have just a few laps to be fast, he was immediately on pace.”
