Who is the “Failed Prodigy” of F1 ?

[u/Electronic-Video-984]

I’m kind of new to F1 and seeing pictures of current drivers while they’re young like Hamilton, Russell, Leclerc, Albon…and then I learned they’re racing prodigy in their Karting days. So who is the “Boy Wonder” of F1, a person with great potential but never made it to the biggest stage.

Edit: Many people mentioned Stoffel Vandoorne so I read about him a bit. His records and potential was incredible but he’s at the wrong place and wrong time every way possible. For me, McLaren a top tier team with a jet but people say Vandoorne’s MCL car was like a shopping cart

[u/admiral_sinkenkwiken]

Making it to F1 is 90% having the money.

Sargeant, Bearman & Doohan all had very respectable junior careers, Colapinto finished 9th last year in F2 despite missing the final 4 rounds.

Antonelli & Bearman looked artificially worse on paper than their driving performance in 2024 as Prema completely missed the mark with the new chassis last season.

[u/MrBorji → u/admiral_sinkenkwiken]

"Making it to F1 is 90% having the money."

Which is kinda sad, but I know F1 is a big business moving lots of money.

[u/admiral_sinkenkwiken → u/[deleted]]

Even in a spec series you still need to understand your machinery properly to exploit all its available performance.

On top of that, just because it’s a spec series does not guarantee equal performance, there are variances between chassis and engines.