By Victoria Taylor
The last Irish driver to run a race in Formula One was Eddie Irvine. Born in Northern Ireland in 1965 Irvine was placed far from the ideal conditions to succeed in a notoriously elitist and nepotism driven sport like Formula one. Despite this he found his way into the sport and stayed there for a decade, at the height of his career driving for Ferrari alongside Michael Schumacher and coming runner up in the 1999 World Championship to Häkkinen.
The situation in Ireland, especially in the North has improved from Irvine’s day but until this point we still have not seen another driver from the country compete at the highest level of motor racing. Ireland is small and has very little infrastructure in regard to things like training academies and tracks that allow children to get into karting competitively. To have any shot young talents must go to England or even further afield.
On top of that the island has its financial struggles. The North’s economy depends largely on supplementary payments from the English government while much of the South’s industry is controlled by large American corporations. This means that young aspiring Irish drivers do not come with the same level of inbuilt monetary support and attractive investment from their home nation that other drivers often receive to help bolster their careers.
Despite that Ireland has its own longstanding traditions in motorsports from TT racing to sports cars to rally racing and a loyal fanbase that have an immense amount of national pride and support to throw behind the young drivers looking to represent their country on an International stage.
Recently these fans have been given new hope to see their countries talent on the biggest stage of all for the first time since Irvine. This hope comes in the form of Alex Dunne, who made his F1 debut during Practice at the Austrian GP this year and Fionn McLaughlin who won the British F4 title this year and has recently been announced to be driving for HiTech in Formula 3 for the 2026 season.
Dunne is nineteen years old and from Offaly in the South of the Island. His climb up the ladder of single seater racing truly started in 2022 when he competed in and won the British F4 championship, he them competed in GB3 during the 2023 season where he finished runner-up with five wins to his name before progressing to Formula 3 with MP Motorsports. Dunne’s 2024 season was largely unremarkable with him finishing 14th overall in the driver’s standings, however, a few key moments such as a podium in the Barcelona sprint and a front row start in Spa were enough to convince Rodin Motorsports to promote him to Formula 2 for the 2025 season.
It has been this F2 season that has really seen Dunne’s name become known in the wider motorsport’s community outside of just feeder series fanatics and Die-hard Irish fans. The nineteen-year-old won his second ever Feature length race in Sakhir with an eight second lead and quickly followed it with a second win in Imola after starting fifth which put him in the lead of the championship. It was immediately clear that Dunne was inherently fast and would be in contention for the title over the course of the season. Despite this his raw speed was tempered by several different racing incidents and a reputation gain for being ‘irresponsible’ after a ten-place grid penalty for an incident in Monaco followed by a ten second race penalty at Spa only a few races later.
Even after the incident in Monaco Dunne, at the time a McLaren development driver, was offered the opportunity to make his F1 debut on the Friday of the Austrian GP during FP1. If you’re in the motorsports world and didn’t know his name before that session then you certainly knew it afterwards.
The rookie managed to take fourth place during the session, only a tenth of a second behind the time of current championship leader Oscar Piastri, this is highly unusual. Normally during these rookie sessions we expect to see the stand-in drivers somewhere towards the back of the pack as far as timing goes, focusing on data collection and helping with set-up while gaining experience rather than doing fast laps. Alex Dunne’s P4 caught the eye of the racing world for its rarity as well as garnering praise both from McLaren team members and Lando Norris, the driver whose car he was borrowing.
Most recently Dunne and McLaren have announced that they will be parting ways. This is a decision that makes sense for both parties as McLaren currently have two strong, young drivers capable of fighting for a WDC in their F1 team and there is unlikely to be a possible seat there for Dunne within the next few years, in fact it is a similar move to the one made by current Stake Sauber F1 driver Gabriel Bortoleto who is also ex-McLaren.
There has yet to be an announcement from Dunne’s camp as to what the young driver will be doing going forward from the split, but we should be able to anticipate something exciting as he has shown a lot of pure pace and promise over the last season which has attracted a lot of positive interest within the paddock. Current rumours place Dunne’s future in the hands of the Red Bull programme which has quite the reputation both for success and brutality but could end up a good fit for a driver building a name based on both speed and aggression.
Whether he ends up with a shot at an F1 seat, as a reserve for the year or participating in a second season of F2 with a different junior academy I think it’s safe to say we’re all excited to see what comes next for Alex Dunne.
The path of our other young talent is, for the time being, a bit more clearly laid out as he follows in Dunne’s footsteps. At the start of last year Fionn McLaughlin was signed by Red Bull’s Junior Academy and competed in both the Formula Winter Series and the British F4 Championship with Hitech both of which he was extremely successful in. He finished the Formula Winter series in third place with three wins and six podiums in twelve races, he also took the rookie cup. However, it has been his British F4 debut which has drawn more attention.
McLaughlin came into the series with a boom finishing an amazing P2 in his first race in the class, which also happened to be his first ever race out of karts, which he then followed up by podiums in the 3rd, 4th and 6th races of the season. The Irish driver had achieved his first pole position in British F4 by race seven and his first win by race nine. By the end of the season Mclaughlin had racked up five different race wins, 14 podiums and 363.5 points over the course of thirty races. This won him both the overall championship with two races to spare and the rookie championship.
A keen eye might note that both in his British F4 championship and in his Formula Winter Series challenge McLaughlin was on the podium for roughly half of the races that he competed in during the 2025 season. Between this impressive statistic, and his championship winning performance for their British F4 team, Hitech were impressed enough to offer the young talent a chance to drive from them in Formula 3 for the 2026 season.
Competing on F1 tracks, during F1 weekends is a big opportunity for any young driver; it draws a lot more eyes to their careers and with this comes more support and sponsorship opportunities which are essential to continuing to climb up the ladder as well as allowing for gaining experience with the tracks themselves and the structure and business of an F1 race weekend.
Formula Three will certainly be a challenging move for Mclaughlin but it is also the first true step on his potential path to F1. Going straight from a national Formula 4 series to international Formula 3 certainly isn’t an easy job but it can, and has, been done with success in the past. Formula One’s own Ollie Bearman made a similar move with great success, though he was coming from Italian F4 which is generally considered a more competitive series. Nonetheless it is proof that the move can be done if the driver in question has talent to the level which is necessary to make it all the way up to F1, in that way Mclaughlin’s performance in the championship next year will be very telling of where his upper-ceiling might be.
Of course, a driver’s own talent isn’t always everything when it comes to championship campaign but in Feeder series like F3 and F2 where the cars are built to be the same it is an extremely large factor. Mclaughlin’s team, Hitech, largely had a rough 2025 season with their highest finishing driver by a mile being Martinius Stenshorne in P5. Stenshorne did manage both a sprint race and a feature race win during the season which was evidently enough to secure him a F2 seat with Rodin Motorsports for next season. It would be prudent to suspect that Mclaughlin will be looking for similar results and a similar promotion.
It is clear that after some time without any significant representation in Formula racing that Ireland now has a real shot with their two young talents but F1 is often more than just a competition of talent, as much a game of luck and timing (and of money) as it is anything else. So I wish both drivers the best of luck with their careers going forward, and I like many others hope to see them on the highest stage of all in the near future.
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