Leonardo Fornaroli is biding his time, but he’s far from sitting still. Fresh off his 2025 Formula 2 championship, the 21-year-old from Piacenza is currently pulling double duty as McLaren’s reserve and official development driver. Under the quiet but razor-sharp leadership of Team Principal Andrea Stella—who also tapped Roman prospect Matteo De Palo for the junior squad—Fornaroli is grinding away in the shadows. His main gig right now? Clocking endless hours in the simulator to squeeze every ounce of pace out of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri’s cars, while navigating a completely new era of motorsport.
Fornaroli recently shook off the cobwebs at Silverstone, jumping into the 2023-spec MCL60 to get dialed in ahead of some upcoming FP1 rookie sessions. Honestly, he admitted it was a bit of a system shock. He hadn’t been strapped into a real race car for a minute, and the sheer stopping power and turn-in capability on high-speed corners left him practically speechless. But the real heavy lifting is happening off-track. The entire grid is currently trying to wrap their heads around the radically overhauled 2026 regulations, and Fornaroli is a crucial piece of that puzzle for Woking. The new electrical energy deployment systems are a completely different beast, requiring a massive learning curve. He sits in on engineering briefings with Norris and Piastri to lock down session objectives, soaking up their feedback and taking notes, while the two starters do their best to help bring the young Italian up to speed.
Naturally, the end game for Fornaroli is a full-time F1 seat next year. He’s hoping to join countryman Kimi Antonelli to solidify a real Italian renaissance on the grid, channeling the energy of his childhood hero, Valentino Rossi. Still, he’s keeping his options open; the allure of an IndyCar or Hypercar drive definitely isn’t lost on him.
The Canadian Litmus Test
All this intense simulator work regarding the 2026 hardware is about to meet reality as the F1 circus heads to North America for the Canadian Grand Prix. In a calendar shakeup, the Montreal race—now in its 55th edition—is taking place in May for the very first time. And it’s going to be a fascinating proving ground for just how much the cars have physically changed.
Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve has always been an absolute brake-killer. Brembo engineers rate the 4.361-kilometer track a solid 4 out of 5 on their difficulty index. A single lap features six “Hard” braking zones, keeping drivers on the pedal for over 14 seconds total. Turn 13 is historically the most punishing: drivers shed speed from 306 km/h down to 147 km/h in a mind-bending 1.93 seconds, pulling 3.7 g’s while mashing the brake pedal with 101 kg of force to generate 1,561 kW of braking power.
But here is where Fornaroli’s simulator data intersects with the tarmac: the 2026 cars brake entirely differently than the 2025 machines. The braking distances and times have stretched out considerably. Take Turn 10, for example. What used to be a violent 107-meter, 2.82-second deceleration event is now a drawn-out 158-meter, 3.94-second affair. The physical toll on the drivers has dropped off a cliff, too. Peak deceleration there dipped from a neck-snapping 5 g’s to just 3.1 g’s, and the required pedal load got slashed nearly in half, dropping from 168 kg to 87 kg.
Because these new cars simply don’t torture their brakes the way the older generation did, the hardware itself is evolving. Total braking power output over a single lap has essentially been halved—plummeting from roughly 15,685 kW down to 7,388 kW. To adapt to the lower wear rates, Brembo has largely ditched the standard 22mm carbon pads in favor of slimmer 20.5mm versions. Some of these new pads even feature special relief cuts on the piston contact surface to shed mass and boost the thermal exchange surface area for better cooling.
It’s a highly clinical, data-driven era of racing. But as much as engineers try to simulate every variable back at the factory, Montreal always has a way of throwing a wrench into the works. Just ask Sebastian Vettel. A decade ago, while leading the race in his Ferrari SF16-H, he completely botched the braking zone into Turn 1 and locked up. His excuse? A couple of incredibly relaxed seagulls were hanging out right on the apex, and he blew the corner trying not to run them over. No matter how dialed in the 2026 simulators get, they probably haven’t coded for local wildlife just yet.