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When Fionn McLaughlin finished school, he would run straight up to his bedroom and start driving on the Formula 1 games.

Now, two years on, he is getting ready to race on Grand Prix weekends for real in Formula 3, which supports Formula 1 for 10 events.

It has been a sharp rise for the 18-year-old, who was racing in karts until he was picked up by Red Bull Racing’s junior programme in August 2024 and is now racing alongside some of the sport’s biggest names.

Last year, in his first season of racing in cars, he dominated the British F4 championship and will now make the step up to Formula 3.

“It’s crazy how life can change,” McLaughlin told BBC Sport NI.

“I gamed a lot after school, that’s all I really did so I know all the tracks off by heart in my head.

“Obviously not in the F3 car, but I know them. So that’s the good thing about gaming when you’re younger, it helps.”

In the space of 18 months, McLaughlin’s life has changed as he gets ready to embark of the biggest season of his short career.

In his words, “just never give up”.

“The way it changes quickly is just unbelievable. When I was in go-karting I was driving around, never thinking I would be in cars.

“Obviously that was the goal, but now being in F3 so quickly it’s like ‘wow, it can really go quick’.

Since his British F4 title success in October, life has not slowed down for McLaughlin.

The teenager, from Magherafelt in Northern Ireland, headed to Asia for the famous Macau Grand Prix, where he challenged for victory before a late accident on the tight and twisty streets.

Then, he had testing in Spain to sample a Formula 3 car for the first time.

In the New Year he was in New Zealand for the Toyota Formula Regional Oceania Trophy, and he was barely back in Europe when he was strapped into his Hitech Formula 3 car for final preparations for the new season.

McLaughlin said the jump from F4 machinery to Formula 3 was “quite crazy”, comparing his first F3 outing to like being in “a rocket ship”, but he has felt improvements every time he has stepped behind the wheel.

“The aero [aerodynamics] is quite different. We’ve got a lot more power and you have to drive differently, so I had to learn how to drive again but in a different way.

“I’m going to have to work as hard as I can and it’s going to be one of the toughest years yet.

McLaughlin’s Formula 3 adventure will see him tackle 10 rounds across the world, from Australia and Monaco to Silverstone, Austria and a brand new event in Madrid.

Despite supporting some of the sport’s biggest names, McLaughlin said he won’t get distracted by the bright lights of Formula 1.

“It’s my goal to get there but I’m here to race F3 and not watch F1.

“I just want to perform as well as I can in F3 and it’s quite special yet to travel around the world with F1 drivers and F2 drivers.

McLaughlin said he was “very grateful” to have the support of his family and Red Bull, who “give everything they can” to back their young drivers.

“I’m really grateful for everything in life, with things that go wrong and right.

“You have to learn from everything and even when you do really well for a full year and was dominant like last year, you have to stay humble. Things can go wrong.

“You have to be happy with what you have, make the most of it, and if you do your best and you don’t make it, then you can’t do anything else.

“If I do my best, then I know me, my family and Red Bull will have put in everything we can.”

So what about his goals for the biggest challenge of his fledgling career? Where does McLaughlin hope to be at the end of the season?

“It’d be nice to get a win, but for me it’s all about learning and improving for the years ahead.

“It’s all a process to F1 and everything I learned from the past will be put into the future.

“I don’t really have a goal of championship. I just want to do everything I can in my power to work as hard behind the scenes, work well with the team and do the best we can with the car.

The Bahrain and Saudi Arabia Grands Prix are under threat as a consequence of the US-Israel war with Iran.

The two countries are among the Gulf states targeted by retaliatory missiles launched by Iran in response to US-Israeli air strikes.

Bahrain is set to host the fourth race of the season from 10-12 April, with Saudi Arabia’s event in Jeddah a week later.

Missiles have hit hotels and civilian and energy infrastructure, as well as targeting American bases in the countries.

The US naval base in the Bahraini capital Manama has already been hit by Iranian missiles. It is situated in the Juffair area, one of the parts of the city where F1 personnel stay.

The Saudi Arabian race is near an oil refinery which four years ago was the target of a missile attack by Houthi rebels in Yemen.

A statement from F1 said: “Our next three races are in Australia, China and Japan not in the Middle East – those races are not for a number of weeks.

“As always we closely monitor any situation like this and work closely with relevant authorities and will always prioritise the safety and security of all those in the sport.”

If the war is still ongoing at the time F1 feels it needs to make a decision, there seems little prospect that the races can happen.

But even if by then there has been a full ceasefire and peace talks involving all parties have been arranged or are taking place, F1 can still not predict the reaction of outside, related or proxy groups.

That could mean that the risk of holding the races is considered too great even if the war has officially ended by the time a decision has to be made.

Complicating matters still further is that the chances of rescheduling the races are slim – the F1 calendar is congested and there are no obvious places where they could fit.

In the event the races do not take place, there is unlikely to be a replacement, which would shorten the season to 22 grands prix.

A number of possibilities have been mentioned – holding a race at Portimao in Portugal, Imola in Italy or Istanbul in Turkey.

But none is realistic because there simply would not be enough time to organise an event, sell tickets and so on.

Another possibility mooted has been to hold a second race in Japan after its grand prix at Suzuka on 27-29 March.

Aston Martin team principal Adrian Newey says vibrations from their Honda engine are risking permanent nerve damage for their drivers within 25 laps of running.

Newey’s remarks on the eve of the new Formula 1 season laid bare the crisis at Honda as the company starts its new working relationship with Aston Martin beset by performance and reliability problems.

The vibrations in the Honda engine caused Aston Martin to do the lowest mileage of any team in pre-season testing and are likely to impact the team’s potential to finish Sunday’s season-opening Australian Grand Prix.

“Mirrors falling off, tail lights falling off – all that sort of thing, which we are having to address.

“But the much more significant problem is that the vibration is transmitted ultimately into the driver’s fingers.

“So Fernando [Alonso] is of the feeling that he can’t do more than 25 laps consecutively before he will risk permanent nerve damage to his hands.

“Lance [Stroll] is of the opinion that he can’t do more than 15 laps before that threshold.”

The team have worked at finding ways to prevent the vibrations from the engine leading to failures in the batteries in the engine’s hybrid system, which afflicted them during pre-season testing.

These have been introduced on the car for the Australian GP.

Honda F1 boss Koji Watanabe said they would only know whether the countermeasures were effective once the car starts running on track on Friday.

The fix introduced only stops the vibrations reaching the battery. They are still being transmitted into the chassis, and from there into the steering.

“There’s no point in not being open and honest in this meeting on our expectations,” Newey said.

“We are going to have to be very heavily restricted on how many laps we do in the race until we get on top of the source of the vibration and improve the vibration at source.”

Alonso said the vibrations made his hands and feet feel “numb” after a number of laps, but added: “If we were fighting for the win, we can do three hours in the car, let’s be clear. But definitely it is something that is unusual. It shouldn’t be there.

“We don’t know the consequences either if we keep driving like that for months. So a solution has to be implemented.”

Alonso said the team would decide after practice and qualifying how to approach the race, when they had a better understanding of how the changes to the car had affected the problem.

The Honda engine is also significantly down on performance as F1 begins a new engine regulation period based on a 50-50 split between the internal combustion (ICE) and electrical parts of the hybrid engine.

Watanabe refused to comment on information gained from insiders by BBC Sport that the electrical part of the engine is 50kw (67bhp) down on power. The electrical motor is limited to 350kw by the regulations.

But Watanabe did say that the reliability problems experienced meant Honda had not been able to run the power unit at maximum revs.

Newey said: “One of the problems with these regulations is that the shorter you are on ICE power, the more you have to make up for using electrical energy to cover for that lack of ICE power, which means that by the time you really want that electrical energy on the straights, your battery’s gone flat. It becomes a self-fulfilling downward spiral.

“The straightforward calculation of what ICE power means on lap time is compounded by the effect of lack of electrical energy.

“Do I believe in our partners and Honda’s ability to bring that power up and to be competitive? Absolutely. They have a proven track record, and we have total faith.”

Watanabe did not address a question as to how Honda is in this situation despite being in F1 for more than 10 years. Newcomers Audi and Red Bull-Ford have managed to produce much more effective engines.

Newey said the car was also behind where he wanted it to be as a result of a “very condensed period of development”.

Newey started work at Aston Martin in March last year and changed the design philosophy of the car the team had created up to that point. They were also not able to run a model in their new wind tunnel until mid-April.

That has left Aston Martin at least four months behind rivals in terms of aerodynamic development.

Newey said that, in chassis performance terms, Aston Martin were “a bit behind the leaders – maybe the fifth best team”.

He said the performance gap between the Aston Martin chassis and the best was “somewhere around three-quarters of a second – maybe a second”.

He added: “The car has huge, tremendous development potential in it. It will take, of course, a few races for us to fully realise that potential.