Photo: Kalle Rovanpera

Junior single-seaters is a place in motorsport where drivers race on the way to becoming professionals, but this year there are several established names making the intruiging step of joining the feeder series fold 

There are several events in motorsport that hold appeal across the globe, and across all categories and disciplines, such as the Le Mans 24 Hours or Indianapolis 500. The opportunity to enter those, particularly for drivers who are not usually in sportscars or IndyCar, is not passed up.

Since junior single-seaters is a place for learning, featuring teams of less experienced and established talents on and off track, there is usually little appeal for professional drivers to spend their time in it. While the smaller cars of Formula Regional and Formula 4 get to race around the streets of Macau, meaning drivers from higher up the ladder have to step down a rung or two to take on its challenge, drivers from top-tier racing don’t do the same even if the Macau Grand Prix is on their bucket list.

When proven stars of motorsport do make junior single-seater comebacks, it’s usually long after their professional careers ended. For example, former CART and Formula 1 driver Jan Magnussen raced in the 2021 Formula Ford Festival and 2024 Walter Hayes Trophy to effectively celebrate how much fun he had en route to winning the FFord Festival back in 1992.

This year it’s not retired talents but active pros at the peak of their careers headed to junior single-seaters, and for full programmes rather than cameos. So what should be made of their decision to race ‘below’ their level?

Ryan Wood

Still only 22, Wood started off in sportscars then has become a tin-top star in Australia. He came third in the second-tier Super2 Series in 2023 as a Walkinshaw Andretti United driver, and the team promoted him to its Australian Supercars line-up for 2024. Two fourth places were the best results of his rookie campaign, while in 2025 he got through the title fight’s first cutoff stage to come 10th in the points table. He won one race, finished third six times, and started on pole thrice.

Top-tier talents at Toyota Racing Series/FRegional Oceania’s New Zealand GP

This weekend he makes his single-seater debut in Formula Regional Oceania, and as a Kiwi he has been frank that his home country’s biggest championship for open-wheel cars has been something he’s followed since childhood and always had aspirations to compete in. His Supercars team will swap its Fords for Toyotas this year, and the brand’s part in organising FRegional Oceania opened the door for Wood to turn a dream into reality.

Since he is racing for his own merits, rather than to further his career, gain crucial experience or prove himself against new opposition, Wood may be happy to take risks and have fun in his four weekends with MTEC Motorsport and that should make him an exciting addition to the grid.

Kalle Rovanpera

Another total newcomer to single-seaters, Rovanpera also has Toyota connections to thank for his FRegional Oceania programme with Hitech GP. The team is now entering the second year of its collaboration with Toyota (and using its name), while the 25-year-old Finn has driven a Toyota GR Yaris Rally1 to 18 wins and two titles in the World Rally Championship.

He is headed to New Zealand to build up as much mileage and understanding of wheel-to-wheel action as possible before he heads to Japan’s top-tier Super Formula championship in three months’ time.

Having one of motorsport’s biggest names outside of F1 racing in FRegional is an amazing headline, but results may be secondary to registering in-car improvements each race. That Rovanpera has won so much at such a young age is due to a winning mindset and relying on his natural driving style, but the WRC’s new tyre compound last year unsettled the latter, so if he doesn’t start on the right foot down under it might be a very introspective campaign rather than ‘one to watch’.

As long as Rovanpera shares his journey with media and fans, it will still be a fascinating rallying to racing move to follow.

Photo: Red Bull

Colton Herta

The first reaction to Herta’s presence in Formula 2 this year: is it fair? That’s not in relation to the rest of the field having to go up against one of the best drivers IndyCar has had this decade, but rather the fact that this move has been required for him to earn a FIA superlicense and be eligible to race for Cadillac in F1 next year.

IndyCar is grossly undermarked in the superlicense points system, and Herta has to make the top eight in the F2 standings with Hitech to get the document he so obviously already deserves. He won two races and claimed three poles as an IndyCar rookie in 2019, came third in the 2020 standings and the 25-year-old left that paddock with nine race victories and the 2024 championship runner-up spot to his name.

While it’s outrageous the F2 move is required, it is the only way for a driver to gather experience of many F1 tracks in high-downforce machinery without racing in F1 itself so it can be considered perfect preparation for his 2027 plans.

As for once Herta is seen on track, it should be thrilling. He’s a great driver to work with, he has a racing style that is great to watch, and it will be really interesting to see how applicable his tyre management experience from IndyCar is to F2.

Nico Varrone

Like Herta, Varrone does have junior single-seater experience in Europe already but most of what he faces in F2 will be brand new or at least feel it. He did contest F2 post-season testing in 2024, so has some car experience to count on but he’s spent the last few years racing sportscars.

The Argentinian was 2023 World Endurance champion and Le Mans 24H winner in the LMGTE Am class, as well as LMP3 class winner in IMSA’s Daytona 24H race, was part of the crew that came fourth in the 2024 Le Mans 24H’s LMP2 class, then he stepped up to the top Hypercar class for prototype cars last year.

Photo: Paola Depalmas

Some of the team-mates he has been partnered with in endurance racing have been immensely experienced and great to learn from, and the long stints mean Varrone has his own extensive knowledge now of brake and tyre management. Those two factors become increasingly key in F2 as the sole single-seater category featuring compulsory pitstops at every event, so races may be where Varrone shines rather than qualifying.

As a journalist, some more insight from Varrone about the motivations and ambitions behind his F2 move is currently needed. Regardless, it will be fun to delve through the data and quotes of the season to come and see the impact he has on his team Van Amersfoort Racing’s competitivity.

Further reading
The top-tier champions who stepped down to junior single-seaters

The post First thoughts on the big racing names headed to junior single-seaters appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photos: KSP Reportages

Karting is the training ground of most drivers before single-seaters, and Formula Scout follows all the major series to see which talents may eventually burst onto the car racing scene, and grab F1 teams’ attentions

Formula 1 teams consistently have an eye on karting now, with 13 drivers across five teams forming the contingent of karters who are members of driver development programmes. Mercedes-AMG and Williams have the most faith in the youngest of talent, with four each, and Andrea Kimi Antonelli stepped up to F1 last year with Mercedes after being one of its proteges since he was in junior karting.

Back in 2021, Antonelli was proving himself on OK karts against Joe Turney, who remains one of the best in the world (and is gradually becoming a legend of the sport) to this day. But since he is a mainstay of the senior karting scene, along with Sean Butcher, neither were in contention for Formula Scout’s list of 2025’s top talents.

We will applaud their achievements regardless, with Turney winning the USA Winter Series and coming 11th in the USA’s SuperNationals in the X30 Pro class, being SuperNats runner-up on KA100 Senior karts, and on OK karts finishing as runner-up in the CIK-FIA World Championship for a third time, coming fifth in the Champions of the Future championship and eighth in WSK’s Super Master Series.

Butcher raced in Rotax Senior class of karts all year, and was Rotax Max Challenge Euro Trophy and Winter Series champion, Grand Finals runner-up and finished ninth in the International Trophy.

Key

WSK: Champions Cup (CC), Euro Series (Euro), Final Cup (FC), Open Series (OS), Super Master Series (SMS), Super Cup (SC)
CIK-FIA: European championship (CIK European), World championship (CIK Worlds), World Cup (FIA WC), Karting Academy Trophy (FIA Academy Trophy)
Rotax Max Challenge: Euro Trophy, International Trophy (Int. Trophy), Grand Finals, Winter Series (WS), Golden Trophy
IAME: Euro Series (Euro), Warriors Final (WF), Winter Cup (WC)
Champions of the Future (CotF)
USA SuperNationals (SuperNats), Winter Series (WS)

Thibaut Ramaekers BELGIUM 16y/o
OK CIK World champion, 2nd in CotF, 5th in CIK European, 27th in WSK SMS   X30 Snr 5th in IAME WC

World Championship celebrations

Ramaekers first featured on this list in 2023 when he was a frontrunner in multiple championship in junior karting, and impressed on his OK debut in the senior class.

He missed out on 2024 inclusion due to being up-and-down as he embarked on incomplete campaigns, but he was certainly one of the fastest drivers around.

That included being runner-up in CotF, a feat he repeated this year. In round one he was competing at the front until retirement in his superheat required him to climb from 20th to ninth in the final. He won the superheat in round two and was runner-up in the final, and was on the podium in the most important races again in round three.

Round four was less impressive, but in the Kristianstad finale he romped to pole, four heat wins and three later podiums (the last after leading the final) to take second in the standings.

The CIK-FIA European Championship went the other way, starting on a high at Campillos with pole, three heats win, victory in his superheat and then fourth in the final. In the following rounds he was near the front but only won one heat, and retired in the wet final of the last round.

He bounced back in the style at the World championship, with three wins and two second places in the heats, coming second in the superheat then winning the most important karting race of them all: the final.

Filippo Sala ITALY 14y/o
OK 2nd in WSK Euro, 3rd in WSK FC, 4th in WSK SMS, 4th in CIK European, 10th in CIK Worlds, 18th in CotF

Photo: Ferrari

The Ferrari Driver Academy signed Sala last April, and worked to ensure the Italian was able to covert pace into big points.

There was a consistent problem in many events he had competed in prior to 2025, as he was usually the driver to beat in his qualifying group but then would make mistakes later on – such as in finals – when it proved more costly in positions. For example, Sala came fifth in the 2024 European championship despite never finishing a round in a position higher than that.

That was in the OK Junior class, while Sala raced in senior karting last year. It was an impressive rookie campaign, making the top four in four championships.

The WSK SMS was first on his schedule, and Sala finished his debut round in eighth. In round two he won the final, going from third to first on the last lap, then non-finishes in the big races during round three scuppered his title hopes. Sala was runner-up in round four, and competitive in round five but it couldn’t put him higher than fourth in the points table.

That was a strong place to start from in one of the most competitive grids, and Sala carried similar form into the European championship. He was the most consistent driver there, with his lowest scoring round netting him 10 points. Every other full-timer had a worse weekend, and Sala won heats at every round. A bumper penalty dropped him from third to 10th in round one’s final, he had to climb the order to 13th in round two, and fourth in the season’s last race put him fourth in the standings.

His concurrent CotF season began on a high, but after a pole and heat wins in the first two rounds he then went points-free in the next two due to non-finishes and then an awful qualifying result.

Sala was the second strongest driver in the WSK Euro Series, rose through the field to finish the World championship in 10th and and winning the final round (despite showing less competitive pace than in the trickier previous events) put him third in WSK’s Final Cup.

Christian Costoya SPAIN 15y/o
OK CIK European champion, WSK Euro champion, 2nd in WSK SMS, 3rd in CotF, 14th in CIK Worlds

Leading the European Championship

The All Road Management protege, now a McLaren junior too, looked unstoppable at times, particularly in the WSK Euro Series where only two drivers surpassed even a third of the points tally he amassed.

He went unbeaten in both rounds, and in the big races usually had a winning margin surpassing three seconds. In karting, that’s a big gap to have at the front.

The European championship featured similar domination, and he was crowned early despite a points-free final round. Costoya topped his qualifying group three out of four times, went unbeaten in round three at Viterbo, did plenty of winning in round two and still got heat wins at the other two events.

While the World championship didn’t go to plan, finishing 14th, Costoya had already more than proven his brilliance having won rounds and contended for the title in CotF and WSK SMS too.

Noah Baglin ENGLAND 13y/o
OK-J CIK World champion, CotF champion, 2nd in WSK SMS, 2nd in WSK FC, 3rd in CIK European   KA100 Jr USA SuperNats winner   X30 Jr 22nd in USA SuperNats

En route to World Championship victory

Having lost the World championship in the OK-J class on the last lap in 2024, Baglin made sure he got the job done this year. He won five heats, his superheat and lights-to-flag in the final with a winning margin of 4.281s.

The Ferrari junior, racing for Prema, was a frontrunner in everything he competed in and that included three classes of kart.

In OK-J he took the CotF title, but his season started on the backfoot as qualifying 16th in round one meant he relied on racecraft to get top-10 results in the races. Despite qualifying seventh for round two, heat victories meant he was on pole for the superheat and he won both that and the final.

Podium sprees followed, then Baglin put it all together to win the final of the final round and that cast him into a title-clinching points lead as his rivals had dreadful weekends and fell behind.

Just two races going differently could’ve made Baglin the WSK SMS and WSK FC champion too. Dean Hoogendoorn, who took the WSK SMS title by three points, edged Baglin to victory by 0.032s in round one’s pre-final with a last-lap pass and by 0.026s in round two’s final. A one-place penalty also took round one victory away from Baglin.

Bosco Arias denied Baglin the WSK FC title by one point, 15th in round two’s final proving costly, and if he had not been disqualified from the whole of round three of the European championship for using an offensive hand signal against another driver he would’ve been at least runner-up in that too.

Over in the USA, he won the major SuperNationals in the KA100 Junior class against the country’s top talents.

Dean Hoogendoorn NETHERLANDS 13y/o
OK-J CIK European champion, WSK SMS champion, 3rd in CIK Worlds, 5th in CotF, 6th in WSK FC   X30 Jr USA SuperNats winner   KA100 Jr 3rd in USA SuperNats

Preparing for a major race

There’s often a trend of a driver who leads the way over the course of a season in the European championship then not appearing near the front in the one-weekend World championship, or vice versa, but Williams junior Hoogendoorn proved he was capable of winning both this year.

His sophomore year on OK-J karts was a big improvement on 2024, and started off in WSK SMS where the Dutchman starred particularly in the wet (winning by 9.5s in one race) and being the overall victor in two rounds. He was unbeaten in qualifying until the final round, in which he didn’t set a laptime and started from the back for all heats. That didn’t stop him from finishing in the top six of each one, climbing over 20 places every time, and fourth in the final made him champion.

In the European championship he again proved a cut above the rest in mixed and wet conditions, and he won races in every round. That consistent podium-taking form ended up comfortably delivering him the title.

Pole, four wins and two second places in the heats then superheat victory put Hoogendoorn on the front row of the World championship final, but he couldn’t maximise it and finished third after a prolonged battle for second as the leader ran away.

Like Baglin, Hoogendoorn went to America for a weekend and he made the USA SuperNationals podium in two junior classes.

Aaron Garcia SPAIN 17y/o
X30 Snr IAME Euro champion, IAME WF winner, 2nd in German championship, 29th in USA SuperNats   OK: 73rd in CIK Worlds, 102nd in CotF

Photo: IAME Euro Series

On X30 Senior karts, the driver who was most often the one to beat in 2025 was Garcia, and he was IAME Euro Series champion by over 40 points despite failing to score in the opening round. He didn’t lack pace, since he was fourth in his qualifying group and second in two heats.

In round two he spent plenty of time at the front, including in the final, scoring enough points en route to second overall to jump to third in the standings. It was roughly the same in round three, and while Garcia was beaten to overall honours by 0.847s he still climbed another spot in the points table.

Repeating that route to the final in round four, which he finished fifth in, was enough to make him champion.

While qualifying remained Garcia’s weakness, starting further back never proved to be an issue and in the IAME Warriors Final he qualified sixth but won four heats and the final.

Garcia also contested the German Karting Championship, which he was runner-up in, and cameoed in other locations.

Riley Cranham ENGLAND 14y/o
X30 Jr IAME Euro champion, British champion, Kartmasters British GP winner, 2nd in IAME WC

Photo: IAME Motorsport

Already racing cars through the Ginetta Junior Winter Series, Cranham made sure karting’s four-round IAME Euro Series was decided in three with dominant form that allowed him to skip the finale.

He took two wins and a second place in both the finals and superheats of rounds one to three, with only two races where he wasn’t on the podium.

In the British Kart Championship he raced with the coveted O plate and showed he was deserving of it by taking the title. He won the first two rounds, and was the top scorer from the heats at five of the nine events.

At the Kartmasters British Grand Prix, Cranham topped his group in the first round of qualifying, but a win and a non-finish put him 15th in the end-of-day classification. He topped qualifying again the next day, but fourth and 11th in the next two heats meant he had to climb up from 10th to finish fourth in the pre-final. Further progress was made in the final, as he won.

The year began with the IAME Winter Cup, which was almost another Cranham-claimed contest. He comfortably won two of his three heats, was victorious in his superheat then was the long-time leader in the final before falling to fourth late on. Penalties for others lifted him back to second.

Jacob Ashcroft ENGLAND 14y/o
Rotax Jr Euro Trophy champion, British champion, Ultimate Karting champion, Int. Trophy winner, BNL Series champion, 2nd in Grand Finals

Photo: RMC Euro Trophy

A title-winning margin of just 15 points (when eight drivers surpassed 500 points) belied how much of a winning machine Ashcroft was in the RMC Euro Trophy in 2025.

He topped his qualifying group in three of the four rounds, won nine out of 12 heats and made the podium in the final three times. After missing out on victory by 0.05s in round one, he had an unbeaten weekend in round three.

During summer Ashcroft won the RMC International Trophy. He was denied pole by 0.006s, then a non-finish alongside his two heat wins meant he started fourth for his superheat. He won that race, and the final.

On home soil the Rotax Junior titles in the British and Ultimate Karting championships went to Ashcroft, and in Belgium’s BNL Series he was also champion.

That success earned him a ticket to December’s RMC Grand Finals in Bahrain, and he was once again the driver to beat. He was fastest in qualifying, won two heats and came second in the other, was victorious in his pre-final and led the final before finishing second.

Alexander Vanchev BULGARIA/USA 15y/o
X30 Snr 13th in USA SuperNats   KA100 Snr Finalist in USA SuperNats   KA100 Jr USA Pro Tour champion, USA WS champion   X30 Jr USA Pro Tour champion, USA WS champion

There were two names who ruled America’s junior karting scene this year, and Alexander Vanchev was one of them.

He won the USA Pro Tour and Winter Series titles on KA100 and X30 karts, gathering a lot of attention as like Formula 2 star Nikola Tsolov he races under the Bulgarian flag.

In the winter series he won two finals out of four in each of the junior categories, and was unbeaten in the opening round for KA100 Junior. He took that title on victory countback after dropped scores were taken into account, and comfortably claimed the X30 Jr crown.

Although Vanchev never once qualified on pole in the Pro Tour, he was able to make his way to the front in the races. He won three KA100 finals, including round five where he qualified 21st then finished seventh in the pre-final. In the final round he went from 44th to 13th in the pre-final, and climbed another nine places in the final.

In X30 Jr he won the first three rounds, doing so from pole twice, and in round five he bounced back from being disqualified in qualifying to get up to eighth by the final.

For the end-of-year SuperNationals he also stepped up to senior karting. In the X30 Snr class he was runner-up in two of his heats en route to the final, which he finished 13th in. He also made the final in KA100 but retired, with a bad qualifying result putting him on the back foot through the event.

Kai Clarke ENGLAND
Rotax Jr 2nd in WS, 2nd in Euro Trophy, 2nd in Golden Trophy, 3rd in Int. Trophy, 4th in British championship, 10th in Kartmasters British GP, 16th in Ultimate Karting Championship, 28th in Grand Finals

Photo: KR Sport

Clarke doesn’t usually smile when on the podium, but he should be happy with what he achieved as one of KR Sport’s driver in 2025.

He was in the top four of five major competitions on Rotax Junior karts, and while his inclusion does make this list a little too heavy on British drivers, it’s worth noting he was a breakthrough talent on the international scene last year while every other name on the list was better known to this writer.

Clarke’s year started in the RMC Winter Series, where he failed to win a race (thanks to a penalty in round two’s final) but was so consistently near the front that he was runner-up in the standings. It was similar in the Euro Trophy, as Clarke never qualified higher than sixth, had penalties in the season’s first half but won the pre-finals in rounds three and four and his podium finishes in the finals propelled him to second in the points with a small deficit to the champion.

At the RMC Golden Trophy he won a heat but retired in the other, then won the final on-the-road before a penalty demoted him to second. On home soil he was less successful, but in a very busy year it was his racing abroad that marked him out.

Maxim Orlov RUSSIA 17y/o
KZ2 CotF champion, FIA World Cup winner, CIK European champion, 4th in WSK SMS, finalist in Trofeo delle Industrie

Talking to media after World Cup victory

Shifter karting tends to be where ‘career’ karters go, and drivers who do not head into single-seaters in their later teenaged years, and in the KZ2 class the biggest star of 2025 was Orlov.

He won the Italian championship in 2023, the WSK Final Cup in 2024, and then two of the biggest championships in Europe and the biggest race of all last year. At the end of it he did step up car racing, coming sixth in the SMP Formula 4 winter series.

The CotF season only featured two rounds for KZ2 drivers, and in the first Orlov topped his qualifying group, won one heat and came 0.084s short of a second after being penalised, was superheat runner-up then romped to victory in the final.

A lap one retirement in heat four of six prevented Orlov from having an unbeaten weekend in round two, with huge winning margins in the late races.

He was on top at the end of each weekend in the European championship too. Moving before the red lights went out copped him penalties that denied him unbeaten weekends in rounds one and two’s races, although in the latter’s final he was victorious by a huge 12s. A heat non-finish made the route to victory a little harder in round three, but he still got it done.

At the FIA World Cup, it was more of the same and this time Orlov did tick the ‘unbeaten’ box.

11 more to watch…

On OK karts, Zac Drummond was WSK Final Cup runner-up, third in the European championship and sixth in the World championship and WSK SMS.

In the OK-J paddock, William Calleja started very strongly but had some nightmare weekends which left him as European championship and CotF runner-up. He was also fifth in WSK’s Euro Series, while Valerio Viapiana was the World championship runner-up, fourth in WSK’s Euro Series, fifth in its Final Cup and ninth in the Super Master Series.

Ilie Cristan, now an Alpine junior, was third in CotF and WSK SMS in 2025, fourth in the European championship and WSK Final Cup, fifth in the World championship. The Canadian landed a lot of top-five results, but taking the fight to the biggest names in the finals was often another step up as the year went on.

MP Motorsport has signed Henry Domain for 2026, after he was WSK Euro Series runner-up, fourth in CotF, sixth in the European championship and WSK SMS last year.

In addition to beating Baglin to the WSK Final Cup title, Bosco Arias was fourth in WSK SMS and seventh in the European championship. Also part of the FIA’s karting pyramid is the Academy Trophy, and Yuzuki Sato won the Senior class.

OK-N karts is one of karting’s newest classes, and Italian driver Manuel Scognamiglio was the top talent. He was WSK Euro Series champion, Italian champion and Trofeo Andrea Margutti winner. For the WSK Final Cup he joined the OK grid and was ninth.

Vanchev’s big rival in the USA was Travis Pettit. He was Pro Tour runner-up, fourth in the SuperNats and fifth in the Winter Series in KA100 Jr, and was SuperNats runner-up, fourth in the IAME Grand Nationals and USA Pro Tour in X30 Jr.

The final two names come from the Rotax Snr scene. Macauley Bishop won the RMC Int. Trophy and Grand Finals, was BNL Series champion, RMC Golden Trophy runner-up, fifth in the Ultimate Karting Championship and sixth in the British Championship but was only 10th in the RMC Euro Trophy.

Tino Sidler did better there, coming sixth in the standings, and was third in the RMC Winter Series and BNL Series.

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The post The top karting stars of 2025 appeared first on Formula Scout.

10. Kean Nakamura-Berta

New entry • Prema’s Italian F4 and E4 champion

Photo: ACI Sport

Photo: ACI Sport

Nakamura-Berta came into 2025 having been dropped by the Alpine Academy after a first full Formula 4 season that didn’t live up to the early promise he’d shown in the Middle East, where he’d run Freddie Slater close for the title.

Prema kept its faith in the London-born Japanese-Slovakian to spearhead its all-conquering F4 squad this year and he became the first driver to win both the Italian and E4 titles in the same season, proving he is the Formula 1 team’s loss.

This year he could only finish third in the Middle East series as R-ace GP locked out the top two, but he started his Italian campaign with a run of five straight victories and never looked back.

He was challenged for pace at times by team-mate Sebastian Wheldon – new to European racing but with a good amount of car experience under his belt – and by former international karting rival Gabriel Gomez of the always competitive US Racing team, but Nakamura-Berta’s consistency was unrivalled.

From his 20 starts in the Italian championship, he won nine times and was on the podium in all but three of his other 11 races – a new record. It was a similar story in the three-round E4 series, where he took four wins and four other podiums.

9. Richard Verschoor

Up 15 • F2 veteran was title contender in best season yet

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Verschoor reunited with MP Motorsport for a fifth and final season in Formula 2 in 2025, self-orchestrating a deal to put himself in a truly frontrunning car for the first time.

During the first half of the season he was making the most of the opportunity. A victory in the Jeddah feature race made him the championship leader, and another in the main race at the Red Bull Ring put him back on top by 24 points at the halfway point of the season.

In the second half of the campaign he was on the podium just once, when he won the Qatar sprint race, as a drop-off in qualifying form – 10th in Lusail was his best starting place in the last six feature races – left him otherwise fighting for the lower points positions.

Stripping the paint from his car from Monza to get down to the minimum weight limit didn’t improve his performances, but did put the tall Dutchman’s stronger earlier season form in context.

It wasn’t a season that was ever likely to earn the former Red Bull junior a shot at F1, but it did land him a contract with McLaren and a step towards a fully deserved future as a professional.

8. Nikola Tsolov

Re-entry • Reinvigorated career with F3 challenge

Photo: Red Bull / Dutch Photo Agency

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

This was a year in which Tsolov returned to the sort of form that allowed him to take Spanish F4 by storm as a single-seater rookie in 2022 and place 17th in this list.

After Tsolov’s two years of toiling in FIA Formula 3 with ART Grand Prix and his split from the Alpine Academy, Campos Racing convinced Red Bull to support him for his third year at this level and he didn’t let either party down.

As for similarly experienced team-mate Mari Boya, there were some struggles in qualifying early on that left him playing catch-up in the championship, even though he won the Bahrain sprint race and came third at Imola. At Monaco came a pole position and feature race victory, and a procedural breakthrough helped him improve in qualifying at more conventional circuits.

He took another pole position and feature race win at the Red Bull Ring, closing him to just one point behind eventual champion Rafael Camara, only to be disqualified for excessive plank wear.

His title chances never recovered, but Tsolov did secure second in the standings and went on to impress in two early F2 appearances with Campos ahead of 2026.

7. Alex Dunne

Re-entry • F2 rookie thrilled with early wins

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Dunne was arguably the standout talent of 2025. In its context, a single performance or sequence of results from a young driver can excite more than a whole championship-winning campaign, and not much bettered Dunne’s early-season F2 form in terms of impression this year.

The Irishman’s potential was well known (he last featured in this list in 27th in 2023) but his step up to F2 came off the back of a pretty low-key single year in FIA F3 and few could have expected him to be a title contender.

Clearly his Rodin Motorsport-run car was fast but Dunne’s dominant win in his first ever feature race in Bahrain was remarkable, and was followed up just two rounds later by a charging drive at Imola that made him the championship leader.

He took pole next time out in Monaco, but things began to unravel when he tried to turn in on Victor Martins at Sainte Devote. The ensuing social media backlash was wholly unjustified, but there would be a few more scrappy moments alongside the sublime over the rest of the year, which cost some points. That’s completely understandable though for a driver who had no prior experience of fighting at the front at anything like this level.

Some outright pace also seemed to be lost across the year, but Dunne was having to single-handedly lead his team without a capable team-mate for most of the year.

6. Jak Crawford

Up 22 • Individual excellence combined with team anonymity

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Inconsistency plagued an F2 season in which Crawford’s individual brilliance not only earned him victories and poles but also lower positions in the top 10 at times when other drivers would likely have not been a points contender at all.

The highs included victories at Imola, Monaco, Silverstone and Baku, but the lows were points-free weekends where DAMS didn’t choose the right direction to go in with his car and there were even deeper rooted problems like engine issues.

This contributed to Crawford only having the 11th best race pace in the field, yet he led more green flag action than anybody else, and the only driver to beat his podium tally and feature race points haul was the champion.

While there wasn’t much more Crawford could do to maximise his car’s potential at times, the third-year F2 driver was not able to take the title fight to a rookie all the way to the finale.

5. Luke Browning

Up 2 • Was a title challenger in first and only F2 season

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Browning finished on the podium in five of the opening eight races in his first full season of F2, and by the ninth race – a fourth-place finish in the Monaco feature race – he had taken the championship lead.

Consistent feature race results were the foundation of Browning’s title bid: he finished inside the top six in nine of the first 10, culminating in his one and only victory from pole position at Monza. Even a drop-off in Friday form in the middle of the year couldn’t stop him on Sundays, and his charging wet-weather drive from 12th to third at home at Silverstone was his personal highlight.

He was the closest challenger to eventual champion Leonardo Fornaroli – 17 points adrift – at the point when his season tailed off, with just one point from the final five races. This certainly wasn’t all in his control: a brake issue plagued him in Abu Dhabi qualifying, by which point the title was already lost and he was already looking towards Super Formula for 2026.

Browning finished fourth in the championship but would have been worthy of more. His feature race points tally was the third highest, with just two points fewer than Jak Crawford and 13 fewer than Fornaroli.

4. Freddie Slater

Up 1 • Showed winning ability in F3, FRegional and GB3

Photo: ACI Sport

Photo: ACI Sport

Slater won a third of the races he contested in a part-time GB3 campaign this year, and 40% of his races in the Formula Regional European Championship. In total, his 2025 featured 16 victories, eight other podiums and 12 poles.

The Middle East was where Slater began life as a FRegional and FIA F3 rookie. In the former, he started the region’s championship with two poles that were converted into wins, and while he repeated that winning feat at a later event he missed out on the title. In the latter, Slater qualifed in the top 10, then finished second with fastest lap on debut.

FREC was his primary focus, and he won at six of the 10 circuits on the calendar. Two early retirements and a mid-season disqualification meant he did not clinch the title until the penultimate race, but he still ended the season 36 points clear.

The GB3 outings occurred on non-clashing weekends, and Slater led that championship too as he won the season’s first two races from pole. He won again when he returned to the grid at Spa-Francorchamps, then got two second places in his third and final appearance at Brands Hatch to come 12th in the standings.

Spa was also where Slater’s second weekend in F3 was, and in November he raced in the FIA FRegional World Cup-awarding Macau Grand Prix. On the trickiest of street circuits he topped the first qualifying session, was just pipped in the second, won the qualification race then one small error ended his victory chances and his day in the main race.

3. Rafael Camara

Up 5 • Perfect preparations meant F3 title was earned early

Photo: Pauline Ballet

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

After three excellent years with Prema, Camara made the step up to FIA F3 this year with Trident and it led to him comfortably claiming the title as a rookie.

The championship’s new car proved to be of great benefit rather than a new challenge in an inexperienced line-up at Trident, since the team found out the intricacies needed to nail qualifying during the pre-season.

Of course Camara still needed to deliver with the strongest car on the grid, and he did just that by taking pole, victory and fastest lap in the feature race in three of the first five rounds. His team’s advantage waned after that, but Camara still won from pole at the Hungaroring and that crowned him champion with a round to spare.

Even with the rest of the paddock having caught up to Trident, come season-end the benchmark driver on single-lap and race pace continued to be Camara and in such a competitive championship he had a ridiculously high median starting position on Sundays of 1.5.

2. Dennis Hauger

Re-entry • Utilised F2 experience to dominate Indy Nxt

Photo: Joe Skibinski

Photo: James Black

Three seasons in F2 proved unrewarding for Hauger, as his points tally decreased with each campaign and he never came higher than eighth in the standings despite being one of the top talents on the grid. But without those years of disappointment in junior single-seaters’ most competitive championship he wouldn’t have been able to dominate Indy Nxt with ease in 2025.

Hauger’s knowledge of tyre management meant the pitstop-free yet lengthy races in IndyCar’s primary feeder series suited his skillset, and qualifying also proved far easier to get right than in F2. In fact, he was on pole at seven of the first eight circuits on the calendar and often said “it feels natural” to drive Ind Nxt’s car.

His seamless transition into the championship was shown by taking victory, pole and fastest lap in each of the first two rounds, and if there were any questions about whether such dominance would continue into the oval leg of the season he showed he could adapt to the new challenge of those circuits too. He claimed pole for his first oval race, which was the only one one of the four he didn’t finish on the podium of.

Hauger last made this list in 2023, coming in at 31st place, and his high placing this year is in spite of an Indy Nxt grid lacking strength in depth due to such an impressive level of domination.

1. Leonardo Fornaroli

Up 5 • Mr consistency nails F2 title in his rookie season

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

That Fornaroli won last year’s FIA F3 title with consistency and without winning a race was understandably used against him. That he continued with a similar approach in F2 and won the title at the first attempt has to be applauded for what it is.

It certainly cannot be said that Fornaroli wasn’t fast. He had the best qualifying results on average, was second-fastest on ultimate one-lap pace to Victor Martins (who could rarely use that pace in the races) and started from pole in three feature races and from second place in two others.

Critically and most impressively, he qualified inside the top 10 at all 14 attempts. Courtesy of the reversed grid, that helped him to win three sprint races alongside his solitary feature race victory across four consecutive weekends as the season entered its second half. That sequence took him from fourth in the championship and 28 points off the lead to having a lead of 28 points with three rounds left to play.

He was consistent in his race results as well as his qualifying performances, only failing to score points in two of the 25 races that it took him to clinch the title.

Right now, F2 rewards drivers who can score consistently with a fast car underneath them, and nobody could stop the combination of Fornaroli and Invicta Racing.

The post Formula Scout Top 50 Drivers of 2025: 10-1 appeared first on Formula Scout.

20. Mattia Colnaghi

Up 9 • Followed Spanish F4 title with Eurocup-3 glory

Photo: Dutch Photo Agency / Red Bull

Photo: Dutch Photo Agency / Red Bull

With two titles in as many years in single-seaters, it’s no wonder that Colnaghi was snapped up by Red Bull before he even had this year’s Eurocup-3 crown in the bag.

After overhauling more experienced competition to become Spanish Formula 4 champion last year, the Italo-Argentine driver had to settle for being runner-up to fellow graduate and MP Motorsport team-mate Maciej Gladysz in Eurocup-3’s winter series at the start of 2025 after a disastrous double non-score in the deciding round.

He started the main campaign with a pole, win and fastest lap at the Red Bull Ring, but was only on the podium twice more across the first nine races, and was trailing Red Bull-backed rookie Ernesto Rivera at the top of the standings at the halfway mark.

After that though, while Rivera was wildly inconsistent – scoring just three times in the last nine races – Colnaghi was never off the podium and put the title out of the reach of the more experienced Valerio Rinicella and Kacper Sztuka with a round to go.

Colnaghi missed the final round to test himself against a deeper field at the Macau Grand Prix, proving his class with an impressive run with with PHM Racing to fourth in the main race as leading rookie.

19. Caio Collet

Up 7 • Indy Nxt runner-up secured a seat in the top tier

Photo: James Black

Photo: Travis Hinkle

Third in Indy Nxt as a rookie in 2024, Collet came into 2025 with his sights set firmly on the title, but had the misfortune to come up against the toughest of newcomers in Dennis Hauger.

Given how well proven Formula 2 drivers have adapted to IndyCar over recent years, Hauger came in arguably overqualified, and Collet and his HMD Motorsports team were left scratching their heads wondering how to keep up with the Andretti driver’s early pace.

They kept plugging away at it though and a breakthrough finally came mid-season at Road America, where Collet put a pass on Hauger to take his first win in nearly a year.

That didn’t exactly open the floodgates, but Collet did convert two pole positions into two victories at Laguna Seca, with a retirement for Hauger there keeping the title alive. Collet made it three poles in a row next time out at Portland, only for Hauger to this time overtake for victory, putting the title pretty much out of sight.

Most importantly though, Collet gets to join his rival on the IndyCar grid next year.

18. Fionn McLaughlin

New entry • Car racing rookie won British F4 title

Photo: Red Bull

Photo: Red Bull

Signed up by Red Bull through its revived Driver Search shootout last year, McLaughlin became by modern standards a relatively late starter in car racing at the start of 2025 at the ripe old age of 17, but he quickly made up for any lost time.

Driving with Hitech GP, he was a frontrunner from the off in the Formula Winter Series, taking a win on his debut weekend on the Algarve and adding two more victories at Motorland Aragon to finish third in the standings.

In British F4, it took him nine races to win, but was never outside of the points over the next three rounds as he traded the championship lead with second year racer Martin Molnar.

McLaughlin’s win in an eventful third race at Zandvoort, when Molnar was among those involved in contact, would prove pivotal. He dropped some points too over the following rounds, but still did enough to ease away in the title race.

There might have been some doubts about the level in British F4 this year, with other drivers holding Formula 1 connections unable to do what McLaughlin did and live up to their hype, but he confirmed his potential at the FIA F4 World Cup in Macau.

Mechanical issues prevented him from doing any proper laps in practice, but he qualified sixth and went on to challenge for the win in the qualification race, only to hit the wall out of second place just a few corners from the end.

17. Enzo Deligny

New entry • The fastest driver in Formula Regional Europe

Photo: ACI Sport

Photo: ACI Sport

Deligny had lost the backing of Red Bull after a disappointing first season in the Formula Regional European Championship in 2024, but put that behind him with a much stronger 2025 campaign in which he was statistically the quickest driver on the always-competitive grid.

The French-Chinese driver remained with R-ace GP for a second season and team boss Thibaut de Merindol saw a big step in his maturity.

Marginally quicker than eventual champion Freddie Slater on qualifying performance across the year, Deligny claimed four pole positions and four victories during the season. The latter allowed him to finish third in the championship on countback against Pedro Clerot, who was more consistent but won only twice.

That inconsistency prevented him putting up a stronger challenge against Slater in the championship and there was still the odd wild moment, such as disqualification from third place at the Hungaroring for driving erratically on the slow-down lap.

Overall though we saw a much-improved Deligny this year, capped by a clean run to third at the Macau Grand Prix.

16. Dino Beganovic

Up 3 • First F2 campaign featured a pole and a win

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Beganovic wasn’t a factor in the Formula 2 championship fight like some of his fellow rookies were, but he certainly showed strong progression.

Having scored points just four times in the first half of the season, he did so 11 times out of 14 in the second half.

This not to say that the Ferrari junior was lacking performance in the early part of the year. He qualified fifth for the cancelled season-opening feature race in Melbourne, and by round four at Imola had put his Hitech car on pole position. He finished that race third, jumped by team-mate Luke Browning after being delayed in his pit-stop before the red-hot Alex Dunne passed both.

While Browning was now firmly in the tight fight, it took Beganovic longer to consistently find his feet, but fourth in the Silverstone feature race began a more competitive sequence of results. His season – which included two F1 practice runs for Ferrari – peaked on the streets of Baku, where he won the sprint race and came third in the feature race.

15. Thomas Strauven

New entry • Superior in winter and summer in Spanish F4

Photo: Campos Racing

Photo: Spanish Winter Championship

The standing and depth of the Spanish F4 championship seems to improve with every season that passes, making Strauven’s dominance of the series in 2025 all the more impressive.

There didn’t seem to be much to separate Strauven and Campos Racing team-mate Jan Przyrowski in terms of pace in the three-round winter championship at the start of the year, with the Belgian’s better consistency helping him to take the title.

The same trend was amplified in the main championship. Strauven had an early edge in qualifying, starting on pole for six of the first eight races, during which time Przyrowski matched him for wins with three apiece. But Strauven was only off the podium once in that time, and already opening up his championship lead.

While Przyrowski then started the next seven races from pole, he didn’t win again. Strauven on the other hand ended the season with a total of 10 wins and seven other podiums from the 21 races, and 157 points more than his nearest rival – which wasn’t Przyrowski but rookie compatriot Ean Eyckmans.

14. Arvid Lindblad

Down 3 • FROC title and early F2 promise were key to F1 chance

Photo: TGR NZ

Photo: Red Bull

Lindblad ends this year with arguably the best prize of any driver on this list, as the only one who will be an F1 driver in 2026.

He took an important step towards that already in the first six weeks of the year when he won the Formula Regional Oceania Championship, giving him enough points for a superlicence. In truth, his prior record was a clear cut above the rest of what wasn’t the strongest field ever assembled in New Zealand, but stepping down a level and getting the job done under scrutiny and pressure is sometimes easier said than done.

Getting it done meant he could step up to F2 with less pressure to achieve results; valuable in the context of the struggles other highly rated drivers have had at that level.

Still, Lindblad did adapt impressively, which likely helped lead the FIA to grant special dispensation for him to receive his superlicence already at the age of 17.

That decision came less than two weeks after he won the Barcelona feature race from pole position. Including that result, across his first six rounds in F2, Lindblad had also won the Jeddah sprint race, come second in the Imola sprint and scored in all but one race.

At this stage he was third in the championship, just eight points from the lead, but he would score only seven times in the last 14 races and end up sixth in the standings. It was a tailing off that mirrored his previous campaigns in FIA Formula 3 and Italian F4, but it’s his quick adaptation at such a young age that should bode well for his next step.

13. Matteo De Palo

New entry • FREC’s surprise Slater challenger 

Photo: ACI Sport

Photo: ACI Sport

De Palo was arguably the biggest surprise package anywhere in junior single-seater racing in 2025.

That’s not to say that his potential had not been completely hidden previously, because his run to fifth in Spanish F4 as a car racing rookie in 2023 certainly showed promise. But there was little in his rookie FREC campaign in 2024 with Sainteloc Racing, finishing 17th in the standings, to put him among the favourites starting this season. After all, his new team Trident had yet to take a driver to victory in three previous seasons in the series.

Together, they put that right in race one at Misano. Maybe more surprising than that home victory was that it wasn’t a flash in the pan.

De Palo’s early 25-point advantage over Prema’s well-prepared Slater was eradicated in only five races, only for the Roman to go and win the next race at the Hungaroring. Slater started to pull away mid-season, but de Palo capitalised on two consecutive non-scores for his rival with a third win of his own at the Red Bull Ring to get in front again. They traded places again either wide of de Palo’s fourth win at Barcelona and he stayed close until the Monza decider, which he had entered only four points adrift.

Newly signed to McLaren’s driver development programme, de Palo’s first weekend in Papaya was underwhelming after a one-off switch to R-ace GP, but it’s with Trident that he steps up to FIA F3 next year – as Slater’s team-mate.

12. Mari Boya

Re-entry • New Aston junior came third in F3, second in Macau

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

49th in this list in 2023, when he was Eurocup-3 runner-up alongside his rookie season in FIA F3, it’s rare for a driver to stay in the latter series for a third season and rarer still for them to then make as positive an impression as Boya did in 2025.

The Spaniard’s appointment as an Aston Martin F1 junior in the middle of the year appeared to be one of the more left-field such signings, but it seemed to help him take a step forward.

At the time, six rounds into the season, he had been sixth in the standings with a couple of third-places to his name in the Monaco and Red Bull Ring feature races. So far, so solid. Next time out at Silverstone he won the feature race, having already finished third in the sprint race.

A second place would come later in the Hungaroring feature race and he ended the year third in the championship – and as the second-highest scorer in feature races.

Boya also made his experience count at the Macau Grand Prix to challenge for victory, ultimately finishing second.

11. Max Garcia

Up 31 • Prodigious rise continues with USF Pro 2000 title

Photo: Gavin Baker Photography

Photo: Gavin Baker Photography

Garcia will still only be 16 years old when he makes his Indy Nxt debut next year after winning back-to-back titles on the IndyCar ladder.

While his USF2000 title in 2024 was hard-fought against several other drivers, with five wins from 18 races, his run to the USF Pro 2000 crown was far more dominant with nine victories from the same number of opportunities. He was on the podium in all but five races.

Such consistency was highly valuable. As an example, Alessandro de Tullio had three poles and three wins from the first four races, but the rest of his campaign was far more hit and miss and he finished fourth, 153 points behind Garcia.

Round three’s triple header at Indianapolis Motor Speedway was particularly wild and Garcia wasn’t able to avoid being involved, but he still finished all three races in the top four and increased his points lead over de Tullio from 16 to 57.

Written by Peter Allen

The post Formula Scout Top 50 Drivers of 2025: 20-11 appeared first on Formula Scout.

30. Sebastian Wheldon

New entry • F4 returnee went global with wins in Europe and UAE

Photo: ACI Sport

Photo: ACI Sport

After winning a Formula 4 title in 2023 in the Skip Barber Formula Race Series and starring in USF Juniors cars in 2024, Wheldon returned to F4 machinery for his third year in single-seaters but relocated his career from the United States to Europe and the United Arab Emirates.

He joined the Prema team to race in three championships this year, starting off with F4 Middle East (after a winning debut in the Formula Trophy at the end of 2024). Wheldon began his campaign with a podium, then two further top-five finishes put him seventh in the standings, behind three of his team-mates.

In Italian F4 he had a far more successful time, and again started on a high with victory and fastest lap in the season opener. A second place followed in his next race, then in rounds two and three he took a win and another podium each time.

There was a dry run of three podium-free rounds that followed, but in the season-closing quintuple-header at Misano three of the wins and two of the poles went to Wheldon. Those results put him third in the standings, not far from second, while in the sister E4 championship he came fourth with one win and two other podiums.

Wheldon’s year ended with the FIA F4 World Cup in Macau, where he set the pace in practice and qualifying. He crashed out at the first braking zone of the qualification race, but impressively recovered to fourth in the main race.

29. Victor Martins

Down 9 • Results didn’t reflect rapid pace in F2

Photo: Williams Racing

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

The Williams junior was the fastest driver in Formula 2 this year, yet came 11th in the standings. He failed to see the chequered flag six times, and only had a podium view three times.

Martins was on pole for the feature races in Melbourne and Silverstone, his average starting position was fifth and his median starting position was 2.5 due to being so consistently near the top in qualifying.

He finished higher than where he started in nine races, usually slipping back since he only had the 13th best race pace in the field. But at the ART Grand Prix team, that still translated into being able to score over three times as many points as his team-mate.

Lots of things did not go Martins’ way during the year, most notably having his two poles do nothing for his race chances. In Melbourne the race was cancelled, and wet weather at Silverstone led to him dropping down the order and coming 19th. He was also on the receiving end of contact from some of his less mature rivals, but that was an accepted risk in opting to remain at this level for a third year – a commitment that ultimately didn’t pay off.

28. Alex Ninovic

New entry • GB3 champion with victories in five countries

Photo: Jakob Ebrey Photography

Photo: Jakob Ebrey Photography

Although he was taking a step up Britain’s single-seater ladder, 2024 British F4 runner-up Ninovic faced many new circuits as he graduated to GB3. However it was at those venues where he outshone his usual rivals, ultimately leading to title success.

Only half of this season’s rounds were in Britain, and the championship’s new, more powerful car presented further challenges. In the opening round, Ninovic had a fourth, a fifth and a non-finish and left the event seventh in the standings.

It only took four more races for Ninovic to move up into the points lead, and from there he continued to score big and was crowned with a 148-point gap to second place.

The Australian won from pole at Zandvoort, Spa-Francorchamps, the Hungaroring, Silverstone, Brands Hatch, Donington Park and Monza, with double victories at the two British tracks. He was GB3’s only driver to star at ‘home’ and abroad.

27. Martinius Stenshorne

Re-entry • F3’s top sprint race scorer

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Stenshorne was ninth in Formula Scout’s end-of-year list in 2023, when he was Formula Regional European Championship runner-up, and last year he stepped up to the FIA Formula 3 Championship with Hitech GP. Although he won a sprint race, he scored no feature race points until the season-ending race where he finished fifth and took fastest lap.

For 2025 he decided to stay with Hitech, and a new F3 car made it difficult to build on any end-of-2024 momentum.

But Stenshorne delivered from the off, starting his sophomore campaign on the podium, winning the Monaco sprint race, taking victory in the Red Bull Ring feature race from 15th on the grid and claiming two other podiums in the season’s second half to make him the year’s top scorer in sprint races.

He more than doubled his 2024 points tally, improved to fifth in the standings after being 18th as a rookie, was in the top seven on single-lap and race pace and delivered all but one of Hitech’s points. Now no longer a McLaren junior but still guided by Nicolas Todt’s All Road Management, he also ran highly on his F2 debut in Baku.

26. Evan Giltaire

Up 14 • FRME champion also starred in FREC

Photo: ACI Sport

Photo: ACI Sport

Giltaire first started racing for ART GP in FREC back in 2023, and his first full season last year may have only featured two podiums but his haul of 97 points from eight races that he finished in the top 10 put him seventh in the standings.

This year he more than doubled his number of points-scoring races, came close to doubling his 2024 points tally, more than doubled his podium count and claimed his first two poles. For the second season in a row the highlight was in the opening round, this year at Misano, where Giltaire broke his pole duck and converted it into his sole victory of 2025.

Before FREC was FRegional Middle East, and that campaign led to the second title of Giltaire’s single-seater career. In a series new to him and the team, he won three times and had five other podiums from the five-round season, allowing him to beat Freddie Slater to the crown.

A similar title challenge in FREC ultimately didn’t follow after he went seven rounds without a podium, but Giltaire was back on form at the end of the year and starred too at the Macau Grand Prix. In qualifying he was third fastest, he finished fourth in the qualification race then was sixth in the main race.

25. Pedro Clerot

New entry • Uber-consistent FREC campaign earned plaudits

Photo: ACI Sport

Photo: ACI Sport

Aside from a points-free weekend at Spa and a single 10th place finish in Hungary, Clerot’s lowest result in FREC this year was seventh as he utilised a superb level of consistency to come fourth in the standings and only miss out on third on victory countback.

Clerot’s highest-scoring weekend was at Zandvoort, where he claimed a double pole and converted first place on the grid into a victory and a second place. He was also on pole at the Red Bull Ring, where he won again and was fourth in the event’s other race, and he collected four other podiums in rounds at the Hungaroring, Barcelona and Monza.

The Brazilian became the first Van Amersfoort Racing driver in FREC to surpass 200 points in a campaign since 2020, and his seven podiums was a haul nobody driving for the team has ever bettered.

There was a run of four rounds where Clerot was in the top five in every race, which not even the champion achieved this year.

24. Gabriel Gomez

New entry • Marked himself out by threatening Prema’s Italian F4 supremacy

Photo: ACI Sport

Photo: ACI Sport

Having only been 18th in Spanish F4 last year, driving for the inexperienced TC Racing team, it wasn’t expected that Gomez’s switch to US Racing for his second full year in single-seaters would lead to him being one of the best F4 drivers on the globe.

His title-winning potential was shown from the off, as he started the Formula Winter Series with two wins and two poles. He remained on the podium through the next seven races, including another win and three more poles, and he was crowned champion by a huge margin.

Prema was not present in that paddock, whereas Gomez had to take on the drivers of the dominant Italian outfit when he then headed to Italian F4 and E4. In the former he won four times, took seven other podiums and five poles, inflicting defeat on Prema more times than anyone else. In the latter championship, lasting nine races, he had two wins and three second places.

Although he was far from Prema’s champion in both, Gomez was runner-up in the standings twice and has a lot of career momentum behind him now.

23. Tim Tramnitz

Up 12 • Solid second F3 season was built on strong early form

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Photo: Red Bull

Quietly impressive is the best way to describe Tramnitz’s sophomore FIA F3 campaign, as he scored strongly enough while his MP Motorsport team was on the pace early in the season that, even with a six-race points-free run following that, he finished fourth in the standings.

He was the fourth-highest scorer on the grid in feature races, making the podium at Bahrain and the Red Bull Ring and finishing fifth in Melbourne and Monaco. Tramnitz’s two team-mates’ combined points tally from the season was less than his, and he outperformed his season-long data metrics thanks to maximising the package he had early in the campaign.

While he only qualified in the top five twice, and there were no standout results, Tramnitz was getting the job done on track each race in a way few others were able to when F3’s new car was introduced.

22. Theophile Nael

Re-entry • Macau GP win followed starring F3 drives

Photo: Macau GP Organising Committee

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Nael was 16th in this list in 2023, when he romped to the Spanish F4 title. He continued to impress last year, but with less headline results as he continued with Sainteloc Racing for the step up to FREC and FRME.

He won once in each championship, and decided to stick with the French team again into 2025. This time he only did three FRME rounds, with a return of three podiums that was still enough to put him seventh in the standings.

Focus moved on from that point to FIA F3, which meant having to leave his long-time team. Nael joined VAR, and enjoyed a stellar start to life at his new home. He qualified third on his F3 debut, rising from 10th to seventh in Melbourne’s sprint race and making the podium in the feature race.

His next points came in round five at Barcelona, and it was a similar story. He qualified fourth, rose to fifth in the sprint race and second in the feature race. There was only one point next time out at the Red Bull Ring, as VAR lacked qualifying pace, but Nael starred again in the feature race Silverstone with a charge from ninth to second. Further points finishes put him eighth in the standings – the third-highest rookie – with more points than his two team-mates combined.

Nael capped off 2025 at the Macau GP. Driving for Pinnacle Motorsport, he set the qualifying pace and stayed cannily in contention through the two races to wind up as winner of the grand prix.

21. Lochie Hughes

Up 9 • Continued stellar rise up road to Indy

Photo: James Black

Photo: Joe Skibinski

Hughes has sped up the Road to Indy, coming third in USF2000 in 2023, winning the 2024 USF Pro 2000 title and placing third in his rookie Indy Nxt season this year.

The Andretti Global driver was on the podium in seven out of the first eight races, with the exception being a fifth place (with the fastest lap) around the tricky Detroit street circuit.

In just his third weekend in the championship, Hughes claimed a double pole on Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s road course and converted those into a victory and a second place.

His next win was at Gateway, his first ever oval race at this level, and a performance that left the Australian in shock as he found a level of extreme confidence on the high line. He also made the podium on an oval at the Milwaukee Mile.

Hughes was third fastest on single-lap pace across the season and fourth on race pace, and for drivers who were stepping up to single-seaters’ second tier he was way clear of the next best driver who was 13th in the standings.

Written by Ida Wood

The post Formula Scout Top 50 Drivers of 2025: 30-21 appeared first on Formula Scout.

40. Akshay Bohra

New entry • FRegional rookie won in Europe and Middle East

Photo: ACI Sport

Photo: ACI Sport

Having pulled off something of an upset by beating Freddie Slater to win the E4 title in 2024, Bohra stepped up to Formula Regional with R-ace GP and made a strong impression for a rookie, winning races in both the Middle East and European championships.

His Middle East win in Abu Dhabi was one of only five races (out of 15) in which he scored points, so he ended up only 14th in the standings there, but his European campaign was far more consistent. There he failed to score just five times out of 20, and came sixth in the standings as the next-best first-year driver after champion Slater.

He joined the top five in winning a race, doing so at Imola from pole position after pipping Slater to pole by 0.027 seconds, and setting the fastest lap as he kept the eventual champion at bay. There were five other podium finishes, including second to an irrepressible Slater at a damp Hockenheim.

Perhaps surprisingly, the Indian-American seems short of options to continue building career momentum in Europe, with a switch to Super Formula Lights on the horizon after testing recently with TOM’S.

39. Noah Stromsted

Down 8 • FIA F3 rookie showed strong pace

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Trident started the 2025 FIA Formula 3 Championship as the team to beat, and Stromsted utilised that to finish two of the first three feature races in second place and set the fastest lap in both races of round three at Imola.

As other teams caught up with the tricks Trident nailed straight away, Stromsted scored less frequently but still got the job done usually in feature races (with only four drivers outscoring him in those) and at Spa-Francorchamps he claimed his maiden victory in the sprint race.

The rookie, who graduated from FREC, came sixth in the standings, was in contention to make the top four and he was an impressive fifth best on single-lap and race pace through the season.

Stromsted qualified in the top three at three different circuits, with his worst weekend being Monaco where he crashed in practice, was down the order in qualifying, retired from the sprint race and was 18th the next day.

38. Ean Eyckmans

New entry • Strong progress as single-seater rookie yielded second in Spanish F4

Photo: All Road Management

Photo: ACI Sport

Single-seater rookie Eyckmans had a stellar 2025, which included racing in FRegional.

Chosen last year as the winner of the Richard Mille Young Talent Academy scholarship, his main programme was in Spanish Formula 4 with MP Motorsport, which began with the Winter Championship. Two podiums and a pole put him sixth in the standings, and he was the second-best rookie.

The start of his main championship campaign didn’t go to plan, as a second place was Eyckmans’ sole points-scoring result in the first five races. But following that he was on the podium seven times in the next eight races, ending with his first victory in round five at Jerez. A win and two third places in the last two rounds made him the championship runner-up behind compatriot Thomas Strauven and ahead of Jan Przyrowski and Rene Lammers, and the top rookie by over 130 points.

During the summer, Eyckmans stepped up to FREC with Race Performance Motorsport, and he topped the rookie classification in three races as well as scoring twice to come 19th in the standings and second in the rookie classification’s points table.

37. Jules Roussel

New entry • Fought for French F4 title and won FIA F4 World Cup in Macau

Photo: Macau GP Organising Committee

Photo: Macau GP Organising Committee

Roussell was 11th in French F4 with one podium last year, and improved in his sophomore season to two victories, six runner-up finishes and only missing out on second in the standings on victory countback.

Spa was Roussel’s strongest weekend, as he claimed his maiden pole and took home both of his wins.

There was only one track where he didn’t make the podium, and while his failure to meet the chequered flag four times was twice the number of his title rivals, he only had one more points-free race than Arthur Dorison who edged him to the championship runner-up spot.

Roussel got to go up against French F4 champion Alexandre Munoz again in the FIA F4 World Cup, and thoroughly outperformed him. Fourth in practice was followed by sixth in qualifying, second in the qualification race and then victory in the all-important main race. He took the lead on the opening lap, and outwitted the drivers who then tried to challenge him.

36. Taito Kato

Up 11 • Made big gains across his sole year in FRegional

Photo: ACI Sport

Photo: ACI Sport

Honda protege and 2024 French F4 champion Kato joined ART Grand Prix to race in FREC and FRME this year and the World Cup in Macau.

His FRME campaign may have included a podium in the second round, but he was far behind both of his more experienced team-mates Evan Giltaire and Kenato Le and had an average finishing position lower than 10th place.

It was totally different in FREC, where his average race result improved to 8.7 and he came seventh in the standings, far ahead of Le and a lot closer to Giltaire.

At Spa and Paul Ricard he made the podium, and in the Monza season finale he finished both races in fourth. In qualifying the field is split in two, and Kato was second in his group twice and third fastest twice too.

In Macau he impressed too as one of the leading rookies. He topped free practice, was fourth in qualifying, then finished fifth in both races.

35. Joshua Duerksen

Down 17 • Podium spree showed AIX’s F2 potential

Photo: FIA

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Duerksen maximised AIX Racing’s pace in Formula 2 at rounds where the team was competitive, making the podium at six circuits and bookending the season with victories. His year-ending win in the Abu Dhabi feature race from eighth on the grid was a repeat of what he did as a rookie with the team in 2024.

Six of Duerksen’s podiums came in the last eight races, and they rocketed him from 15th to ninth in the standings.

He was 13th fastest in the field on single-lap pace, but fifth on race pace and for podiums and laps led (including those behind the safety car) he was only bettered by two drivers. All of AIX’s points were scored by Duerksen.

But there were also lows for Duerksen. In Monaco he crashed out of both races, which was one of six rounds he failed to score in, and in Jeddah and at Spa he was towards the back of the grid.

34. Emanuele Olivieri

New entry • Won F4 Middle East title and starred in Macau

Photo: F4 ME

Photo: F4 ME

Three-time Le Mans 24 Hours-winning Rinaldo Capello is the godfather of Olivieri, and his guidance has so far turned him into an impressive talent at single-seaters’ entry level.

Although the Italian only scored 15 points across 33 races in three championships last year, he was with a midfield team in AKM Motorsport where being a podium threat was unlikely regardless of his abilities. Switching to R-ace GP for 2025 therefore added a bit of pressure to show what his true potential was, and he instantly delivered in F4 Middle East where he beat his team-mate Alex Powell (a third-year F4 racer) to the title. His season featured six wins, five poles and only two races off the podium.

Olivieri’s title-winning margin raised expectations for Italian F4, where Prema is the dominant team. Although Olivieri was R-ace’s lead driver again, and he started the season with two podiums, he only took home two more trophies during the season and came seventh in the standings with two poles to his name.

The FIA F4 World Cup in Macau marked another time to shine, with no team advantages at play, and Olivieri was third in practice and qualifying, won the qualification race with a stunning overtake and finished runner-up in the main race.

33. Alexandre Munoz

New entry • French F4 sophomore made a big step to win 2025 title

Photo: KSP Reportages

Photo: KSP

Munoz wasn’t one of the big names in his domestic karting scene or in international competition, and when he moved into single-seaters last year on home soil in French F4 he started on the back foot by missing the season opener and retiring from his debut race.

Following that he was rarely near the points, only scoring twice and having an average finishing position of 14.7 until the final two races. His season changed then, as he won the reversed-grid race at Paul Ricard and followed it up with fifth in the season finale. That was his best result by some margin in a race using a grid set from qualifying.

The turnover of drivers each year in the centrally-run championship, and that final round of 2024, meant Munoz was perceived to be a likely title contender for this season.

He delivered on that promise, winning all four of the main races across the first two rounds and having three of those victories come from pole. In the reversed-grid races of those rounds he came fourth twice, and while his form was never quite a dominant after that he was still on the podium at least once every round, took a fourth pole at Spa and in the final round became champion before the final race which he won.

Munoz then contested the FIA F4 World Cup in Macau, but crashed in qualifying and retired from both races.

32. Yuto Nomura

New entry • Dominated SF Lights as a rookie

Photo: Super Formula Lights

Photo: Super Formula Lights

Honda junior Nomura spent three years in F4, culminating in the 2024 Japanese title, but it only took one season for him to not only become a frontrunner in the third-tier Super Formula Lights championship but utterly dominate it and earn a Super Formula seat for 2026.

After finishing second in all three races of the season opener (losing a win to a five-second penalty), then failing to score at Autopolis, he won 12 of the remaining 13 races over the next four rounds and his title-winning margin was equivalent to almost five wins’ worth of points.

Round one at Suzuka was the only time Nomura didn’t claim a pole position, as he took both at Okayama, Sportsland Sugo and Twin Ring Motegi, and was on pole for one race at Autopolis and at Fuji Speedway.

The last time there was a rookie champion in Japanese F3/SF Lights was Sacha Fenestraz in 2019, but he had already done a season in FIA European F3. Nick Cassidy had 12 races of F3 experience before winning the 2015 title, so Ryo Hirakawa in 2012 was the last true rookie champion before Nomura.

31. Myles Rowe

Re-entry • Made history with improved second season in Indy Nxt

Photo: Travis Hinkle / Penske Entertainment

Photo: James Black

Rowe rejoins the list after being placed 17th in 2023, when he won the USF Pro 2000 title as a rookie.

He has spent two years in Indy Nxt since then, with Force Indy a permanent part of his entry which was co-run by HMD Motorsports in 2024 and then Abel Motorsports for 2025.

Having come 11th with a best finish of fourth as a rookie, Rowe improved to fourth in the standings as a sophomore and in the oval race at Iowa Speedway in summer he claimed a landmark first victory for black drivers in Indy Nxt.

Rowe ended the season with a second win at Nashville Superspeedway from ninth on the grid, was on the podium in both races on Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s road course, finished second at Gateway and was third at Portland.

He was the top scorer on ovals, and had the third-best race pace in the field. For 2026 he will stay with Abel.

Written by Peter Allen & Ida Wood

The post Formula Scout Top 50 Drivers of 2025: 40-31 appeared first on Formula Scout.

50. Jan Przyrowski

New entry • Raised his game to feature in two F4 title fights

Photo: Campos Racing

Photo: Campos Racing

Spanish Formula 4 sophomore Przyrowski made big strides in 2025, boosted by the continuity of remaining in Campos Racing’s line-up, having strong team-mates and a winter series to gain extra mileage in.

Last year he came 10th in Spanish F4, with two podiums and three fastest laps, and he was able to double his points and podium tally in a campaign by this March as he went on a roll in the inaugural Spanish F4 Winter Championship.

Przyrowski took both poles in round one, converting each into a win, and also won in rounds two and three to be runner-up in the standings. He was beaten to the title by team-mate Thomas Strauven, and their friendly on-track rivalry helped both to raise their game.

That continued into the main championship, where Przyrowski won three of the first four races. He was on the podium at all but one track, his run of seven successive poles incorporated three rounds, and he scored over 200 points in a field which was very competitive at the front. In every race he showed major improvements on the level he had performed at in 2024.

49. Salim Hanna

New entry • Top rookie in Europe’s most competitive F4 field

Photo: ACI Sport

Photo: Jakob Ebrey Photography

The seven-race Formula Trophy season in the United Arab Emirates a year ago was Hanna’s sole single-seater experience before embarking on a four-pronged Formula 4 attack in 2025.

F4 Middle East was the first championship he raced in, driving a Mumbai Falcons-branded car run by Prema, and he took a maiden podium en route to sixth in the standings. He remained with Prema for Italian F4 and its sister championship E4, and Hanna – under the guidance of countrymen Juan Pablo and Sebastian Montoya – continued to grow as a driver.

The Italian F4 season begin with Hanna starting on pole, and he converted it into a second place finish. There were five further podiums across the campaign, putting him fourth in the standings and topping the rookie classification.

In E4 he was seventh, adding one podium to his 2025 tally, and his busy schedule was completed by joining Virtuosi Racing in British F4 for two weekends. His first time in the paddock at Thruxton delivered his first victory, then in the Formula 1-supporting non-championship round at Silverstone he won both races.

48. Pepe Marti

Re-entry • Earned FE seat after matching F1-bound team-mate

Photo: Red Bull

Photo: Red Bull

Marti came 10th in Formula Scout’s end-of-year ranking in 2023 after winning three races en route to fifth in the FIA Formula 3 Championship. That was his sophomore F3 season and his third year with Campos.

This year was his fifth as a Campos driver, his second racing in Formula 2, and also featured three victories.

Missing the last two rounds, having began pre-season preparations for his recent step up to Formula E, meant Marti came eighth in the standings. But at the point when he dropped off the grid, he was ahead of F1-bound team-mate Arvid Lindblad.

Marti was only 15th fastest in the F2 field for single-lap pace, but across the season he was fourth best on race pace and he finished higher than where he started in 13 out of 23 races. There were four occasions where he gained nine or more places, the first being the Bahrain sprint race where he climbed from 11th place to victory.

He also won the sprint races at the Red Bull Ring and Hungaroring, and his sole feature race podium was at Monza.

47. Liam McNeilly

New entry • Visa issues prevented a likely USF2000 title

Photo: Gavin Baker Photography

Photo: Gavin Baker Photography

The 2024 USF Juniors runner-up began 2025 by winning both races and coming 0.0566 seconds shy of a double pole in USF2000’s St. Petersburg season opener. Next time out at NOLA Motorsports Park it was three poles and three victories, then McNeilly headed home to England.

Following that, US state officials deemed his visa invalid. It prevented him from re-entering the country and continuing his season. They did not believe he was a racing driver, despite proof of that fact as multiple parties sought to get his visa approved again, and McNeilly sank to 14th in the standings after missing almost three quarters of the campaign.

There was an opportunity to contest the Canadian event in Toronto a few months later, yet with little to gain now from returning to USF2000, he instead stepped up to USF Pro 2000 for the weekend. He started and finished fifth on his debut, and qualified fourth for race two. That position was kept through the race, and his points-per-race average was the sixth best in the 2025 field.

Even later in the year he made his GB3 debut at Donington Park, with his cameo resulting in a podium.

46. Salvador de Alba

New entry • The fastest junior single-seater driver on ovals in 2025

Photo: Joe Skibinski

Photo: Penske Entertainment / Travis Hinkle

The switch from NASCAR Mexico, where he was champion, to open-wheel racing in 2022 has proven fruitful for Mexican de Alba who has maximised his oval experience in USF Pro 2000 and now Indy Nxt.

His rookie campaign in IndyCar’s primary feeder series last year featured two podiums, both on ovals, and he finished in each of the top four places across this year’s four oval races. There was also pole for the season finale at Nashville Superspeedway, a different kind of challenge compared to other ovals, and it was a result that he came close to achieving earlier in the year.

De Alba was the quickest on absolute pace around ovals, and fourth on race pace, with one victory at the Milwaukee Mile. On road and street courses, he had five top-five finishes and that put him fifth in the standings for a second season in a row.

The 26-year-old was more competitive at every track compared to 2024, showing he’s not stagnated yet in his fourth year of single-seater racing.

45. Roman Bilinski

New entry • Led Rodin to its best ever year in FIA F3

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

The FIA F3 Championship has three-car teams, yet Bilinski scored over half of Rodin Motorsport’s points in 2025.

After three years in Formula Regional, which included a title in New Zealand but only two podiums in Europe and never coming higher than 15th in the championship, Bilinski stepped up to F3 with a point to prove.

Making the podium on his debut and also scoring in the feature race in Melbourne was a strong start, and two rounds later at Imola he netted two top-eight finishes. In the following round in Monaco he topped his qualifying group, which translated into starting and finishing second in the feature race.

At Silverstone he also claimed a double points finish, from row eight of the grid both times. In the feature race he was an impressive fourth, having climbed nine spots on lap one.

Bilinski’s season ended at Monza with a maiden victory in the sprint race, and further points the next day that contributed to 2025 being Rodin’s best ever in FIA F3. It was the most impressive year of his own career, in the first season after a serious injury had threatened to derail it.

44. Alessandro Giusti

Down 17 • Williams junior’s lengthy scoring run was unmatched in F3

Photo: Dutch Photo Agency

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Giusti’s second place finish in the FIA F3 sprint race at the Red Bull Ring was not only the best result of his rookie season, but marked the end of a remarkable nine-race scoring run. It was a feat nobody else achieved this year.

That podium in Austria followed his third place in the Barcelona feature race, which he started from sixth and marked his best Friday and Sunday results by some margin. But on Saturdays, only three drivers scored more sprint race points in 2025 than Giusti.

When MP had top-10 potential, Giusti tended to do a good job of ensuring that translated into results and when he struggled for pace it mirrored what was happening to more experienced team-mate Tim Tramnitz. The team became less competitive over the course of the year, and in the season’s second half he fell from fifth to 10th in the standings.

43. Ariel Elkin

New entry • Made big leap up ladder and with his performances

Photo: Gavin Baker Photography

Photo: Gavin Baker Photography

Elkin was buried in Italian F4’s midfield two years ago, then made a sideways step to USF Juniors in 2024 and was fourth in the standings with three wins. He moved two rungs higher on the road to Indy for 2025, racing in USF Pro 2000.

His debut weekend started well by qualifying seventh in St. Petersburg, but he retired in race one after finding a wall and then missed race two.

Following that he was routinely one of the most competitive drivers, winning twice on Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s road course and then on his oval racing debut in assured style in the Freedom 90 around Lucas Oil Raceway.

Although there were only two podiums in the second half of Elkin’s maiden campaign in the third tier of single-seaters, he finished six of those nine races in the top five and that consistency was enough to make him championship runner-up while rivals had more retirements and finishes outside of the top 10.

Later in the year he did two Eurocup-3 rounds, and then made a winning cameo in SMP F4’s winter series in Russia.

42. Jack Jeffers

New entry • Third title from four years on the US single-seater scene

Photo: Gavin Baker Photography

Photo: Gavin Baker Photography

There were four drivers with the potential to win the USF2000 title this year, and after McNeilly’s enforced early exit it was sophomore Thomas Schrage who then became the leading driver after taking seven podiums in a row.

After that, rookie Jeffers went on an even more impressive run of eight successive podiums in the last three rounds. That included five victories and three poles, and sent him to what ended up being a comfortably claimed title. He was crowned with a race to spare at Portland, and in the first race there got to have a straight fight with Schrage.

Jeffers finished second in the first three races of the season in St. Petersburg and at NOLA, and took his first win and a third place on IMS’s road course. His sole non-finish was in race one at Road America, which marked the first time he started from pole. The incident that ended his race involved his car going airborne and then into a wall.

Race two the next day was also a low point full of learning, as he started from pole again but lost out in battles, had a wide moment and finished seventh. His only other bad result was on his oval racing debut, as he came ninth in the Freedom 75.

41. Tuukka Taponen

Down 27 • Ferrari junior was ART GP’s top scorer in FIA F3

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

ART Grand Prix’s highest-scoring driver in FIA F3 this year navigated his rookie season well while his team wasn’t always on the pace, and made the top 10 in the standings as a result.

He finished fourth in two of the first three feature races of 2025, and netted a maiden podium in a sprint race during that time, then in Monaco he took his best result of the season by finishing second in the sprint race.

Only one point followed in the next four rounds, meaning Taponen fell from fifth to ninth in the points table, but he bounced back at the Hungaroring with his first feature race podium.

Having qualified 24th then finished 14th and 20th in the season-opening races in Melbourne, Taponen felt ART made a “good step up” for round two at Bahrain where he had his highest-scoring weekend. There were eight races in total which he scored in, fewer than sophomore team-mate Laurens van Hoepen but leading to a greater haul of points.

His results were also far better than his pace metrics for the season, indicating he maximised what he had, having been the 16th best for single-lap pace and 12th best for race pace across the year but with a 46-point feature race haul that was the seventh best in the field.

Written by Ida Wood

The post Formula Scout Top 50 Drivers of 2025: 50-41 appeared first on Formula Scout.

The correlation between pace and results was missing once again with the Dallara F2 2024 for some this year, but the bigger story was whether anyone in the field really had the potential to beat Leonardo Fornaroli

When Formula Scout came to review the 2024 Formula 2 season, the first using a new car, the easiest way to sum up the relationship between pace and points was “How talent shone through in an F2 season of statistical quirks”.

The same applies to 2025, where the fastest driver in the field came 11th in the standings. And he knew he was fastest.

Invicta Racing was the team to beat with the Dallara F2 2024, and did the title double again as rookie Leonardo Fornaroli was crowned champion and Roman Stanek scored over 100 points too down in 10th in the table.

Over the 27-race season, Fornaroli amassed twice as many points as his team-mate and 36 more than anyone else. The same gap split second to fifth in the standings. A record-equalling 14 rounds led to 10 drivers scoring a century of points, a tally only matched in 2020 and beaten in 2022, but Fornaroli’s total was only the 17th highest haul in GP2/F2 history.

Halfway through the latest campaign, Formula Scout delved into the data and Stanek’s quote “in F2 qualifying and the race, they are two different sports” headlined the analysis due to the disparity between the two numerical threads.

And rather than start now with comparing Fornaroli to his rivals, we’ll look at Stanek’s season as the pace and results of a ‘weaker’ driver in a line-up is a good way of demonstrating how competitive their team and their lead driver is.

Invicta was fifth in the teams’ standings at the season’s halfway point, 37 points behind championship leaders Campos Racing, with Fornaroli and Stanek fourth and 11th in the points table. Across the first seven rounds, they were on average the third and ninth fastest drivers in the field, then 11th and 16th on race pace.

Absolute pace

Stanek scored three-and-a-half times as many points in the season’s second half, his tally actually beating what Fornaroli achieved in the first half of the season. At the halfway point, Stanek had seven feature race points while Fornaroli had 65.

In the second half of 2025, Stanek scored 65 feature race points and Fornaroli netted 81. That 16-point difference was smaller than the advantage title rivals Jak Crawford at DAMS (61), Richard Verschoor at MP Motorsport (18) and Alex Dunne at Rodin Motorsport (36) had, but larger than Luke Browning’s three-point outscoring of team-mate Dino Beganovic at Hitech GP.

Having a competitive team-mate was an advantage, since Invicta and Hitech’s duos all scored 65 or more points and the teams rose to first and second in the standings. Crawford, AIX Racing’s Joshua Duerksen and Prema’s Gabriele Mini were the only other drivers to exceed 37 points in the season’s second half, with 67, 62 and 41 respectively.

Invicta’s team principal James Robinson told Formula Scout about Stanek’s input in the team’s competitiveness, which was key to Fornaroli’s title bid, saying “his technical understanding of the vehicle is really second-to-none”.

By the end of the year, after Stanek had taken two poles which were converted into second places and won the feature race at Spa-Francorchamps, and victories in three sprint races and one feature race had gone to Fornaroli, the pair were on average the second and fourth fastest drivers of 2025 on single-lap pace (with Fornaroli ahead) and eighth and 14th on race pace.

The improvement in results at Invicta, making it the team to beat, were backed up by quotes from the Silverstone sprint race which kicked off the second half of the campaign. Fornaroli claimed his first win, and Stanek joined him on the podium.

“We changed massively,” said Stanek. “Mainly the work is done outside of the race track, then you just come on the race and prepare it. We did a lot of work behind the scenes, from simulator to some mental health and how to drive a race car. I’ve been missing… not some information, but some little details that helped me in the races, especially.”

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

He added that “although it’s my third season in F2, every day you keep learning new and new stuff” and that the team had “improved a lot”.

Fornaroli was less insightful about the team’s pace, with his favourite phrase over the year being “it means nothing”. What he meant was that strong results or the points lead, which he took in round nine at Spa, couldn’t be taken for granted.

He was analytical about individual races in conversation, primarily because that’s the info people asked for after each of his four wins, but after winning the Spa sprint race he did discuss his progress as a rookie.

“Now that I have more races in my back, as well as testing, I understood more about the tyres. At the start, it was not easy because compared to Formula 3 it’s quite different. But the biggest step forward I did [was] in Silverstone, so there I learned a lot and it was a very similar situation [to winning today].”

That first win, after becoming 2024 FIA F3 champion with no victories, was “a weight lifted” and a “confidence boost” that enabled Fornaroli to further raise his game.

Fornaroli and Stanek’s working relationship actually extended back to 2022, with both racing for Trident for three years but always in different championships, and they credited it frequently during the season for their collective strength as a line-up.

Crawford came second in F2 this year, and despite the continuity of racing for DAMS faced blind alleys on set-up and had to rely on individual brilliance to bring home big results. He scored 88 points in the season’s first half, and 87 in the second.

After winning the wet Silverstone feature race, a points-free Spa weekend followed. Then Crawford finished third in both races at the Hungaroring, but a points-free weekend at Monza followed. Then he won the Baku feature race from pole, but scored only one point at Losail.

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Crawford knew Silverstone would be a “a track that would suit our car”, and expanded on how circuit comparability impacted consistency.

“We find every weekend quite different, and always different challenges, of course. I mean it’s same for everyone, but we seemed to already last year with the team struggle a bit more with consistency. And this year it’s been a lot better, but it hasn’t been consistently at the front, it’s been kind of consistently in the top 10. I think we’re improving.”

At the Hungaroring he qualified third, rose from eighth to third in the sprint race then maintained his position behind the Invicta duo in the feature race. The third-year F2 driver called his best qualifying lap “one of the best laps I’ve done in F2”, despite it not delivering pole, and cited previous instances of post-practice set-up adjustments hampering his qualifying.

Invicta’s drivers were slowest in Monza practice and Crawford was ninth, behind team-mate Kush Maini. In qualifying, Browning took pole, Maini showed DAMS’ potential by pipping Stanek to second, Fornaroli was eighth and Crawford was in 11th with engine issues that left him way off the pace in the races too.

Since several of Crawford’s bad weekends occurred in the first of back-to-back rounds where he then bounced back, he said “I feel like we’ve done a great job to look past the bad, until we feel like we need to look back at it and make adjustments”. Whether that approach truly helped is unknown, but even if he had been consistent Crawford felt the title wasn’t likely.

“It’s hard to beat when the team [Invicta] and also Leo have done a great job. So anyways, even at our best, it would have been very difficult still. We just missed a little bit. Maybe Invicta were the most consistent team, especially when it came to qualifying. I feel like me, Richard and Luke, we were all a bit inconsistent. And it just comes down to a bit the car.

“Kind of [on] the new car that we’ve had since last year, it’s more tricky to get into the window. I feel like the tyres always have been very tricky to get in the correct window. So those two things, if you’re not getting it right every time, you pay the price.”

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Ahead of Monza, Verschoor sought improved pace by introducing a blander livery that weighed less in paint. According to F2’s own info, he was the tallest driver on the grid in 2025. Therefore his car spent many races far above the minimum weight.

He was 24 points clear at the top halfway through the season, sixth on absolute pace and second on race pace, and ended the year seventh and first on those two metrics. His performances earned him McLaren Formula 1 junior status alongside Fornaroli, and unlike the champion he has a confirmed racing programme for 2026 as he heads to the European Le Mans Series.

But having led the way on 114 points, he only scored 56 more after that despite eight successive points-scoring races. His sole podium was victory in the Losail sprint race. That result made him the highest-scoring driver in sprint races this year, but Fornaroli, Crawford and Browning were far ahead with their feature race tallies. While his single-lap pace only worsened slightly after the Red Bull Ring round in summer, where he claimed his third win, that proved costly while others improved.

He never qualified on pole, but having an average starting spot on Sundays of 6.86, with a median of fifth place since 19th in Imola was his only time outside of the top 10, still proved enough to bring in the points in the season’s first half. His average starting spot was 10.71 in the second half, where Silverstone and Losail were the only tracks where he was in the top 10.

There was some irony that at Monza his new livery did seem to help, as he was second fastest in qualifying before he had his fastest lap deleted for triggering a red flag period when he crashed out while in clean air.

To some degree, poor qualifying form meant more opporunities to rise up the order in races. But he actually proved better at that in the season’s first half, improving his position in nine out of 13 races. The Losail win was his eighth in F2, making him the joint fifth most successful driver in GP2/F2 history. It meant “not much” for a driver with over 125 starts.

Fornaroli won the title the next day, and the unravelling of Verschoor’s title attack appeared to be of his own making as team-mate Oliver Goethe was in the top 10 five out of seven times in the season’s second half and his average starting spot on Sundays was 9.14.

Qualifying

Goethe served three-place grid penalties in both Losail races for an impeding violation in qualifying, which he had topped. That meant “a huge amount” to Goethe, after working hard through the season to improve his qualifying, and Verschoor was 0.678s back in 10th. MP and Invicta were the only two teams to get both of their cars into the top 10, and while Goethe exited the weekend with no points he was fifth in both races of the Abu Dhabi season finale while Verschoor scored nothing.

“Yesterday I just didn’t do a good job. I also apologised to the team of course for that. My team-mate did a phenomenal job,” Verschoor said after his Losail win.

“He showed that he’s really quick and that the car is very good around here. And I think we showed it again today in the race. For sure the car is very competitive on this kind of track. Also next week, I know that we are good as well in Abu Dhabi. So it’s up to me to perform. Yesterday I could just feel that – I’m not someone that is driving at all in the break.

“I haven’t been in a race car for two months, and I think that’s just not really smart. Even though it’s very expensive to drive, it’s just not smart because I could feel the difficulty in putting the lap together.”

For a driver in his fifth F2 campaign, it was a very odd remark. After the big break before the Middle Eastern rounds in the previous three seasons, he had returned to action with a sprint race podium each time. His expectation of performing strongly at Yas Marina Circuit was based on a run of podiums there since 2022, including third place and fastest lap in last year’s feature race with the then-new Dallara F2 2024 car.

“I just didn’t have the right feeling with the car [at Losail]. Even though I could feel that there was a lot of potential, I struggled to put everything together, to nail every corner, and I only did five laps in free practice because my engine broke. I had to change engine after FP. So that was also not helping. It just didn’t click. Sometimes you have those kind of sessions, and it was definitely up to me.”

Photo: Red Bull Content Pool

Based on his own comments, even with a competitive car Verschoor was not getting in positions to remain a rival to Fornaroli.

He also didn’t want to take credit for Goethe’s improving over his first full F2 season, after his team-mate said “I try to learn as much as I can from” Verschoor. But he revealed they spent lots of time together away from the track, and was full of praise:

“I always said that he’s a super fast driver. He just couldn’t really show his potential straight away, but if you see the learning slope that he did, it’s just incredible. Being on pole yesterday I think was something no one was really expecting of him, but he pulled it off.”

That Invicta’s line-up entered 2025 with similar experience disparity, but the roles were reversed in terms of who was doing the late-season catching up to the lead driver’s performance level, further marks out Fornaroli as 2025’s only title-capable driver.

But what about Browning, Dunne, or even Campos’s Arvid Lindblad? Browning came fourth in the standings, but second was within reach, Dunne was Verschoor’s closest rival at the halfway mark and Lindblad’s performances earned him an F1 seat.

Lindblad can be ruled out, impressive as he was in his rookie season, as he was behind team-mate Pepe Marti in the standings when the Spanish sophomore ended his campaign two rounds early to step up to Formula E with Cupra Kiro.

“His decision to step away from F2 and commit fully to our FE project is a real statement of intent,” said the team’s chief operating officer Russell O’Hagan, and he was right. It was a cannily timed move, as Marti was a Red Bull junior like Lindblad but not getting any F1 test time or free practice call-ups like his team-mate was. If beating him wasn’t putting him contention for a 2026 Racing Bulls berth, and Ayumu Iwasa’s title-winning Super Formula season wasn’t enough to be picked over Lindblad either, then it was unlikely a spectacular 2026 in F2 or Red Bull’s usual dumping ground SF would for 2027.

Furthermore, Marti’s replacement Nikola Tsolov also outshone Lindblad. On his debut at Losail, a new track to him and without the pre-season preparations other rookies had, the FIA F3 graduate qualified seventh while Lindblad was 17th.

Race pace

Did less than three rounds. Race pace is calculated using drivers’ best rolling average of 10 consecutive green-flag laps

That put him fourth on the sprint race grid, and he took third from Van Amersfoort Racing’s Rafael Villagomez on lap one. They went wheel-to-wheel again on the final lap and Tsolov came off worse, dropping to 10th.

He was also set to finish one place higher than he started in the feature race, but a penalty for a unsafe release from his first ever pitstop put him back to seventh. Tsolov had “a busy couple of weeks trying to prepare myself physically” and faced many new elements under the lights in Qatar but “the only surprise was the call to move up” to F2 itself.

Lindblad redeemed himself by charging up to fourth, but that was his first top-five finish in a feature race since his win from pole in round six at Barcelona. When they headed to Abu Dhabi, Tsolov was faster again in qualifying. An impeding violation meant a three-place grid penalty in both races for Tsolov, but he rose from fifth to third in the sprint race and while there were only two circuits to take data from his average deficit to the benchmark on single-lap and race pace was sixth best in the field.

The fastest driver in the Yas Marina sprint race was Duerksen, who bookended 2025 with victories, claimed six podiums in the last eight races, led more laps total than all but Crawford and Fornaroli, was fifth on race pace for the year but 13th on single-lap pace and came ninth in the standings in a one-sided garage as team-mate Cian Shields propped up the field.

In contrast to Duerksen, Browning scored one point in the last five races and that cost him the championship runner-up spot. He led the points after round five in Monaco, had the best race pace in four races, and it would’ve taken only one race going differently for him to be 2025’s top scorer in feature races. Despite leading less than a feature race-worth of laps all season.

Laps led (excl. safety car periods)

1 Crawford 103   2 Fornaroli 90   3 Lindblad 61   4 Verschoor 60   5 Duerksen 54   6 Dunne 55   7 Beganovic 49   8 Marti 44   9 Maini 42   10 Browning 22   11 Stanek 16   12 Martins 12   13 Montoya 8   14 Miyata 5   15 Goethe 3   16 Mini 1

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Browning’s unpropitious end to the year began in the Baku feature race, where he had a slow start, lost time in a double stack pitstop, went off at a restart and pitted again to be a lap down. At Losail he spun in practice, qualified 18th and recovered to 10th in the feature race by cycling to the front (7% of his time leading in 2025) before pitting with three laps to go.

At Yas Marina he qualified 17th while struggling with a brake issue, finished the two races in 20th and 14th and got a pitlane speeding penalty.

Browning was fifth and fourth on absolute and race pace at the season’s halfway point, and improved to fourth in the latter but fell to eighth in the former with a minor worsening of his actual average gap to the benchmark pace on any given weekend.

He matched Fornaroli’s tally of nine podiums, while Crawford, Dunne and Duerksen all got eight, but only won once (from pole at Monza). The only other driver without multiple victories in the top in the standings was team-mate Beganovic.

Did a lack of winning form matter? Not according to Browning himself. “Honestly, I don’t mind [not winning],” was his take after a double podium in round three at Imola. He added at Barcelona “it doesn’t cross my mind at all to win any races” and “I couldn’t tell you who won the Barcelona feature race four years ago, but I can tell you who won the championship, so that’s the main goal for me”.

While being happily win-free doesn’t sound like a title-winning mentality, the Williams junior was conveying how relaxed he felt about his season at that point having met his personal targets — including improved consistency and showing race-winning pace. And he’d won twice en route to third in the 2024 FIA F3 Championship, behind Fornaroli and one-time winner Mini.

At the end of the season, after Browning had spent many weekends being asked by media about whether wins or consistency was more important for winning the title, Formula Scout circled back to his early-season comments. Since he had won a race, but not the title, what did he want his season to be remembered for within the paddock, and outside of it?

Points scored

Feature races			Sprint races
Pos	Driver	Points	Pos	Driver	Points
1	Fornaroli	144	1	Verschoor	62
2	Crawford	133	2	Fornaroli	61
3	Browning	131	=3	Dunne	44
4	Verschoor	108	=3	Lindblad	44
5	Dunne	102	=3	Marti	44
6	Beganovic	90	6	Crawford	38
7	Lindblad	88	7	Duerksen	34
8	Duerksen	73	8	Browning	31
9	Stanek	72	=9	Stanek	29
10	Marti	68	=9	Martins	29
11	Montoya	67	=11	Beganovic	26
12	Martins	64	=11	Mini	26

“Great question. What was really special about this year for me, which I think really shows who I was as a driver, is being the hero for the British fans at the home grand prix. That feature race, I came from outside the points, and I was lapping a second quicker than most people in the grid in the wet. And around my home circuit that I knew so well, I think it showed talent, because after all, all the cars are equal in the wet.

“That was probably one of the most standout things for me, and what I’d like to be remembered by is my wet-weather prowess. But I think equally the ability to execute and just optimise what I have in terms of the points. For the pace that we’ve had this year versus the points and situations that I’ve been in, I’ve almost optimised everything as a driver that I can.

“Not always do you have the luck to win the championship, you need pace and luck. And we didn’t have so much luck this year, especially with the safety car coming out when we were looking on for a podium last weekend [from 18th on the grid]. These things happen. Dominating in Monza was a good highlight, and not an easy one on a circuit that’s so easy to overtake. And just doing this in our first year. It takes guys years and years to perfect this championship, and still don’t achieve it. And although I’ve not managed to perfect the championship, we got bloody close at times, and I think I’m very proud of that.”

Saying he optimised everything doesn’t correlate with the season-end particularly. Beganovic finished ahead of him in 10 races, and six of those were in the last three rounds. He dominated the Baku sprint race to break his own victory duck and lead a Hitech one-two, and in the Losail feature race led a one-two again on fastest laps and race pace. But he finished ninth, and called it “one of my best races I’ve ever done”.

Hitech came second in the standings with its all-rookie line-up, and the 38-point gap to Invicta could’ve been far smaller or negated entirely. So maybe Browning was a title-calibre driver maximising his potential until the last two qualifying sessions.

Invicta, Hitech and Campos were the only teams to get double podiums, each doing so twice, while the champions were on the podium at 10 circuits, with Hitech, Campos and Rodin (which came eighth in the teams’ standings) collecting trophies from eight rounds. Like AIX, Rodin was reliant on one driver and its rookie Dunne scored all but five of its 155 points.

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

He was frank about what lacking a team-mate he could take data references from to improve his own car meant for his year.

“There was a relatively big gap between myself and the other car for most of the year,” Dunne told Formula Scout.

“There were a couple of times where there were things that I could maybe have a look at just to compare myself. But for the most part, it was very difficult to pick apart things to find for the majority part of the year. In fairness to Martinus [Stenshorne], in Qatar he jumped in pretty quickly and did a good job there. So I would say that was kind of the first weekend of the year where I had another reference to properly analyse and learn from, and spend a lot more time looking through the data to just see where I can improve.

“I think for the most part of the year, even without a strong reference, we’ve still done a good job kind of getting there, not by ourselves, but without having data to properly compare to each weekend. We’ve always managed to still reach a very high level.”

Dunne was the second fastest driver at the season’s halfway point, and sixth on race pace. He was surpassed by Fornaroli on absolute pace after that, and to ninth on race pace despite his average gap to the pace-setters only increasing marginally. That’s impressive given the lack of a strong team-mate meant he couldn’t enjoy the learning curve Fornaroli had.

As a McLaren junior Dunne could lean on their support to improve himself, while Browning felt he developed massively under Williams this year. Dunne got two F1 practice call-ups too, both on F2 weekends so requiring in-event adaptation, then he left McLaren in October to reportedly pursue a seat with an F1 rival. Dunne didn’t comment on this when asked by Formula Scout.

There’s one driver who notably has not been named in this review of the 2025 F2 title fight, because he didn’t feature in it.

Victor Martins was on average the fastest driver in qualifying this year, without a doubt, as he was never off the pace. But the reasons he came 11th in the standings in his third campaign with ART Grand Prix will require analysing on their own.

The post Could anyone have beaten Fornaroli to the 2025 F2 title? appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: Red Bull

Every year, some of junior single-seaters’ top drivers are handed professional opportunities. Some lead to long-term careers in sportscars, while others try out the more cut-throat world of F1 and IndyCar

In addition to annually ranking the top 50 drivers in junior single-seater racing since 2011, Formula Scout also recognises the achievements of the very best of those who ‘graduate’ into the world of professional racing each year.

After making his Formula 1 debut in last year’s season finale, Jack Doohan began 2025 with a full-time seat at Alpine but he only lasted six race weekends before being demoted back to the reserve driver role he had spent the previous two years in.

His replacement was Franco Colapinto, who had starred in his surprise step up to F1 in 2024 when he joined Williams for the final third of the season. He scored five points in nine races, while in 2025 he went points-free and had several costly crashes. Alpine was uncompetitive at most events, and Colapinto was thoroughly outshone by team-mate Pierre Gasly. He initially raced with a five-round deal, then held the seat race-by-race before Alpine committed at the end of the European leg of the season to keeping Colapinto in the car for the rest of 2025. By November, the seat was then retained for 2026 too.

In IndyCar, Jacob Abel realised his dream of being on the grid by leaving his family’s Abel Motorsports team after eight years with them. He joined Dale Coyne Racing, whose place in the pecking order was up and down during the season, but the 2024 Indy Nxt runner-up failed to make a mark at the top level. He was in the top 20 in just one qualifying session and two races.

Seita Nonaka somehow pieced together a near-complete rookie campaign in Super Formula. He started off with Team Impul at Suzuka, then raced for KCMG at Twin Ring Motegi where he finished eighth in race two to claim his only points.

After missing the next round, he returned to the grid in TGM Grand Prix’s line-up for the remaining events and set the fastest lap in the season’s third race at Fuji Speedway. Despite handling his team switches well, Nonaka didn’t turn his four seasons of Super Formula Lights experience into big results like other SF rookies have been capable of and was 17th in the standings.

Photo: KCMG

The driver he replaced at TGM GP was fellow Toyota junior Hibiki Taira, who did four races with Impul in 2024 and scored two points as well as racing a lot in sportscars. His 2025 SF campaign began so weak he was demoted to a reserve driver role.

After being a reserve driver for an F1 and a Formula E team in 2024, Zane Maloney didn’t continue with either in 2025 to pursue a race seat in FE with Lola Yamaha Abt. It resulted in coming a points-free last in the championship.

Roy Nissany became the most experienced driver in the history of second-tier single-seater racing in 2023, then was out of action last year. He returned to racing in 2025 in the European Le Mans Series, and came 15th in his first campaign racing prototype sportscars. His team-mate for the first three races was Francesco Simonazzi, with the 2024 Euroformula runner-up also doing three races in International GT Open which put him 27th in the standings.

Eligible for this list until June, when he returned to junior single-seaters, was Joseph Loake. As can often be the case, his career lost momentum when he stepped up from Britain’s racing scene to the FIA Formula 3 Championship last year and scored eight points to sit 26th in the table. Prior to that he had won a touring car title, starred in British Formula 4 and come third in GB3, and this year his main programme was with Garage 59 in GT World Challenge Europe’s Enduro rounds.

At what can be considered the top level of GT racing (a status several championships can put a claim on), Loake was Monza Three Hours runner-up, went second fastest in his qualifying session at the Spa 24 Hours before his team-mate Marvin Kirchhofer put their McLaren 720S GT3 Evo on pole, then finished that race in sixth. That crew, completed by Kirchhofer’s fellow McLaren factory driver Benjamin Goethe, ended the season an impressive seventh in the Endurance Cup standings.

Clearly with an eye still on an open-wheel dream, despite earning McLaren’s backing in sportscars, Loake made a USF Pro 2000 cameo at Road America and finished fifth on debut in North American single-seaters’ third tier.

As none of the names in bold made the cut, here is Formula Scout’s Class of 2024… Key Wins (W), poles (P), fastest laps (FL)

10. Levente Revesz HUNGARY 20y/o
Int. GT Open champion (4 W, 1 P, 1 FL), 9th in 24H Series Middle East Trophy – GT3 class   2024: 5th in Euroformula (1 W, 2 FL)   2023: 9th in Euroformula (1 W), 25th in FRegional Europe & FRegional Middle East

Photo: Fotospeedy

Some drivers become far more competitive with a switch of disciplines, as proven by Revesz in a canny career move this year.

He was a backmarker throughout his single-seater career, scoring 15 points across 92 races in five championships over three years, until he stepped up to the third-tier Euroformula championship for the last three rounds of its 2023 season.

By then the championship utterly lacked depth, and was ruled by German outfit Motopark which was propping up the entry list but also dominating with ease. Since Revesz joined the grid with Motopark, and he was in an eight-car field, he was able to take a win and two other podiums.

That prompted him to stick about for 2024 with the team, and against a similarly uninspiring opposition he claimed one win and seven other podiums before dropping off the grid with two rounds to go. By then Motopark had also become a top team in the International GT Open championship, which like Euroformula is promoted by GT Sport.

Revesz moved into its GT squad for 2025, and he unlocked far more performance than ever before as he won four races in the Mercedes-AMG GT3 Evo he co-drove and was crowned champion.

9. Syun Koide JAPAN 26y/o
11th in Super GT, 16th in Super Formula   2024: Super Formula Lights champion

Photo: Super Formula

Photo: Super Formula Lights

By Honda’s reckoning, Koide has not done enough to earn a second season in SF but his rookie campaign with B-MAX Racing still had highlights. And while his team is certainly a heavyweight in junior single-seaters, as proven by Koide’s own march to the 2024 SF Lights title with them, it isn’t at the top level where it only runs one car.

Koide started his SF career by qualifying seventh for his first race at Suzuka, a track he has never been strong at historically. That impressive result was thrown away at the start as he limped off the line and dropped to last. After the first safety car period he was gapped by the rest of the field, but in the race’s second half he rose to 14th place.

The next day he qualified 12th, and had a far better race. Two places were lost at the start, but he gained those back and two more with a lengthy first stint. He utilised his fresher tyres to then pass Kamui Kobayashi, before a penalty lifted him to eighth.

Two 14th places at Twin Ring Motegi followed, then Koide was off the pace and got a penalty at Autopolis. He bounced back by qualifying 11th for race one at Fuji Speedway, but another slow start set up an opening lap in which he gained and lost places. By lap four he had been shuffled down to 18th, and after pitting early he only made it back up to 15th.

A very similar thing occurred the next day, consigning Koide to 17th. Sportsland Sugo was very different, as Koide set the pace in free practice one. But in qualifying a totally avoidable kerb-riding moment caused damage that meant he stopped a few moments later and triggered red flags. From last place, he climbed up to 13th in the race.

Koide had top-10 potential on the return to Fuji but qualified 13th, and despite heavy rain meaning the race ran entirely behind the safety car he was able to fall to last on lap two. Race two, which Koide qualified ninth for, was cancelled due to fog.

That meant the final round at Suzuka became a triple-header, and opening lap action proved to be Koide’s biggest weakness again until the last race. A great launch lifted him from 12th to ninth, he made two further places during the lap then after his pitstop dropped him to 10th he made two overtakes on a safety car restart before scoring points in ninth.

8. Gabriel Bortoleto BRAZIL 21y/o
19th in F1   2024: F2 champion (2 W, 2 P, 2 FL)   2023: FIA F3 champion (2 W, 1 P, 3 FL)

Photo: Sauber Group

Bortoleto’s career accelerated on F1’s support bill, winning the FIA F3 and Formula 2 titles back-to-back and being picked up by Sauber to race in F1 this year.

While the memorable moments of his rookie campaign were mostly crashes, including a 57G shunt on home soil, he still shone on the most competitive stage of all and was the lead Sauber driver at the chequered flag in 10 grands prix.

Bortoleto had spent 2023 and ’24 as a McLaren junior, so was familiar with F1 simulators and facilities, but since it was a different team he debuted with there was plenty of learning to do surrounding its working methods.

It was clear that chief technical officer Mattia Binotto [pictured above] had a lot of faith in Bortoleto’s abilities and when Sauber was at its strongest he was consistently progressing to Q2 and even making it to Q3 three times. This included outqualifying Fernando Alonso, who helms the A14 Management firm which oversees Bortoleto’s career.

The unfamiliar tracks after F1’s European leg unsurprisingly led to a dip in form, but he still scored a point in Mexico City.

Bortoleto raced without the pressure of fighting for his future, since he was signed on a two-year deal, but staying out of trouble when fighting for positions is still an area needing improvement so not to add to his crash count.

7. Zak O’Sullivan ENGLAND 20y/o
15th in SF, 3rd in Super GT – GT300 class (1 W, 1 FL)   2024: 16th in F2 (2 W, 1 FL)   2023: 2nd in FIA F3 Championship (4 W, 1 P, 3 FL)

Photo: Super Formula

In addition to being Envision Racing’s simulator driver in FE, O’Sullivan joined Toyota’s ranks to race in SF this year.

Despite being a Williams junior and having been called up to drive in an F1 practice session while still in F3, a funding issue cut O’Sullivan’s rookie F2 season short in 2024. He had won the feature race in Monaco and a shortened Spa-Francorchamps sprint race, but was actually one of the slowest in the field on race pace and lacked consistency.

SF was a totally different challenge, including a language barrier, on tracks he was totally new to. But O’Sullivan adapted instantly by qualifying 10th on debut and finishing that race in eighth.

He failed to finish in race two at Suzuka, but at Motegi he rose from 14th to 12th in race one, then from 13th to 11th in race two, and at Autopolis he qualified eighth. He saved his car from spinning as it squirreled while he went up the gears at the race’s start, which briefly dropped him to 11th, and was up to fourth when he crashed out before making his required pitstop.

Fuji was a low point for pace, qualifying no higher than 19th and therefore not being in contention for points, but in race one he was faster than Kondo Racing team-mate Kenta Yamashita as he rose to 14th. His potential was shown far better at Sugo, where he qualified eighth then finished seventh in the wet.

He applied what he had learned on the return to Fuji, and utilised his wet-weather prowess, to net an 11th place finish.

In the Suzuka finale there was a huge crash in race one, he could do little from from the back of race two’s grid, and it was a similar story in race three. Meanwhile in Super GT, which marked his first foray into sportscars and in a car shared with an inexperienced team-mate, O’Sullivan took a win and a second place en route to third in the GT300 class standings.

For a total newcomer to Japanese racing, and in SF’s pitstop era, it was a year to be proud of.

6. Jamie Chadwick ENGLAND 27y/o
3rd in European Le Mans Series (3 W), DNF in Le Mans 24H   2024: 7th in Indy Nxt (1 W, 1 P)   2023: 12th in Indy Nxt

Photo: Javier Jimenez

Chadwick’s victory in Indy Nxt last year showed how much she had developed since her rookie season in 2023, but she changed trajectory for 2025 by joining IDEC Sport in the European Le Mans Series. She was partnered with Mathys Jaubert and Dani Juncadella, both established GT racers but rookies in the LMP2 prototype class they were entering.

The trio started fifth for their debut at Barcelona (which like all races was four hours long), and were down to 11th at one point but made their way to the front and finished second. They then won at Paul Ricard, despite ending a wet opening lap in 14th. There was plenty of early drama, and Chadwick rose to fifth before handing over as the track became more treacherous.

It was an up-and-down race at Imola, where the crew spent time in the lead but then quickly ended up a lap down, returned to the lead lap then fell several laps behind. The trio lost a lot of time in traffic, but Chadwick did best at not losing places.

At Spa-Francorchamps, she ran fifth until two pitstops during a virtual safety car period. Prolonged interruptions meant no opportunities to recover places, and after her stint ended the crew’s race got harder and they finished 18th.

On home soil at Silverstone an early pitstop put Chadwick in 15th, and she recovered to 11th before the driver changes began and more places were gained. Her team-mates took the car further up the order to a win that revitalised their title hopes. At the Algarve finale. Chadwick lost second place on lap one, cannily reclaimed it a few laps later while lapping traffic then was shuffled down to fifth. Not long before being swapped out, she took fourth in a dramatic moment she triggered. While a fourth podium was claimed, with their title rivals ahead it meant IDEC’s trio came third in the standings.

Chadwick also drove the car at the Le Mans 24 Hours, and ran sixth in class during her double stint. IDEC competed in collaboration with Genesis Magma Racing, which has signed Chadwick as reserve driver for its Hypercar squad next year.

5. Louis Foster ENGLAND 22y/o
23rd in IndyCar (1 P)   2024: Indy Nxt champion (8 W, 7 P, 7 FL)   2023: 4th in Indy Nxt (2 W, 4 P, 2 FL), 12th in FRegional Oceania (1 W, 4 FL)

Photo: Chris Jones

Photo: RLLR

IndyCar’s Rookie of the Year may have only come 23rd in the standings, as one of only three full-time drivers without a top-10 finish, but he also claimed a pole, led three races and impressed Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing enough to land a multi-year contract extension.

The championship rivals F1 for its strength in depth, physical intensity, variety of circuits and onus on experience, and Foster had two full-time team-mates who already had 328 starts between them so had plenty of knowledge to lean on.

He qualified 16th for his debut, but retired in a lap one collision, so round two at The Thermal Club marked his first exposure to tyre durability in race conditions. Foster started 10th, way ahead of his team-mates, and ran in eighth early on before he lost pace and drifted down the order with each stint until he was a lapped 24th. It was an important day of learning.

Qualifying was Foster’s strength everywhere but ovals, as he started in the top 10 for six races on road and street courses but on average qualified 19th for oval races.

On Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s road course he qualified third and finished 11th, his joint-best race result which was repeated at Road America where he took pole and was almost a second quicker than team-mate Graham Rahal in sixth. At Mid-Ohio he finished 14th from sixth on the grid, and also made the top 10 in Toronto and at Laguna Seca.

Foster’s tally of 14 finishes from 17 races was a better record than seven drivers in the field, and he was the leading RLLR driver across the line in four races including the second one around the Iowa Speedway oval.

The 2024 Indy Nxt champion’s best oval race in IndyCar was his first: the Indianapolis 500. He qualified 20th, ran as high as sixth, and finished on the lead lap in 12th.

4. Igor Fraga BRAZIL/JAPAN 27y/o
6th in SF (1 W, 2 FL), 18th in Super GT – GT300 class   2024: NC in Super GT – GT300 class   2023: 4th in SF Lights (1 W, 1 P, 1 FL), 23rd in Super GT – GT300 class

Photo: Super Formula

Formerly an esports star, a Formula Regional champion and a Red Bull junior, Fraga returned to real-world racing two years ago and came fourth in SF Lights with one win and 23rd in Super GT’s GT300 class. He continued there in 2024, while waiting on the sidelines for a chance to race at single-seaters’ top level in SF.

That happened in 2025 as Nakajima Racing signed him, and he seized the opportunity with both hands.

He qualified eighth for his debut, but had to start from the pits and then got caught in an incident that put him a lap down. While he started 14th for race two the next day, Fraga was in the top 10 by the second corner. Having ended lap one in eighth, he then joined several other drivers in taking the risk of an early pitstop on lap two. It paid off, and he charged to sixth before a penalty moved him up another spot.

At Motegi he was 0.135s away from claiming pole for race one, and finished only 3.772s behind the winner in third. It wasn’t so simple for race two, as he started sixth, struggled for pace early on and dropped to 15th before recovering to ninth place.

Fraga said the set-up was very sensitive, and he was driving the car in an agressive style with possibly more time in races spent side-by-side with rivals than any other driver in the field. When there were clashes, he came out on top.

A fall from sixth to 20th in the first two laps at Autopolis prompted Fraga to pit on lap three, and from there he climbed back up to eighth. The Fuji double-header was productive too. He qualified in the top eight both times, finished eighth in race one then ran seventh in race two before making a second pitstop put him a lap down. Sixth and eighth places at Sugo and Fuji followed, and he was 0.076s off pole for the race that got rescheduled to run at Suzuka.

Fraga qualified third, finished second and set the fastest lap in race one, led every lap of race two to deliver Nakajima’s first win since 2022, then rose from sixth to fourth (with fastest lap) in the finale.

3. Andrea Kimi Antonelli ITALY 19y/o
7th in F1 (1 P, 3 FL)   2024: 6th in F2 (2 W, 4 FL)   2023: FREC champion (5 W, 4 P, 5 FL), FRME champion (3 W, 3 P, 5 FL)

Photo: Mercedes-AMG F1

Photo: Mercedes-AMG F1

The Mercedes-AMG F1 team’s long-time protege finally arrived at single-seaters’ top level this year, and immediately slotted into a seat with his backer as its seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton left for Ferrari.

Joining a race-winning team as a rookie rather than learning the challenges of F1 under a little less pressure with a team further down the grid meant Mercedes had to protect and support Antonelli rather than outsource that responsibility and it was slow to react at times to both external issues, such as social media abuse, and internal like drops in confidence.

In only his fifth year of single-seater racing, Antonelli became the highest-scoring F1 rookie of all time, the youngest driver to lead an F1 race and finished on the podium four times including sprint races.

However team-mate George Russell scored over twice as many points as him, an important metric for assessing any driver’s season, and only two drivers (one being Bortoleto) exceeded his tally of retiring from four grands prix.

Antonelli qualified 12 places lower than Russell on debut, but finished one place behind him in fourth and was only two places behind in qualifying next time out, which was for the Chinese Grand Prix’s sprint race. In his first eight races, the teenager only finished lower than seventh once but in the next nine rounds he had his four non-finishes and only scored twice. That was the European leg of the season, mostly on familiar tracks, but he couldn’t click with the soft (C6) tyre compound.

The exception was the Canadian Grand Prix, a track he had no reference for and therefore nothing to lose confidence against, and he qualified fourth on the C6 tyres then clinched his maiden podium in third place.

In the flyaway leg of the season, Antonelli’s confidence returned and he grabbed three more podiums. At Interlagos, he started and finished second in both the sprint race and grand prix, the latter after holding off Max Verstappen. The drive was touted as a sign of what’s to come from the young Italian.

2. Ollie Bearman ENGLAND 20y/o
13th in F1   2024: 18th in F1, 12th in F2 (3 W)   2023: 6th in F2 (4 W, 3 P, 2 FL)   2022: 3rd in FIA F3 Championship (1 W, 1 FL)

Photo: Haas F1

Photo: Haas F1

Outscoring his grand prix-winning team-mate Esteban Ocon in his rookie season was a stellar job by Bearman, who learned a lot from his three F1 races in 2024 (that catapulted him into his 2025 seat and a likely future berth at Ferrari).

The highlight was the Mexico City Grand Prix, where he took his and Haas’s (joint) best race result in F1 by finishing fourth.

That came in a run of four consecutive Q3 appearances, which translated into points finishes each time. Bearman also converted a strong start position into points at Suzuka, while at several events he showed an ability to charge up the order.

He rose from 17th to eighth in the Chinese GP, 20th to 10th at Bahrain (between Red Bull Racing’s Yuki Tsunoda and Antonelli), and from the pitlane to sixth at Zandvoort. That was down to a power unit change, which would’ve boosted his pace.

Like Antonelli, Bearman already has a colossal fanbase and he expertly handled the attention and pressure of the F1 paddock. In fact, he looked at ease most of the time.

At no point did Bearman cite his height, a constant disadvantage for reaching the car’s minimum weight, for lacking pace and his early run of points in Asia was a great bounceback from Haas’s unexpectedly tricky season opener.

1. Isack Hadjar FRANCE 24y/o
12th in F1    2024: 2nd in F2 (4 W, 1 P, 2 FL)   2023: 14th in F2 (1 FL), 7th in Macau GP

Photo: Red Bull

Photo: Red Bull

Unlike Antonelli and Bearman, there was an element of surprise surrounding Hadjar’s brilliance in his rookie F1 season. His superb sophomore F2 season in 2024 put him second in Formula Scout’s top 50 junior single-seater drivers of the year, and earned him an F1 seat at Racing Bulls over Red Bull’s Super Formula star Ayumu Iwasa.

As Formula Scout’s focus is on the series below F1 there is a limited understanding of just how ‘easy’ RB’s car was to drive compared to Red Bull Racing’s, and whether that contributed to the rotation of drivers between the two teams on the opposite side of the garage to Hadjar after just two rounds. But regardless of the team’s potential, Hadjar maximised his own.

He qualified 11th for his debut, while his first team-mate Tsunoda was fifth, but the next day he was holding back tears as he told media “it feels terrible” to crash out two corners into the formation lap and not even get to race.

Hadjar moved on from that embarassment quickly, qualifying seventh for the next two grands prix, the top Racing Bulls driver both times, and scored his first points. That trend continued, with 10 further points-scoring races, 17 more Q3 appearances, outqualifying his team-mate 22 times across the season and finishing ahead of them 18 times.

The highlights results-wise were Zandvoort, where Hadjar qualified fourth and claimed his team’s first podium since 2021 by finishing third, in Monaco where he started fifth and finished sixth, and Monza where he scored from 19th on the grid.

He moves to Red Bull for 2026, and F1’s technical overhaul should mean he avoids the struggles others had at the team.

NC. Taylor Barnard ENGLAND 21y/o
currently 13th in Formula E   2024-25: 4th in FE (2 P)   2024: 21st in F2 (1 W), 2nd in FRME (5 W, 4 P, 1 FL)   2023-24: 22nd in FE   2023: 10th in FIA F3 Championship (1 W), 2nd in FRME (2 W, 3 FL)

Photo: McLaren

There are a lot of reasons why Barnard deserves the number one spot on this list as the most exciting junior single-seater graduate of the last year, but arguably that graduation came in 2024.

The former protege of Nico Rosberg had a slow start to his single-seater career, and joining new team PHM Racing as a third-year Formula 4 driver in 2022 was a risk but it paid off superbly. He was runner-up to Antonelli in ADAC F4 and then FRegional Middle East at the start of 2023, before stepping up to the FIA F3 Championship with Jenzer Motorsport in the equivalent of a loan deal.

The end of that campaign featured starring drives that may have only left him 10th in the standings but put him firmly on the international map again. A McLaren test in FE set such an impression that he was then signed as reserve driver, while PHM’s pipeline also pushed him up to F2 for 2024 less than four weeks before the season began.

His first F2 points came when he won the Monaco sprint race, and he’d gained circuit experience a month prior by making his FE debut. Barnard was called up mid-event, and drove from 22nd to 14th on a track where overtaking is very difficult.

He raced for McLaren again in the Berlin double-header at the start of May, and scored in both races. In the second he charged from 18th to eighth, showing immense potential, and he qualified 14th for the first race.

By August, McLaren had decided to hand Barnard a full-time for the 2024-25 campaign. Once his future was determined, Barnard decided to end his F2 campaign four rounds early and his pre-season preparations for FE began.

The year ended with the season-opening Sao Paulo E-Prix, and despite qualifying 17th a starring drive meant Barnard broke the record for FE’s youngest ever podium finisher. The rest of the season occurred this year, and four further podiums and two poles put the 21-year-old a stellar fourth in the standings, outscoring his team-mate by over 80 points.

The post Formula Scout’s Class of 2024 appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: Campos Racing

A breakout year featuring 12 victories and two Spanish F4 titles has set expectations high for a leap up to third-tier single-seaters for 2026 that was planned long in advance as the Belgian revealed to Ida Wood

There is a wave of exciting Belgian talents currently winning in karting’s biggest events and making an impact in entry-level single-seaters, and leading that group is 17-year-old Thomas Strauven. This year he became the second driver in Spanish Formula 4 history to win the title with four races to spare, and he fell just short of the 400-point marker which Richard Verschoor and Nikola Tsolov reached in their title-winning seasons.

But with a 157-point winning margin, he officially became the most dominant champion in terms of his gap to what was a strong opposition.

This season was Strauven’s third in the Spanish F4 paddock, but that’s not a fact that should diminish his 2025 excellence. He did one round with MP Motorsport in 2023, and last year joined Rodin Motorsport for a double programme.

The first championship he contested was the Spain-based Formula Winter Series, and only scored in one of the four rounds but that included a victory that helped put him 12th in the standings. In Spanish F4 he started off very strongly at Jarama, finishing third with the fastest lap in the season-opening race, winning the next one from pole and finishing 10th in the third to depart round one second in the standings.

In round two at Algarve he took two third places, taking the fastest lap in both of those races, to sit third in the points. But there were only three top-five finishes in the next 12 races as the season literally heated up and Strauven dropped to seventh in the standings after missing the final round.

In conversation with Formula Scout this year as he romped to the title, Strauven said he “wasn’t really stressing about” his worsening form over the course of 2024.

Photo: Spanish F4

“Because in the beginning of the year, it was really cold every time, and I thought the car was really good in the cold conditions. Maybe because [Rodin] are British, I don’t know,” he said half-jokingly.

“The car was really strong when it was really windy. When the track was really hard to drive; the car was reacting really good. But while we were getting through the season, like the hottest race [of each weekend] would always be the worst race.

“I didn’t know really if it was me or the car, because I didn’t really have team-mates to compare with. So in the beginning of this year, we could only see how the car was in the [Spanish F4] winter series, and I think it’s really good [again]. But now in hot temperatures [in 2025], we can also see that it’s handling really well and we’re getting the same results as in the winter.”

In 2024, Strauven scored 122 points while the drivers of Rodin’s other two cars scored 25 between them.

“At Rodin it was really hard for me because: one, I was like 0.5 seconds off [the pace]. And I don’t know where to look for the 0.5s. And it was also hard for me when I’m the first [-placed] of the team and I’m one second faster than my team-mates. It looked like I drove well, but maybe if there was [to be] someone else and he’s faster than [me then] I drove bad. So it was pretty hard. I like it more with [strong] team-mates and more team-mates, so you have more data.”

By joining Campos Racing for 2025, who he “felt really confident with” after testing with them, Strauven became part of a six-car line-up and used that to improve himself and maximise results.

Strauven was certain that without such strong opposition, and team-mates, this year his own performances would’ve been worse. He particularly credited team-mate Jan Przyrowski, who was runner-up to Strauven in the Spanish F4 Winter Championship and third in the main championship.

“We were pushing each other, you know. If I’m faster, he wants to push more. And then he’s faster and I want to push more. I think we’re both getting stronger with each other [as benchmarks] because we are two strong team-mates.”

Photo: Spanish F4

Przyrowski won four races to Strauven’s two in the three-round winter championship, but the latter only finished one race outside of the top four and claimed more of the extra points for taking pole.

There was also a super start to the main championship for Przyrowski, who won three of the first four races. But he didn’t win again after that, while Strauven starred at every track and was on the podium in all but four of the season’s 21 races.

It felt similar to Tsolov’s 2022 domination, which was unsurprising given Strauven had Jose ‘Josete’ Perez as his race engineer. Perez engineered Tsolov in F4, and in the FIA Formula 3 Championship this year.

“I think he’s a really good engineer,” said Strauven. “I have a really good connection with him. We make some jokes as well. I really like him as a guy. And I learn a lot [from him].”

Strauven was not anticipating the level of form that meant he won at all but one track, and he tried to not think about his title prospects during the season.

“I always stayed in myself. Not like ‘ooo, I’m going to win this easily’. So I was always trying to keep my foot on the floor. And obviously tried to do my best.

“I didn’t really expect this domination. I definitely thought we had a chance to win the championship. But with three other really good drivers that were fighting a lot with me — Jan, Rene Lammers and Ean Eyckmans — it wasn’t expected. That’s quite cool to be 100 points ahead [of them].”

Eyckmans, another Belgian, and Lammers drove for MP and came second and fourth in the standings. There was a season-long trend though of when one was a rival to Strauven, the other was far from the podium.

Photo: Spanish F4

Eyckmans put Strauven under a lot of pressure in round three at Algarve, but that forced the championship leader to improve and as a result he delivered his only weekend where he won every race.

“I think my racecraft wasn’t really that good at the end of last year and in the beginning of this year,” Strauven reflected.

“Like I would always be good driving from P10 to the front, and starting from P1 [I wasn’t]. Now, all of a sudden at Portimao, I made it click and [every time] there’s someone behind I stay cool and try to get my head down and try to go and look ahead.”

The slipstream effect at Algarve made it hard for Strauven to pull away, so he had to “change the mindset”.

“When you’re starting a bit more in the back, [I knew] just take it easy, overtake some guys. I was quite good in overtaking, but my defending was just worse. So I think I made a good improvement in my defending through the year.”

Strauven converted his first pole of 2025 into victory, but failed to do so with the next six. With his Algarve breakthrough, only one of the next six poles didn’t lead to a win and over the year there were six victories where he had to pass rivals to win.

After winning the main Spanish F4 title in the penultimate round of the year, Strauven entered the Barcelona finale with the 400-point target in mind but wanting to “not take too many risks” to achieve it. He dominated race one, then had to take risks in the next two races as he qualified 10th.

Prior to that weekend, there were only two qualifying sessions where Strauven had been outside of the top two, and those outliers had been a fourth and a fifth place. On the final day of the season, some bold moves meant Strauven recovered to fifth and fourth in the final two races but ended eight points shy of his goal.

Managing his career is Benjamin Bailly, who came seventh in FIA Formula 2 back in 2010, and he secured Strauven his Campos seat not just for 2025 but also for 2026. A dominant year in Spanish F4 was far from their original racing plan.

Photo: Spanish F4

“I wanted to do Eurocup-3 or something [at the Formula Regional level] this year, but I think whatever you do, you need to be with a winning team [for career momentum] to get up to Formula 1 or F2. You always need to be in a winning team to win championships.

“We couldn’t find the budget to do Eurocup-3 with a good team, then Campos offered us a year of F4 and Eurocup-3 next year. So I’m really happy with them. And also in [Spanish F4’s] winter series, I got to learn how they work. I like the way they work a lot. They [have been] doing a really good job to make the car on point and get me also ready [to perform well].”

The Eurocup-3 part of the deal was announced a few days ago, and it will be a big jump as the championship introduces a faster car that moves it up from FRegional to F3 level. But the Campos-Strauven combination looks well placed to shine.

CV

Age 17
D/O/B April 5, 2008
Country Belgium

Car racing
2025: Spanish F4 champion (10 wins, 10 poles, 11 fastest laps), Spanish F4 Winter champion (2 W, 3 P, 4 FL)
2024: 7th in Spanish F4 (1 W, 1 P, 3 FL), 12th in FWinter Series (1 W)
2023: 32nd in Spanish F4

Karting
2023 (all OK): 2nd in WSK Super Master Series, 17th in Champions of the Future, 30th in CIK-FIA European Championship
2022: 2nd in LeCont Trophy – OK, 10th in WSK Open Cup – OK, 39th in WSK Final Cup – OK, 10th in CotF – OK Junior, 11th in CIK-FIA European Championship – OK-J, 13th in Italian Championship – Junior, 35th in CIK-FIA World Championship – OK-J
2021: 2nd in IAME Int. Games – X30 Jr, 6th in Rotax Max Euro Trophy – Rotax Jr, 11th in IAME Euro Series – X30 Jr, 19th in BNL Karting Series – Rotax Jr, 28th in WSK Final Cup – OK-J
2020: 34th in Rotax Max Euro Trophy – Rotax Jr, BNL Karting Series champion – X30 Mini, 2nd in Rotax Max Int. Trophy – Rotax Mini, 6th in IAME Euro Series – X30 Mini, 7th in IAME Winter Cup – X30 Mini, 30th in IAME I-Games – X30 Mini
2019: Rotax Max Int. Trophy winner – Rotax Micro, 2nd in BNL Karting Series – Rotax Micro

The post Scout Report: Thomas Strauven appeared first on Formula Scout.