Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Ferrari has announced Aurelia Nobels has departed its driver development programme, as well as the programmes of its new protege Alba Hurup Larsen.

Nobels spent three years as a member of the Ferrari Driver Academy, and earned her spot by winning the third edition of the FIA Women in Motorsport Commission’s FDA-affiliated Girls on Track Rising Stars programme in late 2022.

Under its tutelage, the 18-year-old Brazilian spent three years in Formula 4. She already had experience in the category, having previously come 16th in Brazilian F4 and 18th in Danish F4 as a part-timer in the two championships.

In 2023 she raced for Prema in E4 and Italian F4, failing to score in both, then she had a very busy 2024 that began with two points-free rounds in F4 United Arab Emirates with Sainteloc Racing. Nobels made the podium in a Saudi Arabian F4 cameo, also did a British F4 round and joined ART Grand Prix for an E4 cameo and the all-female F1 Academy championship.

She came 12th in the standings there with a best finish of fifth, and stayed with the team for a second season in 2025 but dropped down one spot in the points table despite making the podium. The team also ran her in the Spanish F4 Winter Championship, where she was points-free, and she made another E4 cameo with AS Motorsport.

Larsen succeeded Nobels as winner of the Girls on Track Rising Stars’ senior final, but her reward was two Indian F4 rounds in 2024 with MP Motorsport. She has been with the team ever since, coming seventh in F1 Academy last season with two fourth places as her best results and remaining in MP’s line-up for 2026.

Jenzer Motorsport also ran Larsen last year in the Formula Winter Series, where she failed to score, and in British F4 she came 22nd in the standings with Chris Dittmann Racing as a part-timer.

Ferrari signed Larsen last August but she did not join the FDA’s ranks until yesterday, and the Formula 1 team has announced that the 17-year-old Dane will continue in British F4 this year and race in F4 UAE.

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Photo: ACI Sport

Several teams have revised their line-ups for the second round of the E4 season this weekend at Mugello.

AKM Motorsport has expanded to five cars with the addition of Javier Herrera and Tomass Stolcermanis.

Herrera has just concluded his Formula 4 Central European Zone campaign with Jenzer Motorsport, in which he came third in the standings with three wins. The rookie has also done two Italian F4 rounds and an Formula Winter Series event with Jenzer.

Stolcermanis has raced for Prema exclusively in his single-seater career, which started with a 2023 F4 South East Asia cameo. Last year he came 18th in F4 United Arab Emirates as a part-timer then fifth in E4 and ninth in Italian F4.

He began 2025 with his maiden car racing victory en route to fourth in the F4 Middle East standings, and despite missing three rounds sits 10th in Italian F4’s standings.

US Racing has grown from four to six cars, adding Ludovico Busso and Arjen Kraeling. Busso did round one with Viola Formula Racing and has been racing in Italian F4 with that team, while Kraeling has recently been racing in British F4.

R-ace GP has added a fifth driver to its line-up: Mercedes-AMG Formula 1 junior Andy Consani. The single-seater rookie is currently 11th in French F4, having claimed pole on debut but only one podium so far.

Returning to E4 is Cram Motorsport, which has done one round in each of the last two seasons. Its drivers are Italian karting graduate Oscar Repetto and its F4 regular Elia Weiss.

Despite being a car racing rookie, Weiss was called up to test in Formula E earlier this year. His racing experience so far consists of two FWinter Series rounds and five Italian F4 rounds, and he has scored no points.

Making its series debut is AS Motorsport, and is doing so with the all-female line-up of Aurelia Nobels and Mathilda Paatz.

Nobels came 12th in the all-female F1 Academy championship last year and sits 14th in the 2025 standings. Paatz came 20th in French F4 as a rookie in 2024 and was eighth in F4 CEZ this year.

Consani was first to the top in free practice one on Friday morning, and traded first place with team-mates Alex Powell, Alexander Savinkov and Emily Cotty.

Stolcermanis broke R-ace GP’s hold with a 1m52.527s, but Consani and then Powell lowered the pace. Prema’s Sebastian Wheldon was next to lead the way by breaking into the 1m51s, and Stolcermanis responded with a 1m50.864s.

That benchmark stood for 18 minutes before Prema’s Kean Nakamura Berta set an unbeatable 1m50.663s. PHM Racing’s Reno Francot ended FP1 third fastest, 0.282 seconds behind and 0.01s ahead of US’s Kabir Anurag, with Busso and Wheldon completing the top six. A second covered the top 22.

Anurag, team-mate Gabriel Gomez and Van Amersfoort Racing’s Maximilian Popov disputed first place in FP2 until Nakamura once again came to the fore. This time he set a 1m49.155s, putting him 0.324s ahead. Wheldon was 0.396s behind in third, with Powell and US’s Andrija Kostic the only others within 0.5s of him.

Points leader Gomez ended practice in 14th, 0.984s off the pace.

The post Revised line-ups across the grid for E4 round two at Mugello appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: Dutch Photo Agency

Ferrari junior Maya Weug will move from Prema to MP Motorsport to spend a second season in F1 Academy.

Weug stepped back down to Formula 4 machinery to join F1 Academy as Ferrari’s representative last year. She had previously spent two seasons in the category in the Italian championship in a car entered by Prema’s sister squads Iron Lynx and Iron Dames, and finished 14th in the standings as a regular points scorer in her second campaign.

She then stepped up to the Formula Regional European Championship and had a solid rookie season with the small KIC Motorsport team, scoring points six times and finishing 17th in the standings.

Weug made a one-off return to FREC last year with KIC at Imola alongside her F1 Academy campaign, which she finished third in the standings with a breakthrough victory in the very last race in Abu Dhabi.

“It’s a hugely exciting prospect to be able to race for MP Motorsport in the F1 Academy”, said Weug, who was born in Spain but has been racing under the Dutch flag. “It’s actually the first time in my motorsport career that I will represent a Dutch team, so that alone is quite special.

“MP have done well in the first two F1 Academy seasons, always running up front and taking their share of wins, and it’s definitely my goal to add to those wins and challenge for the title.”

While Prema won last year’s teams’ title, MP Motorsport placed fourth of the five teams without a win to its name.

Weug’s Ferrari junior Aurelia Nobels will also return to F1 Academy for a second season. She will remain with ART Grand Prix and continue racing in the colours of Ferrari and series sponsor Puma.

The American-born Brazilian-Belgian driver came 12th in the standings last year with a best finish of fifth.

The post Ferrari’s Weug makes MP Motorsport switch, Nobels stays with ART appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: F1 Academy

French team ART Grand Prix has announced it will enter the upcoming Euro 4 and Italian Formula 4 finales with two cars.

Best known for its exploits further up the single-seater ladder, ART GP expanded into the entry-level F4 category last year in the all-female F1 Academy championship.

It runs three cars there, and Bianca Bustamante and Aurelia Nobels will migrate across from ART GP’s F1 Academy line-up to drive at Monza twice later this month. The Euro 4 season concludes there on October 4-6, then the Italian F4 finale is on October 25-27.

Both Bustamante and Nobels are Formula 1 juniors, with the former backed by McLaren while the latter joined Ferrari’s ranks at the end of 2022 after winning the FIA Women in Motorsport Commission’s Ferrari Driver Academy-affiliated Girls on Track Rising Stars programme.

They are currently seventh and 11th in the F1 Academy standings respectively, with Bustamante taking a podium and a fastest lap in Miami.

Bustamante also came 40th in Formula Winter Series and made a points-scoring British F4 cameo this year, and in 2023 she was seventh in F1 Academy with two wins and 27th in F4 United Arab Emirates.

Nobels dabbled in several F4 series as a single-seater rookie in 2022, competing in Brazil, Denmark and Belgium, and last year joined Prema for a double programme. She came 22nd in Euro 4 and 26th in Italian F4, where she missed races.

This year has been far busier, starting off with two F4 UAE rounds, then a Saudi Arabian F4 round where she got a podium before she joined the F1 Academy grid. Like Bustamante, Nobels has also made a British F4 cameo in 2024.

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Photo: KSP Reportages

French Formula 4 frontrunner Chester Kieffer will make a cameo in British F4 at Zandvoort this weekend.

The Luxmebourger has signed with Xcel Motorsport, an Emerati team he already has some experience with since he made his single-seater debut at the start of this year with its affiliate squad X GP in a round of the F4 United Arab Emirates championship at Dubai Autodrome.

He took a best finish of 15th from that event, while he is yet to finish a race outside of the top 10 in the first three rounds of the French F4 season. Kieffer finished 10th and fifth in the two races at Nogaro that kicked off the campaign, then at Ledenon he followed up a victory from pole position with a seventh place and a second.

At Spa-Francorchamps he picked up a second win, and finishing fifth and fourth in the next two races put him fourth in the standings and 32 points off the championship lead.

“It’s the race week again, but this time slightly different!” said Kieffer. “Very excited to drive against new competitors in a new car, and looking forward to the challenge!”

The inclusion of the Dutch Grand Prix venue in the British F4 calendar has attracted many drivers from other series, with F1 Academy racers Bianca Bustamante (Hitech GP), Jessica Edgar (Chris Dittmann Racing) and Aurelia Nobels (Argenti Motorsport) all joining the grid ahead of racing there on Formula 1’s support bill, and Mexican talent Ernesto Rivera (Hitech) too.

Rivera has been driving for Campos Racing so far this year, coming 15th in Formula Winter Series with one podium and sitting third in Spanish F4 after the first three rounds with a win, a second place and four other top-five finishes.

He is replacing Mika Abrahams in Hitech’s line-up, with no explanation given as to why the South African has withdrawn from the event. Abrahams took a win the opening round, but has only been on the podium twice since and is seventh in the standings at the season’s halfway point.

Ferrari junior Nobels came 16th in a part-time Brazilian F4 campaign in 2022, was 26th in Italian F4 last year and is currently 15th in F1 Academy.

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The 17-year-old Brazilian is in her third year of racing in Formula 4. Her single-seater career started in 2022 in her home country’s F4 championship, and after missing the final third of the season she ended up 16th in the standings with a best finish of eighth. A single Danish F4 outing led to a seventh place finish, while she failed to score in a Spanish F4 cameo.

Nobels won the FIA Women in Motorsport Commission’s FDA-affiliated Girls on Track Rising Stars programme that year, earning her spot in the Ferrari Driver Academy and a paid-for Italian F4 drive with Iron Lynx. However she instead raced for Prema in that series and Euro 4 last year. She did not score in either, coming 22nd in Euro 4’s standings and 26th in Italian F4.

Last month Nobels did two F4 United Arab Emirates rounds with Sainteloc Racing, with a best finish of 19th. She will be team-mate to Lia Block and Bianca Bustamante in F1 Academy, and her car will be sponsored by sportwear brand Puma which has just been announaced as a partner of the all-female series.

“I’m super happy. It’s a new opportunity and I’m sure I’m going to learn a lot,” said Nobels of joining ART GP, with her F1 Academy move having been announced by Ferrari last December.

The structure of F1 Academy rounds will change for its second season, with the third race and second qualifying session of each event scrapped. The fastest laps from qualifying will set race one’s grid, with the second-best laps used for race two’s grid.

Prema will get to run extra cars as wildcard entries, rather than be capped to three drivers like every other team, and Reema Juffali has been announced as driving its fourth car for next month’s season-opening round in Jeddah.

“It’s an honour and a privilege to be representing my country, especially in my hometown,” said Juffali. “The day F1 arrived in Jeddah was the clash of both my worlds and now I am actually going to be participating. I’m really looking forward to it and happy to share the experience with my friends and family who are based here.

“As the saying goes: if you can’t see it, you won’t believe it. So, hopefully Saudi fans can see that there is a Saudi racing driver out there and it will get them to thinking that ‘this is something I can do!’. It is for this reason I have decided to take this challenge on.”

It will mark a return to single-seaters for the 32-year-old, who spent last year racing in GT World Challenge Europe. She failed to scored in either the Endurance or Sprint cups, but in 2022 came sixth overall in the rival International GT Open series and was the top Bronze Cup entry in the Spa 24 Hours.

Before that she mustered just three top-five finishes from 102 races over three years in junior single-seaters.

The post ART GP completes its F1 Academy line-up with Aurelia Nobels appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: Sainteloc/Dutch Photo Agency

French team Sainteloc Racing has announced four drivers for the upcoming Formula 4 United Arab Emirates season, but they are only confirmed for round one.

Its line-up of Yevan David, Aurelia Nobels, Matteo Quintarelli and Maxi Restrepo will be racing at Yas Marina Circuit on January 13/14, but may not appear again after that.

Ferrari junior Nobels it the most high profile member of the four and spent 2023 racing in F4 with Prema. Later this year she will race in the all-female F1 Academy series.

The other three drivers will all be racing for Sainteloc in Spanish F4. Quintarelli is a UAE-based Italian who made his car racing debut in the 2022 F4 UAE Trophy and came away with a ninth place finish. He then won a shootout to race for Yas Heat Academy in the 2023 F4 UAE season, but his best result was only a 16th place. Following that he joined R-ace GP in Italian F4, and also failed to score.

Restrepo was karting in Colombia before he joined Drivex School for a double F4 programme last year. He came 17th in a part-time Formula Winter Series campaign, with a best finish of eighth, then was 37th in Spanish F4.

David is the least experienced of Sainteloc’s drivers, as next weekend is his single-seater racing debut. The 16-year-old Sri Lankan came fourth in the 2020 IAME Asia Cup for X30 Junior karts, sixth in the 2021 FIA Karting Academy Trophy, won the silver medal in the FIA Motorsport Games’ Karting Sprint Senior competition and then for 2023 transitioned to shifter karting where he came eighth in the WSK Champions Cup and 19th in the FIA World Cup for KZ2 karts.

Yas Heat has two drivers signed for F4 UAE. Local racer Keanu Al Azhari drove for them last season, which he came seventh in with two podiums, and in each of the last two Trophy events.

Last year he also raced in Spanish F4 with MP Motorsport in a Richard Mille-funded seat. He took a pole and a podium in round one, but no more after that and came ninth in the standings.

His team-mate at last November’s F4 UAE Trophy and for the upcoming season is Zack Scoular. Last year he raced on Rotax Senior karts, and finished 12th in his first two car races which were held at the same circuit as next week’s season opener.

French karter Jules Caranta has announced he will be on the round one grid with R-ace GP, and the team has since confirmed to Formula Scout that he will race but only in the opening round.

Caranta was IAME Euro Series champion on X30 Junior karts and 10th in the CIK-FIA European championship for OK Junior karts in 2022. The 15-year-old came 16th in the CIK-FIA World championship and 23rd in the Champions of the Future series on OK karts last year.

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Photo: Ferrari

Ferrari has announced several changes in it young driver development programme for 2024.

Marco Matassa is leaving his role as head of the Ferrari Driver Academy, which he has held since 2018, and Jock Clear has been named as his successor. The Englishman has been working in Formula 1 since the 1980s, with stints at Benetton, Lotus, Williams and Mercedes before he joined Ferrari in 2015 in an engineering role.

While it is unclear if he was involved in the decisions, the first changes under his leadership is the departure of Arthur Leclerc and James Wharton from the FDA. The former, however, is “remaining part of the Ferrari family”.

Leclerc became a Ferrari junior in 2020, with his older brother Charles already one of the team’s race drivers, and since then he has been Formula Regional European Championship runner-up, FRegional Asia champion, an FIA Formula 3 race-winner and most recently a Formula 2 podium-finisher as he stepped up to the series this year.

Wharton was the winner of the inaugural FDA Scouting World Final in 2020, and his first year as a Ferrari junior was spent karting. He transitioned into Formula 4 last year, coming fifth in the final season of the German championship, then in 2023 won the F4 United Arab Emirates title, came second in Euro 4 and fourth in Italian F4.

Retaining their FDA places are Aurelia Nobels and Maya Weug, and Ferrari has announced both will race in the F4-spec F1 Academy series. Weug steps down from FREC, which she finished 17th in this year, and Nobels moves across from Euro 4.

The annual Scouting World Final was held for a fourth time this October, and the winner was anticipated to be revealed by the start of December. But there was no mention of the results of the event in any Ferrari communications.

Last week MP Motorsport announced it had signed karting superstar Rene Lammers for a multi-series F4 programme, and revealed he had won the Scouting World Final but not joined the FDA due to faltering negotiations with Ferrari.

A day later Ferrari put out its own statement confirming Lammers – son of former F1 racer Jan – had indeed won the event and stood out against his fellow finalists “because of his consistent pace, his car control and the mental strength he demonstrated throughout the evaluation camp”.

As for why Lammers was not joining the FDA, the prize for winning the final, Ferrari’s official line was:

In order to assess whether a driver is ready to start studying at the Academy, the engineers on the Ferrari young driver programme base their decisions on a series of parameters and from all the information gathered, they felt that neither Lammers nor the other candidates were ready yet. However, their progress will be closely monitored as they continue their racing programmes in 2024.

Matassa commented that “this was one of the closest Scouting World Finals we have ever witnessed, with so many drivers at the same level” and said of Lammers that “our paths might well cross in the future”.

The post Leclerc and Wharton leave FDA as Jock Clear becomes its new leader appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photos: ACI Sport

There’s been a lot of attention on the launch of the F1 Academy series for aspiring female drivers, but three women have chosen the traditional path in F4 that they hope will take them to the sport’s highest levels

Aurelia Nobels, Tina Hausmann and Victoria Blokhina are competing in this year’s Italian Formula 4 championship, following in the tracks of Formula Regional driver Maya Weug and the Al Qubaisi sisters Amna and Hamda, both of whom are now starring in the F1 Academy series.

Formula Scout caught up with the three Italian F4 contenders as they began their season at Imola last month. While none of them were making their racing debut, the large field allied to tricky weather conditions early in the weekend made for a challenging start for the inexperienced trio.

Born in Boston to Belgian parents, Nobels races for benchmark team Prema under the flag of Brazil, the country where she grew up. “I went there when I was three years old, so I think it’s my country,” she explains.

The 16-year-old Ferrari junior qualified 10th in her 19-car group, setting a laptime 1.021s off the group’s fastest driver.

A coming-together with Hausmann at Tosa in race one put Nobels out of contention, but in race two she came home a creditable 11th. In race four, which featured the whole 36-car field, Nobels started 21st, dropped back to 25th mid-race and then recovered to 17th. Blokhina finished two places behind, and Hausmann was an immediate retirement.

“It’s my first year in the Italian championship so I’m here first of all to learn,” Nobels told Formula Scout.

“The first race was really good and I managed to be on the goals they set for me – just one second off and then P10 in my group in qualifying. We learned what to improve for the next races. It’s hard with the drivers who just did the UAE championship, they [already] drove a lot.”

Out on track there were plenty of indications of her underlying speed – her fastest lap in race four was within 0.18s of team-mate F4 UAE champion James Wharton’s, and quicker than the highly-rated duo of Tuukka Taponen and Enzo Deligny.

She continued her qualifying form at Misano, going 11th and 12th fastest in the two sessions, within 0.57s of pole in both.

Having retired from race one while running 13th, she unfortunately had to sit out the rest of the weekend after breaking her wrist in a pitlane incident involving multiple cars ahead of the second race.

“It’s hard to accept but this is also part of the game,” she said afterwards, expecting to be able to return for her home round in the series at Spa-Francorchamps. However that hope has not been realised, and Prema has drafted in their F1 Academy driver Bianca Bustamante to replace her for this weekend’s races.

Nobels secured her place in the Ferrari Driver Academy by winning last year’s FIA Women in Motorsport Commission’s Ferrari-affiliated Girls on Track Rising Stars programme, seeing off competition from several drivers now in F1 Academy.

With the provision of a budget in excess of €1.2 million, the FIA’s “flagship talent detection programme” aims to develop a pathway for 10 to 16-year-old female competitors to reach the top levels of motorsport.

“It was a huge opportunity,” Nobels remembers. “I saw Maya winning the first time and it was something I wanted to follow, and I saw her improvement with Ferrari. When I had the chance to participate, I worked really hard for it.”

Despite being understandably nervous to start with, she “just focused on the driving and the physical part and it all went very well”. For a childhood Ferrari fan too, even down to her bedroom decoration, “it was really a dream to become part of Ferrari”.

“I really realised in the training camp we did that it is really a big family. We did a lot of really hard activities and whenever there was a driver who was a bit behind another driver would help.

“Everyone is there for each other, helping, although, of course, on track we are against each other.”

Weug in particular has been around to pass on her experience.

“Before the beginning of the championship, I didn’t know how it was going to happen, even with the tests, so she helped me a bit. It’s really helpful to have another girl with experience,” said Nobels.

As well as membership of the prestigious FDA, Nobels’ success earned her an F4 seat with Iron Lynx, which metamorphosed into a Prema drive once Iron Lynx and Prema aligned their multidisciplinary racing programmes.

Nobels came into the season having already gained some F4 race experience in three different championships.

“I did one Spanish round [at Spa] and four races in Brazil [finishing 16th in the championship for TMG Racing]. This helped me quite a lot, giving me a bit of experience although less than the other drivers, but it was really useful,” she said.

The Tatuus T-421 is used in Brazil, Italy and Spain, with the first two series running on Pirelli tyres while Spanish F4 utilises Hankooks. Danish F4 races with “a completely different” previous-generation Mygale car, and Nobels did a round at Jyllandsringen in that series to gain “experience of the starts and the racing”. It resulted in a best finish of seventh.

Swiss karting graduate Hausmann was also making her Italian F4 at Imola, remaining with the AKM Motorsport team for whom she made two appearances in Spain’s Formula Winter Series. Her car racing career began there with a podium in the opening round at Jerez, picking her way through from fifth on the grid to finish third.

Hausmann started racing in the Swiss Rotax championship, “then I moved to CRG Holland and last year I did some races in the Deutsche Kart Meisterschaft and some ADAC Kart Masters races”. Her first experience in a F4 car came in post-season testing, “two times with Van Amersfoort Racing and then with AKM”.

She remained with the Antonelli family team, which “I love” as she committed to Italian F4, arguably the most competitive entry-level single-seater series on the planet.

“[AKM] is like a big family. I feel confident and happy with everything. It’s not easy to be the only woman in one team but they respect it very well and I feel like the others.”

Hausmann had a difficult start to the season, with a best finish of 19th at Imola. She was frank with her assessment of it.

“It’s always a tough start into a season because you see where you are, before it’s unclear,” she explained. “It’s a big field but you learn from the best here. You race against the best which makes you a very good driver. We didn’t have any expectations for this race at Imola. We just tried to perform, do our best and keep working.”

Her luck did not improve at Misano where she was pitched into a dramatic roll in race one, escaping with a sore shoulder, and consequently was also absent from the weekend’s other two races. Now her schedule for the rest of 2023 looks uncertain although she is confirmed for Spa.

“We don’t know yet the plan [for the season], maybe [I continue here], maybe not. We take it step-by-step and see how it goes.”

In her rookie season, the goal is “to make good progress, to develop step-by-step and in the end to be able to look back and say, ‘I made a big step’. It’s all about finding a few tenths, making progress and feeling more confident in the new car.”

Blokhina is the most experienced member of the trio, with a full Italian F4 season and two F4 UAE campaigns behind her.

Like Nobels, she reached the final four of the FIA WiM GoT Rising Stars programme, although she was beaten to the top prize by Laura Camps Torras in the initiative’s second year.

After finishing 29th in WSK’s Champions Cup in her first full season in senior karting in 2021, Blokhina made her single-seater debut in F4 UAE in 2022 with 3Y Technology by R-ace GP, before switching to her current team PHM Racing for Italian F4, where she took a best result of 12th.

Though the Russian, who races under an Italian licence, says that “now my results are not so good; I haven’t had any tests here so I’m just trying to improve myself,” she made steady progress during the Imola weekend.

PHM’s F4 team manager Mikhail Aleshin, a fellow Russian who was Formula Renault 3.5 champion in his junior career and later raced in IndyCar and made the overall podium of the Le Mans 24 Hours, is confident “that she will achieve promising results in the championship [having] already improved a lot last year”.

Blokhina appreciates the contribution the PHM squad has made to her development as a driver. “The team has grown a lot from the previous year. It starts to be bigger and better and has helped me a lot with the coaches and with the engineers. They just focus on the drivers and the experience.”

For the rest of the season her aim is to “at least to get in the points and to be the fastest woman”.

The Italian F4 championship awards separate classification trophies for the top three rookies and the top three women in each race. Nobels was able to savour the Brazilian anthem from the top step of the podium twice at Imola, but as a result of her and Hausmann’s misfortunes since it’s Blokhina who is points leader within the women’s classification.

Naturally, the aim for all three is to score well in the overall standings but nevertheless, taking home a trophy is always special and Nobels says “because we are only three girls out of 37 drivers so it’s important to show everyone we are doing well.”

Below is a table showing the trio’ average gap to the absolute pace (100%) in qualifying compared to three of their forerunners in Italian F4.

Do the women find themselves being treated differently because of their gender? Nobels says that the other drivers respect me “as they respect the boys with no differences”.

For Hausmann: “The only difference is that I get my own changing room so that I can change alone without the boys in the room. Otherwise, I’m treated like all the other racing drivers, and I think that’s what you have to do.”

In the past, leading female drivers such as Sophie Floersch have been critical of women-only series. While F1 Academy boasts the support of Formula 1 itself, it is harder to follow for fans than Italian F4 is, and Nobels, Hausmann and Blokhina – while very positive about F1 Academy – are aiming to show there is another route.

“I think [F1 Academy’s] a very good idea to support women but I want to improve here in the Italian championship and work from here,” said Hausmann. “It’s a nice championship, the F1 Academy, so well done to them that they do it. Maybe in the future – we never know.”

To achieve the goal of encouraging more girls into motorsport at the lower levels, support is needed from F1, the FIA and other young driver programmes.

Nobels is positive that “they’re doing quite a lot now with the F1 Academy and they really want to see as soon as possible a woman in F1, so I hope it increases”.

“I hope that I can inspire others who have the same dream: it’s hard at the beginning but just don’t give up and keep working really hard and you can do it.”

The post The women racing male rivals on equal terms in Italian F4 appeared first on Formula Scout.

Nobels was the winner of the third edition of the FIA Women in Motorsport Commission’s FDA-affiliated Girls on Track Rising Stars programme in 2022, earning her a spot in Ferrari’s line-up of Formula 1 junior.

Part of the prize of winning the Rising Stars programme was a paid-for drive in Italian F4 with Prema’s sister team Iron Lynx (whose cars are co-run by Prema in F4), but she will instead race for the more established single-seater outfit.

“I am very happy to join Prema in 2023 to compete in the Italian F4 championship, one of the most competitive single-seater series in the world,” said Nobels.

“It will not be easy, but I am excited to take on this challenge, work hard and improve my skills. I know that working with such a professional team as Prema, and being part of the FDA, is a big responsibility, and will be important for my growth as a driver.

“I cannot wait to meet everybody in the team and start working together and I want to thank the team and Iron Dames for having helped me to reach such a big step in my career. My thanks also go to the FIA and its Women in Motorsport Commission, whose Girls on Track Rising Stars programme made this dream possible.”

The 16-year-old Brazilian started her single-seater career last year, primarily competing in her home country’s new F4 championship where she finished 16th in the standings. She also made one appearance in Spanish F4 and one in Danish F4, where she had a best finish of seventh.

“Aurelia showed excellent promise and we are happy to have her within our ranks,” Prema team principal Angelo Rosin said.

“She accomplished a lot and her talent didn’t go unnoticed. We are delighted to work with her, and to collaborate with FDA and Iron Dames to help her achieve her full potential with a high-profile programme.”

The post New Ferrari junior Aurelia Nobels joins Prema in Italian F4 appeared first on Formula Scout.