Photo: Roger Gascoigne

Prema started off in Italian F3 in 1984, and became a title-winner in 1990. Staying on top in racing proved difficult over the next 20 years, but the team’s since become a dominant force in multiple categories. How?

The period after Prema won its first junior single-seater title in 1990 may not have been defined by the success we know it for today, but was the genesis of the operation as it is now: a colossus towering over multiple series in multiple continents. Having begun as an F3 team, Prema expanded into categories up and down the open-wheel ladder, and success followed it.

In part two of the story of Prema’s early years, we talk to Prema’s co-founder and family patriarch Angelo Rosin about how the team gradually rebuilt itself at home and abroad.

Since Formula 1 got into the idea of young driver development programmes, its teams have entrusted the development of their junior drivers to the “Prema school”. In fact, Prema was there from the start in Europe for modern manufacturer-backed talent academies, which began with Japanese brands Toyota and Honda at the start of this millennium.

Rewinding to the end of 1993, Prema was a team that had won just three races in three Italian F3 campaigns since Roberto Colciago had delivered it the 1990 title. However, with new investors and a new base, hopes for the 1994 season were high.

Regaining the team’s title-winning status was not straightforward. European karting champion Federico Gemmo had joined the team, but podiums were scarce and he was replaced mid-season by Andrea Boldrini, whose victory in the last round prevented Prema from suffering its first winless season since 1991.

In 1995 Gianantonio Pacchioni returned after two years racing for rivals, and took four wins en route to third in the standings.

“Pacchioni always drove very well on the small tracks,” Rosin says, as if to illustrate that his four wins in 1995 came at two of Italy’s smallest circuits, Varano and Misano.

Photo: Roger Gascoigne

Pacchioni’s true speciality was Monaco, of course another small track, where he led start to finish in the grand prix-supporting F3 race to beat Ralf Schumacher to victory by half a second [pictured above]. Prema had won the 1989 edition of the race, and Monaco where it could make an impression on an international level.

Back home in Italy, Prema’s co-founder Giorgio Piccolo – who had left the team in 1994 – made a surprise return in 1996 to manage its planned expansion to Formula 3000. When that fell through, he ended up back in charge of its Italian F3 entry.

“There were five of us, including the driver, Joao Barbosa. A fantastic work group. We won a wonderful race at Varano [when Barbosa started on slicks on a wet track and lapped the field] and came second in the championship. A fantastic experience.”

By now, however, Italian F3 was a pale shadow of its former years, as talented Italian drivers such as Jarno Trulli opted for German F3. And so Prema made its first foray abroad, joining the German championship with Andre Couto and Max Wilson.

Wilson took Prema’s first win at Diepholz but the transalpine sojourn was short-lived, as Prema withdrew at the end of 1996.

Picking the right engine partner remained critical in F3, then an open category, as Rosin explains. “In 1995 to ’96 [Novomotor’s Gianni] Pedrazzani pushed us to an evolution of the electronics [for the Fiat engine]. Prema invested money into the organisation bringing in some people. But it was difficult because in that period Opel had a very good engine, with a very good development of the electronics.”

For 1998, Prema joined the growing exodus to Opel power and soon returned to winning ways at home, taking the Italian F3 title with Donny Crevels that year and with Peter Sundberg in 1999.

Despite the team’s successes, it was clear that the writing was on the wall for Italian F3 “and so we decided to stop with F3 in Italy because in this period F3 in Italy had a very low profile, a very low level, and moved full-time to Germany with [Enrico] Toccacelo and [Philip] Cloostermans”, with Toccacelo winning at the Nurburgring in 2000.

Photo: Prema

Then in 2001, Prema embarked on its programme of developing young drivers for manufacturer-backed programmes, which would contribute to its rapid growth over the next decade.

The liaison with Honda meant Formula Dream champion Kosuke Matsuura, a protege of ex-F1 driver Aguri Suzuki, joined Prema in German F3 for 2001 alongside Bjorn Wirdheim.

But the tie-up with Toyota proved more durable and brought Prema its first major international success. Toyota’s Prema-run programme broke new ground in developing junior single-seater drivers in Europe, creating a template for others to follow, and led to Prema’s first step beyond F3 into Formula Renault 2.0 as Toyota sought to evaluate talent in lower categories.

“Toyota came to us to organise the Italian FR2.0 with Ryan Briscoe and Ronnie Quintarelli. During his title-winning FRenault season in 2001, Toyota decided to give Briscoe an F1 test and decided to skip F3 and move him straight to F3000 with Nordic Racing, championship winners with Justin Wilson. They expected bigger results but after five or six races, they decided to stop because the results were very, very bad,” Rosin recalls.

“So, they came back to the German F3 championship with Prema. It is difficult to restart in F3. Toyota decided to give him one last chance to drive in F3 in 2003 and he won the F3 Euro Series.”

In his sophomore season, Matsuura was German F3 runner-up as Briscoe played himself back in with three late-season podiums. But the decline of F3 championships had proved to be a multinational rather than Italian phenomenon.

For 2003, French F3 and German F3 combined to create the Euro Series which Briscoe won. His campaign featured eight victories, and team-mate Robert Kubica won on debut at the Norisring, having broken his arm in a road accident at the start of the year and missed the first three rounds. Briscoe’s triumph was Prema’s first title outside of Italy.

Photo: Prema

One rung below, Prema took another Italian FR2.0 title with Franck Perera, then a third in 2005 with Kamui Kobayashi who also won the FRenault Eurocup that year aged 19.

“My racing career in Europe started in Prema. I worked with Prema for two years. At that time the championship was very competitive, and it was the first time Prema had won a European championship. [We] made history and I’m very proud to be part of this game,” says Kobayashi, who is now Toyota’s World Endurance Championship team principal.

Briscoe’s success did not herald an era of Prema dominance in F3. In fact, the team would surprisingly win only five races in the next seven seasons as ASM Formule 3 (which later evolved into ART Grand Prix) dominated the Euro Series with Jamie Green, Lewis Hamilton, Paul di Resta, Sebastian Vettel, Niko Hulkenberg and Jules Bianchi from 2004 to ’09.

Toyota junior and series sophomore Perera came fifth in the 2005 standings, then Renger van der Zande ended Prema’s winless streak of close to four years at Barcelona in 2007. He took two more wins and third in the standings in 2008.

After Opel withdrew factory support for its teams at the end of 2004, Prema’s rivals using the HWA-developed Mercedes engine became untouchable.

In fact, as Rosin relates, “Gerhard Ungar from HWA-Mercedes [now the co-owner of US Racing, one of Prema’s biggest F4 rivals] gave me a proposal: ‘I want you to come to Mercedes. I will give you support’”.

But Rosin’s hands were tied by his commitment to Toyota. “With Toyota it was impossible. Toyota said no because they were fighting with Mercedes in F1, two big [automotive] companies. Toyota paid for seven drivers, so it was difficult to say no, to turn down Toyota to move to F3 with maybe two or three drivers.”

After a change in management personnel at Toyota in 2005, Rosin said “sorry, I’m not interested in driving for Opel; I’m moving to a team with Mercedes”. However “it wasn’t possible to change immediately, so we continued to stay with Opel”.

Photo: Roger Gascoigne

When Prema finally made the switch to the now-dominant Mercedes engine for 2006, Rosin recalls that Ungar said to him: “You refused many times my proposal. Okay, welcome but now you stay like this.”

Mercedes, and subsequently German rival Volkswagen, began to use F3 for developing young drivers, not only filtering the best talent for progression into their DTM teams or to F1, like in Hamilton’s case, but playing a role in allocating drivers to favoured teams in F3.

“Had I signed earlier, I [would’ve] received the same proposal in the same moment as ASM,” says a rueful Rosin. “All the good drivers he moved around the company. I received one driver, but it was not the best driver. But things changed a little bit when they understood the potential of the relationship.”

Indeed it did, and the partnership with Mercedes continued to blossom, forming the foundations for Prema’s return to the front of the field.

GP3 was launched in 2010 and the new F1 support series immediately attracted ART GP. It was out of F3 a year later, while Prema remained loyal to the category.

The recruitment of experienced and talented senior technical personnel, allied to new investment, provided Prema with the infrastructure to dominate the 2011 and 2012 seasons, with Roberto Merhi and Daniel Juncadella its two champions. Juncadella rounded off his title-winning year by finally taking Prema first win in Macau to the team’s delight and relief.

Almost as if winning Macau had been a mental barrier to overcome, victory there provided the catalyst for Prema to forge ahead. The floodgates opened and trophies have been flowing towards Vicenza ever since.

In 2016, Prema expanded into single-seaters’ second tier and finished one-two in its maiden GP2 season with Pierre Gasly and Antonio Giovinazzi. It has remained there ever since, with the championship now known as Formula 2.

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Prema had made multiple attempts at taking the step up before. In 1992 a plan to graduate with Jacquess Villeneuve was scuppered when he opted for a lucrative offer to race for TOM’S in Japanee F3, and the 1996 attempt foundered despite having enticed Piccolo back as team manager for the stillborn project.

Then in 2006 it purchased DAMS’ entry in FR3.5, the rival series to GP2, and spent four seasons there with a return of five wins, three poles, five fastest laps and 19 podiums as well as the championship runner-up spot with Ben Hanley in 2007.

By the early 2010s the financial future of the team had been secured through a significant investment from Lawrence Stroll, now executive chairman of Aston Martin.

Rene Rosin, the son of Angelo and his wife Grazia Troncon, gradually took over at the helm from 2006 before assuming overall responsibility as team principal from 2011. Prema also strengthened its technical team through some significant new hires.

The rest, as they say, is history.

“Things changed a lot when Mr Stroll came,” says Rosin Sr. “Prema is a good step to get the mentality. Mr Stroll chose Prema because he saw the result of the work is good.”

Stroll’s involvement “was very important” in setting the foundation for the huge growth in Prema’s strength, reputation and successes across almost all categories of junior single-seaters, something which has been taken to the next level in the tie-up with Iron Lynx under the DC Racing Solutions structure.

From a staff of five in the 1980s, Prema recently counted 144 trackside personnel over a single weekend as it embraces multiple single-seater championships as well as the prototype sportscar programme it added in 2022.

Troncon with a former F4 crop (L-R) Schumacher, Correa & Vips

At heart, it remains a family business. Angelo and Grazia are still trackside, looking after the Formula Regional and F4 teams. Their good spirits and passion for the sport underpin Prema’s philosophy.

Though its level of professionalism and technical excellence continues to set the benchmark for other teams, and not only in the junior categories, Prema has managed to retain the sense of the small Italian garage team, still smiling and laughing even when crushing the opposition on the track.

“I never imagined that it would become so big,” says Rosin. “For me, to stay in motorsport, when you stay with two cars in F2, two cars in F3, when you stay like this, maybe after one year it’s finished.

“To stay in motorsport, it’s necessary to give opportunities to young drivers, this is the priority. To have a good organisation, good engineers, good mechanics. Mistakes are normal for everybody. What is important is that the people work together. It’s the work of everybody. My son, my wife, the wife of my son. It is impossible for one person to organise like this.”

But Prema has neither the time nor the inclination to live from past successes.

As Rene Rosin explained to Formula Scout: “Our job is to keep pushing. Every year. Especially when the car is keeping the same, the field is getting closer and closer because you know better the car. Our job is to keep pushing and never rely on the previous year’s result because that’s when you start failing.”

The post Prema’s rise from domestic success to international dominance appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photos: Jenzer Motorsport & Roger Gascoigne

In its 30th season, Jenzer Motorsport is still proudly independent and family-run, an old-school racing team. Andreas Jenzer and wife Esther are passionate as ever about motorsport, particularly junior single-seaters

Formula Scout had the privilege of following the team through its anniversary season, including a four-race winning streak in mid-summer, and took the chance to sit down with Andreas Jenzer to reflect on the team’s history, some of its drivers and the changing face of motor racing.

When Taylor Barnard crossed the line at Spa-Francorchamps to take a well-deserved FIA Formula 3 victory for the team, its first at that level since Yuki Tsunoda’s sprint race win at Monza in 2019, it would have been hard to imagine a more popular winner in the paddock.

Champagne corks popped, the team hugged each other, and anybody else in the vicinity, and cried with emotion as rival teams were quick to add their congratulations.

Just one week before Spa, Jenzer had told Formula Scout: “For us, the wish is our health keeps going well, that we can keep pushing in motorsport, and obviously to try to bring home some trophies for the team and winning some races in FIA F3 will be really nice.”

Yet, reflecting on the end of the season, Jenzer could still not hide some disappointment that a late safety car had, in his view, prevented Barnard from triumphing again at Monza.

“It’s quite amazing how fast these 30 years went,” he tells Formula Scout. “I don’t think that there are many teams in the paddock [which] never had any big financial trouble, with the same partners, with the same names. Jenzer Motorsport is Esther Lauber, my wife, and myself. We are 50:50 and we run the things ourselves,” he says proudly.

The Jenzers taking podium pics

While many rival teams have brought in external investors, Jenzer has remained “a little bit an old family team”.

“We don’t have any commercial partners. We are pretty proud of this, that we are still here and still in junior championships.

“We had many times the option of going to prototypes or GT cars. I never really had the feeling for having windscreen wipers on a car. It’s always single seaters in my heart, single-seaters is a nice part of my life, I have to say.”

Jenzer himself “started racing with an Audi 50, just doing some wild races where there was no licence needed” at Switzerland’s only circuit, Lignieres, which is just 30km away from the team’s current base in Lyss.

But as soon as he got into a Formula Ford car in 1987, he immediately knew “I was not going to sit back in a car with windscreen wipers. I was really fascinated by and passionate about single-seaters”.

“I was already 23 years old. I was only able to start racing when I was able to earn my own money from my job as an electrician. My parents were never able to support me financially, so I just did a lot of work to finance myself to go racing and I was also lucky this time with Esther, then my girlfriend, to help pushing, first as a driver and then the transition into a race team.”

Running his self-built Faster chassis, developed together with friend, Alain Feuz, Jenzer took consecutive top-three finishes in the Swiss FFord Championship in 1990, ’91 and ’92. The highlight came in the traditional end-of-year trip to Brands Hatch’s FFord Festival in 1992.

“I did pretty well up and should actually have reached the final,” he remembers. Driving his Faster, Jenzer crashed out of his quarter-final whilst running “in a good position”, leaving him too much to do in the semi-final to make up ground.

Jenzer driving in the 1992 FFord Festival

“On the Monday after the Festival I tested a Swift and was incredibly fast. I said: ‘Bloody hell! How easy it is to drive a car from a manufacturer compared to the car I was used to drive’.”

After his promising ’92 season, Jenzer had his heart set on stepping up to Formula 3. “I was 29 years-old and I had my dream of becoming a racing driver. I tested Formula 3000, Porsche Cup, F3 and all these tests went really well.

“I had basically all my money together to do F3. The money from my biggest sponsor [Binggeli Galvano] was the last bit to fill. And then he said to me: ‘If you go F3, I don’t give you any more money. But if you start a racing team, I will give you double the money’.”

Jenzer had already struck a deal to bring two Swift chassis back to Switzerland and when a father turned up looking for a team to run his son, “I was thinking all these things seem to be a sign to really start the team”.

So, within months, Jenzer found himself not only as a FFord team owner but also the official Swift importer for Switzerland, “and already in the first year I sold seven cars!”

Unsurprisingly, “Swift was very happy and the impact of starting a competition team against Van Diemen in Switzerland worked out perfectly”.

So perfectly in fact that Jenzer Motorsport ended its first season with its first silverware, as Hans Pfeuti won the Swiss FF1800 Championship. The team would dominate the series with six titles in eight years.

For Jenzer himself “the plan was not to race anymore in 1993”, but he came out of retirement for a last time to take on future Sauber Formula 1 driver Norberto Fontana, who was making a name for himself in Switzerland and around Europe in a factory Van Diemen.

Jenzer driving at Zandvoort in 1993

“Swift was a little bit worried that I will not do the business selling cars, that we can only sell cars if we are winning. But it wasn’t like this,” he remembers.

And by now Jenzer was settling into the role of team owner: “I really have to say already in ’93 I enjoyed looking after the drivers, some who didn’t even have a driving licence on the road. I think my first drivers in 1994-’95 were 16, 17 or 18 [years old].”

“We started racing internationally immediately when we started the team. We went to Germany, to France, we went racing in England, obviously the traditional FFord Festival, which were more an English thing then.

“I still remember some of the set-ups we were running in 1995 in FFord,” says Jenzer. “We had a lot of enjoyment in FFord.

“We had a very good promoter with Gilles Martineau at the time who was promoting the French championship but also looked after the European. We did podiums in the championship in the French, we finished fifth in the Festival in ‘95 with Luciano Crespi in the Swift, second in the European Championship in 1996 [with Iradj Alexander-David] and won the championship in Germany [with Marc Benz in 2000].”

Benz, now working in his family garage in Switzerland, looks back fondly on his time with Jenzer. “It was a really special season,” he tells Formula Scout. “We were travelling almost non-stop to races in Germany, France and the Festival, sleeping in the back of the truck.”

“Andreas believed in me from the start. He was a real father figure. Without him I wouldn’t have been able to step up [from karting]. We worked hard but had a lot of fun. It was a real school of life, both on and off-track” he remembers.

But FFord was already past its heyday, “with the Zetec cars you started to see all the Festivals in 1997 and ‘98 going down to 80 cars [from 100] and the national championships starting to struggle a bit more,” remembers Jenzer.

Jenzer’s history in wins

And so, when Formula Renault became a spec championship, and “Tatuus came in with a price below €30,000 for a ready-to-race car I immediately jumped on this,” Jenzer recalls.

“I have to say Renault Switzerland was a company with a very strong passion for motorsport. Andre Hefti, one of the guys basically on the board making decisions, was always helping young Swiss drivers like Neel Jani, Marc Benz and Nico Muller and this obviously also helped the team a lot. We got two drivers and we immediately started with FR2.0 [in the] German and European championships.”

“From 2000 onwards we decided to race always outside in the best championships like Italy, Germany or France with FR2.0. Renault with the World Series by Renault did a great championship package, a great organisation, [so] we followed for a long time the Renault world.”

Jenzer Motorsport carried on in FRenault where it had left off in FFord. Benz and Jani were second in the FR2.0 Eurocup in 2001 and ’02 respectively, future DTM champion Bruno Spengler was runner-up in FR2.0 Germany in 2002 with Ryan Sharp going one better the following year.

Red Bull-backed Michael Ammermuller took second spot in the Eurocup in 2005, the start of a longer term relationship with Helmut Marko, before Dani Clos and Pal Varhaug won the 2006 and 2008 Italian FR2.0 series.

In 2003, Jenzer had expanded into the FRV6 Eurocup, which was later succeeded by FR3.5, run under the World Series by Renault umbrella. Success again came quickly with Jani and Sharp narrowly missing out on titles in 2003 and ’04.

Fabio Leimer won the short-lived International Formula Masters championship for Jenzer in 2009, but “there was this GP3 coming and we saw more the way of GP3 because of the Renault support”.

“The first GP3 car had a Renault engine so we were always quite following the Renault situation and we went to GP3 in 2010,” Jenzer explains. GP3 would, of course, metamorphose into FIA F3 in 2019.

“The show exploded when the name got changed from GP3 to FIA F3 and the show costs a lot of money. The show has nothing to do with the racing, but investors and drivers want a flash situation.”

Nevertheless, Jenzer appreciates Michel’s efforts “to support the teams in a way that it’s affordable”.

“He’s always looking into the situation that the championship has a financial balance and doesn’t just go through the roof.”

Jenzer is proud of the fact that “ART Grand Prix and Jenzer Motorsport are the two last remaining teams who were there already on day one” of GP3.

At single-seaters’ entry level, Jenzer has been a mainstay of Formula 4 since its inception, stepping across from Formula Abarth to join the inaugural Italian F4 season in 2014, and ADAC F4 in Germany when it launched a year later.

Following the demise of ADAC F4 at the end of 2022, Jenzer added a programme in the F4 Central European Zone championship for this season, with Ethan Ischer edging team-mate Reno Francot for honours at the final round to take Jenzer’s first title in the category since Marcos Siebert beat Mick Schumacher to become 2016 Italian F4 champion.

Jenzer unearthed Siebert in Argentina thanks to the connections of former driver Luciano Crespi, whose 2013 FRenault season was cut short when his sponsor dropped out.

“He was really without money and winning the championship against Mick was a big effort from the team and from a very, very skilled driver,” said Jenzer. With no budget for testing, he reckons Siebert’s total test mileage in three seasons would be “what a Prema driver today is doing before his first race”.

Jenzer Motorsport celebrating F4 CEZ success

A broad smile crosses the face of Siebert, now rebuilding his career in GTs, when approached by Formula Scout for his memories of his time with Jenzer.

“He made me as a racing driver. It was one of the best things that happened to me,” he recalls. “I have really good memories.”

“It was like a second home. Andreas is like my second father in Europe because I grew with them, I lived with them for three years. I was in the workshop making my own car, helping the team, so the reason we won the championship was not only that we were fast, but that we really worked together.”

But a laughing Siebert points out a lesser-known side to Jenzer’s man-management style.

“People that know him know how tough he is with drivers. He’s really strict, especially in the race weekend. He was engineering my car. I learned a lot with him, we had fun, sometimes not that much because he was too hard with me.

“He loves racing, and we were fighting for the championship. When I made a little mistake he was hard with me, banging my helmet sometimes, he was completely crazy.  But he knew it was the way to make me faster, so at the end of the day it was the reason why we succeeded.”

Jenzer has maintained his strong Argentinian links, with seven mechanics and one engineer from the nation in his team right now. “They are really passionate people who love motorsport. It’s a nice team with the Argentinian guys here.”

Another non-European to leave his mark was Yuki Tsunoda, who arrived in Europe as the reigning Japanese F4 champion, backed by Honda and Red Bull, and was the first driver announced for the inaugural season of the FIA F3 Championship.

After finishing third in the teams’ championship in GP3 in 2017, Jenzer had suffered a tough season in the final year of the series and concedes that not many teams were clamouring for Tsunoda’s signature.

Photo: Roger Gascoigne

“It was very nice being able to get Yuki at this time, but I think also, there were not too many options for him because all the teams would have probably not jumped on a F4 driver from Japan, who never did a lap in any race tracks in Europe.”

Jenzer remembers when Tsunoda arrived, his lack of physical strength meant he “was not able to hang on to the car for more than five laps”.

“The first step was getting organised with Red Bull and Honda to have him training very hard, seven days a week non-stop from December until he jumped in the car in March.”

Tsunoda’s first acquaintance with car and team actually came in the post-season GP3 test at Abu Dhabi, immediately impressing with his times on each of the three days.

“In the same test there was also another driver testing with Jenzer Motorsport, [Oscar] Piastri, and the two were always on the same level,” Jenzer reveals. “With Piastri it was already organised that he will do FR2.0 Eurocup but Tsunoda was with us.

“We did all the hard work with Yuki, we got a little Japanese boy, not even 50kg heavy, living in Switzerland, organising the things for the boy. We didn’t make a big marketing out of it, what was maybe wrong for us, but I think we did a great work with him, preparing him for Formula 2. We know where he was after a couple of years.

“We worked very hard on this project. That was obviously a huge success for Jenzer Motorsport being part of this success. Obviously, we were expecting that we could continue to have Red Bull drivers but c’est la vie.”

For 2020, Red Bull switched its allegiance to Hitech, which is still its junior single-seater team of choice.

Although Jenzer acknowledges that running cars for Marko was “not an easy task,” they ended up working together for eight or nine years, going back to the team’s time in FR2.0.

Photo: Dom Romney / FIA F3 Championship

“We just had this kind of co-operation at this time. And at one stage the collaboration stopped. Maybe I am a little bit a strong character. I still like to do my own decisions for some of the things and obviously it was nice to work with Red Bull but Red Bull left us and the year after we were with different drivers in front of Red Bull. We were still able to maintain the job.”

Though the team has always been internationally-oriented, Jenzer is naturally proud of the Swiss heritage of the team and has always been a passionate supporter of young Swiss drivers, including Jani, Benz, Leimer, Muller, and Gregoire Saucy.

“We counted last year over 70 Swiss drivers who passed through Jenzer Motorsport. We actually impressed ourselves that we actually had such a big load of young Swiss drivers.”

Running a racing team from Switzerland, one of the most expensive locations in Europe and somewhere with no permanent racing circuit, isn’t easy.

“It’s nice but it involves a bit more organisation and obviously, the financial level is a bit different. We are very exclusive in Switzerland, Jenzer Motorsport together with Sauber in F1 are the two only really established big single-seater teams who also had some good success over the years. Obviously, it’s all about getting organised with things but also when you look how small the country is and still, how many good drivers and how many drivers are coming out of this small country we can be pretty proud of ourselves.”

The relationship with Sauber, at least when Peter Sauber was still at the helm, was a strong one, with Sauber offering his countryman any support needed, “except for money!”.

And being based in Switzerland does have one practical logistical benefit: “We are in the centre of Europe. When I come out from my workshop we turn to the right, we go to Italy, we turn to the left we go to Germany, we go straight, we go to Austria, we go backwards, we go to France, so except for this paperwork I always enjoyed running the team out of Switzerland.”

“Obviously being based in Switzerland, we are working with Swiss money [but] we are getting paid in European money. In 2011 we had a huge financial crisis with Europe. Our Swiss franc wass miles too strong against the euro. It is still too strong, but in ’11 I had to find solutions with much more work in Switzerland.”

As the Eurozone debt crisis worsened, investors sought refuge in the most-accessible “hard” currency, the Swiss franc, pushing its value up by 30% against the Euro.

The financial impact was so severe and so sudden that Jenzer came close “at this time, to say I’ve had enough”.

“The Swiss franc in such a short moment got so strong that we were really suffering or having huge problems that the company was able to swim on top of the water and not under the water and this was a time where it was really hard, but we had a huge drive from everybody to push the company through and find solutions.

“We had a very, very tough moment [but] I just worked even double as hard to survive.”

To balance the books, and to ensure an additional and more stable income stream, Jenzer responded by adding “our third business, looking after gentleman drivers, and after gentleman [drivers’] single-seater cars. If you come to our workshop, we have our four F4 cars and three F3 cars but we always have between 25 and 30 single-seater cars in the workshop where we are doing maintenance work, rebuilding work, repairing the cars for track days, and this is the business I had to grow in 2011.”

As for all small businesses, keeping a tight rein on costs is a daily imperative, particularly in the current inflationary environment, requiring the team to be as efficient as possible.

Esther looks after the financial side of the company, and Jenzer admits that “I think she gets a few more grey hairs this year looking at bills coming”. Without external investors, “we are a little bit an old family team, and we have to be able to be competitive with what we have”, he adds.

Photo: Jenzer Motorsport

“We are quite a small operation, with an average of 15 to 25 employees over the last 20 years. With the mechanics and engineers, we are very efficient; quite a few people are doing double things.”

Jenzer has proved itself as a training ground not only for drivers, but also for mechanics and engineers starting their careers in the junior categories. “The list of mechanics and engineers who succeeded with Jenzer Motorsport and made a living out of it is probably as big [as the list of drivers] and that’s another part where we are proud,” comments Jenzer.

He is reluctant to pick any favourites from the “many, many drivers we had in [the team] who brought a lot of enjoyment.

“It’s always a delicate thing to put names because there are many names who made it in different aspects and also many names who probably didn’t make it because of the financial resources.

“Over the 10 years all the success we had with Renault was nice success [but] there is no one particular thing in my memory whether I could say this was really the point,” he says, although he does pick out Nico Muller’s feature race win in GP3 at Silverstone in 2011 as “one of my race wins which I really enjoyed a lot”.

Muller is clearly one of his favourite alumni (“we still have a huge contact”) but adds that “we actually still have a lot of contact with many of our drivers also, there is not many drivers who I could say something negative about”.

“Bruno Spengler was a kind of a character where there was so much enjoyment working with him, and also Neel Jani, who was a completely different character, was an absolute pusher only for results. There are drivers like Fabio Leimer. With the skills he had, with what we were able to achieve with him and what he was able to achieve after, it’s a bit sad to see that he was not able to make it in motorsport.”

Both Siebert and the team’s 2022 FIA F3 driver William Alatalo have continued to work with Jenzer as driver coaches.

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Alatalo is naturally itching to get back into a competitive seat but says that he has “learned a lot coaching the F4 guys”.

Having experienced life on both sides of the pitwall, he feels at home in the squad. “It’s exactly as a team is supposed to be, everybody is working together just to have everything good for the driver and the team overall.”

Unsurprisingly, motorsport has changed considerably in 30 years. Racing is safer, more popular but also more commercial. The changes, good and bad, permeate all the way down from the top to the bottom of the ladder.

“The last couple of years, I have to say that there are a few sporting things or political-sporting things that make me think a bit too much what I want,” Jenzer says.

In particular, the professionalism in entry-level categories is squeezing out traditional outfits like his own, Jenzer fears.

Too much testing is driving costs up, while the dominance of F1 junior programmes and the concentration of well-funded drivers with one or two teams leaves small points for the rest to fight over.

“I found myself thinking too much about things in the sport what I don’t like or I would like to change. But I always say when you want to enter politics, then you have to do politics, and you have to help yourself to exit or try to change something.

“I’m really a motivation-driven person and a really sports-driven person and not a business-driven person. I don’t like that huge business around the sport.”

Where he still gets a buzz is from working with young drivers and the feeling that “with this driver you can go out there and try to win”.

Jenzer and Spengler

“But today a lot of drivers have to do 10, 15 or 20,000 kilometres before even thinking about getting in a race or winning a race. Raw talent still matters but it doesn’t matter like maybe in the old days.”

“Maybe I am thinking a little bit too much last couple of years. This is a bit a part, especially in the junior categories, when it’s difficult to give an answer. But I am always driven by the sport and I want to go forward.”

After 30 years, Jenzer is not yet ready to hang up his headphones for good but accepts that the time to move on is approaching rapidly, within “the next three to five years”.

“Esther actually has [reached] retirement age. I am only three or four years away from it. There is also a lot of things in the world I want to see. And maybe it’s a bit the moment to have different job objectives.

“Esther and me are the owners of the company. Nobody is paying our salaries, we are earning our salaries. We are doing still all our decisions ourselves.

“We don’t have to come to the circuit [for each event], but we want to come to the circuit. And there is no time where I don’t like to go to the circuit. Because when you are 60 to 65 years old, you can have a much easier life staying at home.

“We are not money-driven. We don’t need to go to the circuit to make money. We don’t need to be here. We are well enough to also have an easier life.

We could “maybe run GT cars where the first session is only at 10am and not like in F4 where the first session is at 8am,” he says.

“In FIA F3 at Silverstone we had to leave the hotel at 5:30am without breakfast. If you do this still at 60 or 65 years old, you must have some sort of a passion,” he laughs.

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

One thing is certain, he says: “We will remain in motorsport. I have fuel in my blood and I will not be able to do something else than motorsport, but I don’t know exactly which direction we’re going to take in the next thing. Maybe we get to build a race track in Switzerland because now it’s allowed to have a race track in Switzerland, I would like to be involved in something like this.”

Jenzer laughs at the suggestion that we might see the development of a circuit named Jenzerring somewhere in his homeland.

“Maybe not a Jenzerring somewhere, but I have to say if our government rule [banning motorsport] would have been ditched 25 years ago, I think people like Peter Sauber, like Emil or Walther Frey, like Fredy Lienhard with Lista, big players in industry, big players in the automobile world would have probably sat at a table and decided let’s build a race track because we had some really, really super passionate people in Switzerland.”

“To survive 30 years in this shark pond is not an easy task. Esther and I are still together. Even if we have hard time sometimes, not in private life but in terms of business.

“My passion is: I really love single-seater racing. And I still love to go to the circuit; not for a money reason [but] to try to teach young kids and to do the best possible job.”

Jenzer is one of the last of a dying breed, the family-owned and managed racing team, competing at the highest level. Its re-emergence as a race-winning outfit is thoroughly deserved, a testament to what can be achieved with talented drivers, even on a budget.

The post A passion undimmed: Celebrating Jenzer Motorsport’s 30th anniversary appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photos: McLaren Racing

From starting his car racing career to becoming a McLaren driver, this is the drama and win-filled route Oscar Piastri took to becoming a Formula 1 racer

Friday, December 16 2016

A 15-year-old Piastri, who came sixth in the CIK-FIA World Karting Championship for OK-Junior karts earlier in the year, makes his car racing debut at Yas Marina Circuit in the second round of the new Formula 4 United Arab Emirates championship. He finishes sixth, and follows it up later that day with a fifth place as future rival Logan Sargeant takes a clean sweep of second places from the weekend.

Piastri goes on to come sixth in the standings, contesting two further rounds but skipping the season finale, and racking up his first two podiums on the return trip to Yas Marina. His opposition in the series includes Sean Babington, now driver coach to McLaren junior Ugo Ugochukwu, prototype sportscar racer Jonathan Aberdein, IndyCar rookie David Malukas and FIA president Muhammed ben Sulayem’s son Saif.

Wednesday, February 8 2017

Arden names a four-strong line-up in British F4, with sophomore Ayrton Simmons joined by rookies Yves Baltas and Piastri. Olli Caldwell is also signed but does not debut until turning 15 halfway through the season.

Sunday, May 21 2017

Piastri’s first car racing win comes in the reversed-grid Oulton Park race, which is a battle between himself and Sargeant after he makes a few mistakes in the lead. The pressure from Sargeant is ultimately relinquished when the race is red flagged due to a crash.

Photo: Jakob Ebrey Photography

Saturday, July 29 2017

Two rounds later at Snetterton, Piastri demonstrates his potential to be involved in the title fight by taking two pole positions and converting the first of those into a win later that day. On Sunday he repeats the feat.

Saturday, October 7 2017

Piastri makes his Formula Renault 2.0 debut with Arden in the FR Northern European Cup finale at Hockenheim, and comes eighth in both races.

Wednesday, December 20 2017

After finishing as runner-up in British F4, Caroline steps up to FR2.0 full-time with Arden to contest the FR Eurocup.

Friday, December 21 2018

Piastri and highly rated team-mate Sami Taoufik perform far worse than expected as FR2.0 rookies, with Piastri bagging three podiums and a lowly eighth in the Eurocup standings. For his second season, he signs with the crack R-ace GP team.

Saturday, May 11 2019

A switch to Formula Regional technical regulations doesn’t shake up the Eurocup’s competitive order too much, and Piastri’s first pole and win came in round two at Silverstone. Qualifying took place on a drying track and he mastered the conditions to be quickest, but he lost the lead to team-mate Alexander Smolyar in the race and it was only after he retired with a car issue that Piastri was able to romp away to win by a massive 12.693 seconds.

Photo: DPPI / Renault Sport

Sunday, September 8 2019

In a critical weekend for the title fight between Piastri and MP Motorsport’s Victor Martins, Piastri spins off on the sighting lap for Saturday’s race at the Hungaroring and is unable to start. However rainy conditions means it only runs for three laps and Martins gets half-points for victory, then on Sunday Piastri bounces back by dominating qualifying and taking a controlling win to head into the final three rounds with a big points lead.

Friday, October 18 2019

There’s a lot of interest in Prema’s FIA Formula 3 seats after it dominates the inaugural season of the championship, and it can only trial so many drivers in the post-season test at Valencia’s Ricardo Tormo circuit. Piastri makes the shortlist of five.

Friday, October 25 2019

Martins cuts the gap to Piastri before the final round at Yas Marina, and beats Piastri to pole for the series’ first ever night race. However he fluffs his start, handing Piastri the lead. It takes a while for Martins to recover back to second place and he then goes on an intense chase of his rival. They finish 1.2s apart, and Piastri calls it “the most nervous half an hour of my life”.

Saturday, October 26 2019

Martins still had the pace advantage going into the title-deciding day, and beat Piastri to pole. This time he was able to convert it into a dominant win, but Piastri only needed to finish seventh to become champion. Fourth place was more than enough to take the crown.

Sunday, January 26 2020

Piastri’s future is confirmed as off the back of his Eurocup crown he is announced as a Renault F1 junior and a Prema driver in FIA F3 for 2020.

Sunday, March 1 2020

Just as the COVID-19 pandemic starts to have global implications, and later put the Australia-located Piastri at risk of not being able to race in Europe, the 18-year-old becomes a personal protege of his countryman Mark Webber, a former F1 star.

Wednesday, May 27 2020

With the world in lockdown and very strictly regulated international travel, possibly the most important moment of Piastri’s career comes as he is granted exemption to travel from Australia to the United Kingdom and then serve a two-week quarantine once he arrives in the country. Piastri’s exemption is also the firmest indication yet that FIA F3 will be racing.

Saturday, July 4 2020

In a race he thought “had ended in the first 10s” following a dramatic first two corners, Piastri came from third on the grid to win on his F3 debut ahead of old British F4 and FR2.0 rival, and now Prema team-mate, Sargeant.

Friday, August 7 2020

Piastri’s season is at a doldrums, as title rival Sargeant takes his second pole in a row at Silverstone while Piastri’s first qualifying run ends at the pit entry and then his second run comes to a halt at Luffield due to technical trouble. He qualifies 11th, and at no point does he make the front row during the season.

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Sunday, August 16 2020

After Sargeant moves into the points lead at Silverstone, Piastri undoes some of the damage of that weekend by picking up his second F3 win in the reversed-grid Barcelona race after going from fifth to first in four corners on the opening lap.

Saturday, September 5 2020

Piastri becomes championship leader once more by charging from 15th to third at Monza and calls it “a lot of fun”.

Sunday, September 6 2020

Neither Piastri or Sargeant avoided contact with other drivers in race one, and it is the same in race two. Piastri forces David Beckmann off and gets a five-place grid penalty for the final round, while Sargeant ends team-mate Frederik Vesti’s hopes by crashing with him and is penalised three spots on the grid at Mugello.

Friday, September 11 2020

Sargeant qualifies second, but will start fifth, and Piastri is only 11th in a close qualifying session at Mugello, meaning he will start from 16th for the penultimate race of the season.

Saturday, September 12 2020

Sargeant recovers to seventh in the Mugello opener, and Piastri makes up several places but by finishing 11th is just short of the points positions, bringing Sargeant back level in the title race, and of getting the reversed grid pole for the title decider.

Photo: Prema

Sunday, September 13 2020

The title hopes of Sargeant expire on the opening lap as he is sent into the gravel, while some help from Vesti (as requested by Prema) enabled Piastri to get up to eighth and then snatch seventh in a photo finish. The outcome was title success, by just three points over ART Grand Prix’s Theo Pourchaire.

Friday, October 30 2020

A landmark day in Piastri’s career, he gets his first taste of F1 machinery in Renault’s R.S.18 car from 2018 at Bahrain.

Tuesday, December 1 2020

Webber works to land Piastri the best F2 seat possible, and he delivers as Piastri stays with Prema for the step up.

Tuesday, December 8 2020

A week later, Piastri gets his first official running in a F2 car at Bahrain and goes fastest several times before ending the first day of post-season testing as the top debutant in fifth place.

Saturday, March 27 2021

Piastri finishes fifth on his F2 race debut, again at Bahrain, and later that day gets to race again. This time he starts sixth, makes a pitstop and beats Zhou Guanyu, a fellow junior of the now rebranded Alpine, to victory with a final lap pass. Afterwards he calls it the craziest race and win of his career.

Tuesday, May 25 2021

Piastri sits second in the points behind Zhou after two rounds, and Alpine is gearing up F1 preparations for both by handing them further private tests. As rumours swirl that the team will be retaining Esteban Ocon on a long-term contract though, it looks unlikely either driver will be rewarded with an F1 race seat if they become champion. Piastri says “it changes nothing”.

Friday, July 16 2021

A breakthrough for Piastri as he claims his maiden F2 pole at Silverstone, his first front row start since his Eurocup campaign.

Friday, September 10 2021

For several months after Ocon signs his long-term deal, Piastri is bombarded with questions about if he has an F1 future. He opened up to the press at Monza as his hopes diminished just as he asserted himelf at the top of the F2 points table.

Sunday, September 12 2021

Later that weekend, Piastri turns his second pole in a row into his first F2 feature race win. It would mark the start of an immense run of performances across the next three events.

Tuesday, November 16 2021

Zhou’s yet-to-be-announced but widely anticipated move into an Alfa Romeo Racing F1 seat for 2022 opens up a vacancy in the reserve driver role at Alpine, and the team all but confirms Zhou’s exit as it announces Piastri will take his place for the next season. At the same time, it’s an admission that it has been unable to loan him to a rival team.

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Sunday, December 5 2021

Piastri puts one hand on the F2 title, and with a round still to go, by winning the shortened five-lap Jeddah feature race.

Friday, December 10 2021

A remarkable fifth pole position in a row goes to Piastri in the Yas Marina finale, and fellow Australian Jack Doohan qualifies second in just his second F2 appearance.

Saturday, December 11 2021

Pole position put Piastri 10th on the reversed grid for the opening sprint race of the weekend, but moved up to sixth on lap one. He and team-mate Robert Shwartzman, by this point his main title rival, then rose up the order together before Piastri passed him, netted a podium finish in third place and more importantly was crowned champion with two races to spare.

Sunday, December 12 2021

Piastri caps off a stunning year with an odd incident in which he had contact with another driver on the way to the grid, but then a fourth feature race win in a row.

Tuesday, December 14 2021

Piastri’s first miles in a contemporary F1 car as he drives Alpine’s A521 in the official young driver test.

Saturday, March 12 2022

Photo: Alpine Racing

The start of the Piastri to McLaren story, the drive-less champion is made available by Alpine to its rival team as reserve driver if his services are required. The agreement comes about after McLaren driver Daniel Ricciardo, a fellow Australian, goes down with COVID-19.

Monday, July 4 2022

Unknown to the under-pressure Ricciardo, and most of the motorsport world, McLaren signs Piastri for 2023. It is not revealed publicly whether Piastri was signed initially as a reserve driver, given at the time Ricciardo was still contracted to be team-mate to Lando Norris for next year.

Monday, August 1 2022

Following Aston Martin driver Sebastian Vettel’s announcement in the lead up to the Hungarian Grand Prix that he will retire from F1 at the end of the season, Alpine’s Fernando Alonso swoops in and by the end of the weekend has got a deal with the team for the next two years. He is announced as switching allegiances on the Monday.

Tuesday, August 2 2022

Alpine start the day by saying they know Piastri could follow Alonso out the door, then announce via Twitter during the morning that he will actually step into seat being vacated. It makes him the first driver from the Alpine Academy and its predecessors to be signed to race for the Enstone-based F1 team since Robert Kubica, and the first to do so without aligning himself with a rival F1 team before that since Romain Grosjean in 2009.

By this point it is known that Webber had been talking to McLaren about putting Piastri in a race seat.

Photo: Alpine F1 Team

In a style mimicking Alex Palou’s denial he had signed an IndyCar contract with his current employer Chip Ganassi Racing, Piastri tweets: “I understand that, without my agreement, Alpine F1 have put out a press release late this afternoon that I am driving for them next year. This is wrong and I have not signed a contract with Alpine for 2023. I will not be driving for Alpine next year.”

Wednesday, August 24 2022

Ricciardo agrees to leave McLaren at the end of 2022, a year before his contract ends, opening up a spot for Piastri to race for the team in 2023. Piastri had already been in firm contention for a 2024 seat, and Ricciardo’s exit actually feeds interest that McLaren’s IndyCar stars and the drivers signed to its F1 test programme could move into the world championship.

Monday, August 29 2022

A tribunal appointed by the FIA’s Contract Recognition Board meet after Alpine challenges McLaren’s claim to Piastri’s services for 2023. At this point McLaren is yet to admit any involvement in the drama playing out, despite it being widely known to the world it has signed Piastri, and the CRB does decide in the team’s favour by saying “Mr Piastri is entitled to drive for McLaren Racing Limited for the 2023 and 2024 seasons” and that the contract Alpine wrote up is therefore invalid.

Saturday, September 2 2022

“I’m extremely excited to be making my F1 debut with such a prestigious team as McLaren and I’m very grateful for the opportunity that’s been offered to me.”

The words everyone was waiting for as McLaren announce Piastri as team-mate to Norris for the next two seasons.

He has now stopped his reserve driver commitments with Alpine, although the team is coy on the subject, and work begins on providing junior driver Jack Doohan with free practice opportunities to assess his suitability for the role while the search begins for Ocon’s 2023 team-mate.

Tuesday, November 22 2022

Piastri drives a McLaren for the first time in the young driver test.

Friday, March 3 2023

If everything goes to plan, then the date Piastri makes his grand prix weekend debut in free practice for the Bahrain Grand Prix, his first F1 race…

The post The timeline of Oscar Piastri’s journey to an F1 seat appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: Emil Frey Racing / Brecht Decancq

When Arthur Rougier beat Victor Martins to win the 2017 French F4 title and subsequently joined the Renault Sport Academy, he seemed assured of a strong future in single-seaters. But it did not play out that way

After a disappointing rookie year in the Formula Renault Eurocup and without a budget to continue on the ladder, Arthur Rougier found himself both out of a drive and being dumped from the Renault Formula 1 team’s driver academy. Things didn’t look bright.

However after switching to GT racing, the 22-year-old Frenchman has rapidly made a name for himself, initially in a Sainteloc Racing Audi and since 2021 at the wheel of a Lamborghini Huracan GT3 Evo for Swiss squad Emil Frey Racing.

As Rougier tells Formula Scout, he is not jealous of the success of Martins, who won this year’s FIA Formula 3 title but was also dropped by Renault after his second year in the Eurocup before he earned his way back onto the scheme.

“I’m happy with where I am at the moment in GTs. I really enjoy what I’m doing and seeing those guys performing, sometimes it puts a smile on my face. But I’m happy they’re doing well. I know Victor quite well and we keep in touch.”

Naturally, there are times when his thoughts turn to what might have been. “It’s also showing that I was doing well at that time against him. I remember also doing tests with Arden at Spa-Francorchamps in the winter test day and being ahead of Oscar Piastri. So I’m like, ‘Yeah I could have maybe sometimes [done what they did],’ but [life in GTs] is cool.”

Rougier only raced on karts for two years before he moved into single-seaters, debuting in French Formula 4 in 2016. He claimed a maiden win in the season finale and came 10th in the standings. Though rookie Martins ran him close in his sophomore season, five victories and 12 podiums gave him the title by four points, after a tense final round at Paul Ricard.

“Looking back at it for me the [centrally-run] French F4 championship was really good,” he says. “Because then in single-seaters, you need to be in a top team. And this is sometimes politically quite tough to be in the right place at the right time.

Photo: FFSA

“In French F4 everyone has the same car, just to make sure it was fair, and this I like. We all had the same strengths to fight and this was really nice.”

Rougier shone in Pau and at Spa in his title-winning F4 season, winning all three races at Spa. No driver has done that in the series in its FIA F4 era, and Rougier’s company in the Formula Renault 1.6 cars before that are Anthoine Hubert, Jules Gounon, Lasse Sorensen and Yifei Ye.

“I won double pole [at Spa] in 2017, with victory in all three races. It was really cool,” he reminisces.

For the step up to the Eurocup, he signed with Fortec Motorsports, while Martins joined reigning champion team R-ace GP.

Rougier was as much in demand, and “had many options, but Fortec offered me a really good deal – the only one I could afford because still with the help of the [French] federation and Renault I had to add something from my personal partners. So Fortec was only one I could go for.”

• Scout Report: Victor Martins & Arthur Rougier [April 2018]

In a competitive field, with rivals including Christian Lundgaard, Logan Sargeant, Martins, Piastri and champion Max Fewtrell, team and driver struggled.

Rougier came 15th in the championship with his two best results, a fourth and a sixth, occurring at Spa. The rookie was undoubtedly hurt by the lack of a strong team-mate.

“There are many reasons [why it didn’t work out],” he explains. “I personally think that I did quite a strong season with what I had at that time. Just missing team-mates to go forward, let’s say, and experience.

Photo: Roger Gascoigne

“[The FR2.0 car] was really specific, really tough to drive and you needed some a lot of driving time to understand it properly, I would say.”

“I really missed in my team a leader. I was the fastest of my team, which you would at first think is a good thing but no, when you are a rookie, you see all the rookies performing really well,” he explains. “They have a team-mate that is able to fight for the title and I had no one to push me forward, let’s say.”

Rougier believes that “the team was missing some references and data from the previous years”, while R-ace had “four drivers maybe to fight for wins every race”.

“So to try different things with the set-up we were losing time and the field is so competitive. And we were generally missing qualifying performance, because on race pace we were always really strong, but you cannot overtake a lot when you start P10 or P15. The set-up in qualifying to understand when the peak is working is really important and we missed it all season.

“The only time we had a really good car was in Spa and I ended up being something like one tenth off pole. At that time, I thought I had understood something with the car but no because the weekend after, it was one of my best quali laps of the year, but I was really far off in qualifying.”

“It was a tough year but if I had to do the same, I would do [it],” he reflects. “Because I learned a lot during that season [which] really helped me to grow as a driver and to experience a lot of things. I really had to push myself because the level in this championship was crazy.”

His funding finally ran out before the end of the season, causing him to miss the final round, and Renault confirmed his exit from the Academy for 2019 soon after.

“I knew I had no chance to go for one more season because in 2018 I had big help from the federation and from Renault.” With the FFSA’s support limited to one year, he realised “it wasn’t doable, there was never an option to go for another year”.

“My goal was to be in a top team because I think back in those days, I mean still now, if you’re not in one of the top teams there is no chance to be really up in front. I never felt like I had a proper chance, I have to say.

“To me if you want to give a driver a chance he has to be in a top team. You need to give him the support where he has no excuses. And me, I had excuses, let’s say.

“Where the [quality of the] field is so high and some drivers are coming with a lot of budget, a lot of testing, you need to be at their level. If you don’t have the same budget or team or whatever, there is no point for me to fight. I think I personally did a strong season but I did not have the keys to prepare, really up in front.”

With the backing for continuing his single-seater career gone almost as quickly as it arrived, Rougier made the decision to move across to his national GT4 series in 2019, before stepping up to GT3 in 2020.

In 2021 he was enrolled into Lamborghini’s GT3 Junior Driver programme, and in an end-of-year shootout at Vallelunga he was determined as the best junior. With Lamborghini’s support he now races in ADAC GT Masters and GT World Challenge Europe’s Endurance Cup with Emil Frey.

“It’s the first year [when] I can do two full championships, so it’s really good for me,” Rougier explains. “The first one that was on the schedule was the ADAC during the winter and we could add a late programme for endurance, which is also really good to have some more driving time so more experience this year with 24 hours of Spa of course. Both championships are a really high level and targets are really high this year.”

Photo: SRO / Kevin Pecks

The focus is on the German title, where Rougier shares a car with Franck Perera, a contemporary of Lewis Hamilton in their junior years. They made the podium at Oschersleben and Zandvoort, and are in outside contention for second in the points.

“Zandvoort was a good weekend overall [even though] we still did not quite put everything together,” says Rougier.

His luck has been atrocious in GTWCE, not even getting into the car in the opening two rounds due to crashes in earlier stints when his team-mates were at the wheel.

“We had a really unlucky start of the season in endurance. I did not complete a single lap in the race in endurance actually, because I was supposed to be the last driver in Imola and Paul Ricard and we had to retire the car before me.”

At his specialist circuit Spa, Rougier and team-mates Leo Roussel and Giacomo Altoe finished 19th in the 24-hour race, having been the lead Lamborghini at half-distance.

“A really frustrating year so far,” he admits. “Last year was really good with the qualifying but this year I really struggled to have a clear lap.

“ADAC is a bit easier, but the level is so high and without heated tyres it’s making the field even closer. So usually if you’re five tenths off pole you’re last, so this is completely crazy.”

The fact that Lamborghini has announced an LMDh programme for 2024 has unsurprisingly not escaped Rougier’s attention.

“Of course, I’m aware of what is going on but for now I’m fully focused on the GT side, I’m feeling good in the GTWCE and ADAC and trying to perform well.

“The target is to have a seat with Lamborghini, a proper factory seat. I will try to do the maximum I can to get that seat and then we will see.”

And looking back on his three seasons in the junior categories, he says that “in the end now I’m happy where I am in GT, but I learned a lot during those years of single-seaters”.

More of Lamborghini’s single-seater to sportscar journeys
The gang of self-titled pirates saving single-seater hopefuls’ careers
The story behind one of junior single-seaters’ greatest comebacks
The Yugoslavian who’s left his mark on motorsport history
The junior driver spurned by Renault’s last F1 name change
Mirko Bortolotti: The Raging Bull whose eyes-open approach has led to racing glory

The post How an F4 champion reset his career after short-lived Renault support appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photos: Oregon Team & DPPI

You may have seen the distinctive pink, yellow and green of Oregon Team before at a race track, and heard drivers credit their careers to the Italian outfit. Ida Wood got an eye-opening inside look at the operation

It’s not uncommon for Formula Scout to catch up with drivers who have dropped off the junior single-seater ladder and ended up finding success in sportscars, and there are a few who could only make that move because of one name: Oregon Team.

The Italian team competes in Lamborghini Super Trofeo Europe and Clio Cup Europe, and has now expanded into Euroformula’s sister series International GT Open with two Lamborghini Huracan Evo GT3s as the brand’s lead team there.

At its helm is Jerry Canevisio and Piergiorgio Testa, who founded the operation in 1986 to contest autocross. Canevisio won the national title in 1990, after which the team moved into the entry-level Formula Monza single-seater series. Formula Scout finds Jerry, preparing some tomatoes for his team, in the Hungaroring paddock to find out more:

“This step is autocross, Formula Monza. Because for the learning, the path from autocross, the school of the FMonza is a little the same in Formula Ford,” he says flamboyantly, explaining how FMonza was far more of a training ground for running a team than autocross.

“And then Formula Renault Eurocup in 1996. But FR Eurocup for Oregon in this year is big! The team is not ready, and is young. Bin this, stop the formula and start with the cars of tourismo.”

Formula Scout asks for more on why Oregon felt unprepared for a seemingly small step up the single-seater latter.

“We did the little category, no more expansive [as a team], but big, big problem because in FMonza it’s not possible to buy the car. It’s obligatory to construct the car. In FMonza engine and gearbox, finish it, and your job [is to make] the cars. No problem.

“Big school [for us]. Better build a car and race in the first two years. Crashed, broke the suspension, crashed all of it, but this is learning, don’t ole ole ole for the truck [sic], but for the construction of the car this as a category is no more expensive, and I can win it first year and do the learning [of it simultanously]. But FMonza, this is not a championship, this is school. And you work on the car with this, first years for understanding. Then Formula Renault, step-by-step, you understand?”

A sage nod, realising that the FMonza was a school for all the years beyond just FR2.0.

“Formulas are race cars. Touring car, okay, you bring the bags, we bring the car, and we go in the holidays with the Clio. This is the difference,” he jokes.

And so over the next 25 years, Oregon established itself in touring cars and then sportscars. But its roots remain very much on show. Firstly, how did the name come about?

“The name is the start. Before the autocross started, the first car in Oregon is a Ford Taunus. Very old car, Ford Taunus. When finished two jobs of the cars, immediately ‘Look at the car. It is the same as the stock cars, but the Oregon [university sport] team in the United States is nowhere back then. It means right now, I use the Oregon name, and I go!

“The first car [gets a lot of attention]. The Oregon is not in the US, the Oregon is right now [in Italy].”

It’s a origin story that doesn’t quite make sense, even for someone with knowledge of American college sports and NASCAR’s origins, and the tale behind the very distinctive livery is told just as passionately.

“The colours is the same history. I finished to play with autocross, arrived in FMonza. I understand immediately that the difference is big. I sit in the tribuna [grandstand] and I look at the race. I understand immediately that in this time it’s impossible to win. I started in last position, all races.

“Okay, [watch a race and] point at the car that is most wrong [and laugh], but there are people who look at the cars in last position but remember the cars. So I paint the cars with the strong colours, and there is no change for 35 years. And the world knows right now this is big. Ferrari is red, Aston Martin is green, Oregon is looking this crazy. You understand?”

Formula Scout nods again, and notes the team’s typography – which would now be considered retro – has been retained too.

“Si, si, si. No change, nothing. In 35 years in Europe, I understand when arriving in the trucks with my prototypes, the Lamborghinis, the livery is the same, the colours no change and the name no change, and people immediately ‘Ahh, they’re Oregon’. You look at the car on television, at the trucks, immediately ‘well, this is an Italian team. Who the [heck] is this?”

Despite Oregon’s short stint in single-seaters, a Formula 1 car remains on its logo. Why is that? “To make it more noticeable.”

Of course it is. But back to the racing bit, and Oregon’s move from junior series to touring cars.

“Start with Renault Megane Cup. Do the Italian championship four years. Good bar, this series. Autocross, win the championship. FMonza, win two championships. FR2.0 one year, no win, NOTHING. More difficult. Then we changed immediately to touring cars, win a championship. Eurocup with the Clio Cup, win two championships. Finish the Clio Cup, one year in European Touring Car Championship with Alfa Romeo. Win the championship. Return to Renault with Megane Trophy, win three championships. Stop this programme. Start with R.S.01. Win the championship.”

The Renault Sport Trophy succeeded the Megane Eurocup and used the bespoke R.S.01 sportscar. Oregon won several titles in its first season, but the series folded after its second season. So Oregon moved on to the LMP3 prototype class of the European Le Mans Series, avoiding other forms of sportscars with reservations about the use of technical performance equalisation in many series, but it was like a repeat of the short-lived FR Eurocup venture.

“The championship is very hard, the budget of the team is not ready for this championship,” Jerry admits.

And so the pressure to win again led to a move to the single-make Super Trofeo for 2020.

“In this moment I prefer Super Trofeo for a school with GT. I think the next years, the official cup of the Lamborghini [will be where customer interest lies].”

Oregon did return to single-seaters at one point, kind of, as it painted the car of Cram Motorsport driver Felipe Massa in the 2000 FR Eurocup for free. It was another publicity trick, as Massa won several races and Oregon got its livery on show. As a result, more money – and drivers – started going in the team’s direction. Massa had arrived in Europe as a very incomplete package, and his turnaround during the Eurocup campaign was something Oregon could take some slight credit for. To this day, the team’s founders have a strong belief in the importance of the junior categories.

“The school of the car of single-seaters is obligatory for the driver [to learn],” Jerry says.

Many of the drivers who, in the nicest of terms, have washed up at Oregon in the last decade have shown lots of promise in single-seaters and won titles. When they arrive at the team, what is its approach to working with them to revive their careers?

“All drivers are different. But Stefano Comini is crazy. Comini: the car is no problem. One tyre is flat, no problem, no bother.

‘But Stefano, the tyres’
‘No, no, the tyres are fi-’
‘No Stefano, the car has the tyre flat. Are you really able to pu-?’
‘Yes, yes.’.

Canevisio, Comini and Oregon's Pirate flag

Canevisio and Costa

Comini went through FMonza and FR2.0, making the podium in the Italian championship in 2009 before switching to the Megane Eurocup in 2010. Oregon unlocked a new form from the Swiss, who won three races as a rookie and the title as a sophomore, then claimed a Clio Cup title and two TCR International crowns to become a modern cult hero in touring cars.

“Winning with the tyre flat is crazy, but no professional would motor on. He was incredible on track.

“Albert Costa is the same. Albert is even more fast. Characteristically he’s no more hard. Mirko Bortolotti, professional, character is more hard, okay. Excellent…” Jerry recalls his delight at the challenge of developing Bortolotti as a driver.

• Feature: The underfunded Techeetah beater who had to reset his career

Both are drivers that have spoken to Formula Scout previously and credited Oregon for the impact it had on their careers, and mindset.

Oregon ran Costa to the 2012 Megane Eurocup title, and Bortolotti the year after. Costa was FR Eurocup champion in 2009, but after two years in FR3.5 had his single-seater career ended by fraud. Despite his Megane crown, he then had a racing break before joining Bortolotti in becoming one of Lamborghini’s most valuable assets in racing today.

“In that period of my life, I was lucky that I found people that really believed in my abilities, gave me a chance,” Bortolotti said of his arrival at Oregon. He had dominated MSV Formula 2 in 2011, but was without a racing future until meeting the team.

• Feature: Mirko Bortolotti: The Raging Bull whose eyes-open approach has led to racing glory

“Albert, fast as a bullet, but one problem, he says he doesn’t know. [And I say] ‘no just a moment, no problem, you push’.

“All drivers have a little difference. There is the champion. But in this moment and having a bigger dip, is Leonardo Pulcini. Leonardo is the same. He is more and more fast. Through the school of the formula he [should have] arrived in F2, but for the moment to have the money to arrive in F1 is very, very difficult.”

Oregon Team alumni

Pulcini, the 2016 Euroformula champion, moved from FIA Formula 3 into Oregon’s Super Trofeo line-up for 2021 and the 23-year-old won the title as a rookie.

While Jerry isn’t one to have his decisions led by the customer, he knows he can only race in series where his team can operate without a financial loss so he can pay his staff. And winning a lot of races by picking the best drivers helps do that.

“For me and Giorgio, this is not a real [day] job. I import and export goods, and Giorgo works in the banks. For me, Oregon Team is the heart.”

Jerry clutches his shirt tight where his heart is, and no doubt would have clutched this writer’s were we not socially distanced.

“Is the heart. I understand it’s not possible to have a team with only with money of the drivers. When I look to buy the money for the team, not only for the drivers. And this is the situation for winning the race, but more important the championship. Because, say, the team had more money, then arrive the sponsors of the team, is normal for me [to present to them] it’s more better to have a faster driver.”

The argument is that Oregon is more financially secure with a top driver, or one it can turn into a title-winning talent, and it makes sense given you’d expect to pay less in penalties and repair costs, and be spending engineering hours more efficiently.

“With the driver more fast, this is really, really win. In these days, this is more and more important. And the team’s time [in a series therefore] doesn’t depend on the driver. Pick a category, the cars, and the championship, is the team‘s job.

“Drivers then arrive, and he’s not [my] driver if ‘I want’. You want the team [to do something]? No. Okay. The team is the line, and this is the category. You want tomorrow [a different series], it’s not possible. You change, I rest in this point. this is the politics of the team, and the first point. The second, [for a new] championship we look at the money, at the budget.”

Oregon and Bortolotti

Jerry’s firm strategy is to make decisions and preparations long in advance of driver interest. It means once Oregon is in a series, its focus can be more on making its car faster. And having raced in Renault series for over two decades, it has a strong relationship with that brand that no doubt helps. In fact, Jerry is keen to reinforce that even though there is a crazy image of his team – and a pirate flag flying from the top of the truck – there is fierce paddock respect. He summarises it with this line.

“The [Renault] president calls me? No. I call him. He is younger, respects me.”

At this point the huge tray of tomatoes have now been prepared, and Jerry makes the call for lunch in Italian to his team, several of whom emerge from the truck. This writer gestures to it and thinks out loud “does the team sleep in there?”. Well…

“This is the spirit of the racer of the team. This is the old spirit. In this race meeting, it’s the Clio Cup [today], but Pulcini and I sleep in the truck because Leonardo is in the night sleeping with the mechanics, the engineers [he will work with], I sleep in the truck. Not the team and the mechanics sleep in the truck, and I in the hotel, no, no, no, no. All the team sleep in the truck. And in the night, sleep, smile, solve the problem. In the truck, resolution of the problem.”

Given the escalating costs of motorsport – and living – today, Oregon seems to have found a more affordable way of going racing while maintaining team spirit. During the COVID-19 pandemic they travelled in their own bubble too.

“You speak with the mechanic. A few jobs done [overnight], it’s crazy. You have the chance [to voice an issue], and other mechanics with the smile ‘yeah, there is [the fix]’ and finish the problem in the truck before they sleep. [Comfy in] bed: problem finished. Then exit truck with a smile.”

So if the day ends with an issue with the car that needs fixing, the team wakes up the next day with it already fixed after collaboratively working on a solution overnight? “Si. This is the spirit.”

It’s very cool, and also very old school.

“Al certo. It is the old school. It is the heart! It is the heart! I understand very wise, because the money is more important. But to win the race, especially – win the race, the whole team wins the race. The championship is more different [to win]. To win the championship, the team [needs to] win in the race with more difficulties. And the driver understand very well in this moment ‘okay, not possible to win, now continue, ba ba boom, ba ba boom with the team’. No problem, then no jobs for mechanics. Tomorrow the car is not perfect, but tomorrow I [maximise the score]. In this moment, you have this learning, you have the possibility to win the championship.”

Now that’s kind of cleared up, onto the tomatoes. Does Jerry bring a lot of fresh food for his team?

“All weekend. On the Saturday the team has the BBQ outside the truck. All races. To win, because the spirit is more different.”

That team spirit will be on sight in the Euroformula paddock this year, starting from this weekend’s season-opening event at Estoril season shared with Int. GT Open. Piloting one of Oregon’s cars will be Pulcini, now a Lamborghini GT3 Junior, who joined Formula Scout for the next surreal segment of the interview sitting socially distanced on hammocks in the team truck.

Pulcini calls it an “unlucky opportunity” that he lacked the budget for F2 after three years and three wins in GP3/FIA F3, and that in the latter “you just win with Prema” and in F2 “with two or three top teams”. To sign for €1.5-2 million with a lower team “is just to throw the money away”.

“In 2018 I did a very, very good GP3 season with Campos Racing. Ended P4 in the championship,” Pulcini recalls.

“I was fighting with ART Grand Prix and Trident. After that I wanted to go to F2, but I didn’t have the money enough for a seat so Hitech GP offered me to be professional driver for the team. So I raced in FIA F3 in 2019.

Pulcini and his Oregon bed

“But things didn’t go how we planned. We had to win the title, but unluckily I didn’t, so I moved to GTs. And with Lamborghini, they’ve already give me such good opportunities, and also with Jerry and Giorgio, the two bosses of Oregon.

“It’s like a family. You are here, you are seeing that I’m sleeping with the team. You don’t see very often this kind of situation, but it’s not because of something [wrong], it’s because it’s like a family. And I’m becoming a part of their family, so I’m very happy to be here. I’m not racing this weekend, but I’m coaching and I’m helping the mechanics, engineers and everyone to support the team. Immersing myself.”

Pulcini’s Super Trofeo form put him on course fairly early on for a bigger Lamborghini seat for 2022, and last summer he came close multiple times to single-seater returns in FIA F3 and beyond, having made a F3 cameo for Carlin at Silverstone in 2020.

“When I was racing single-seaters no one was coming, but at the moment I’m receiving so many offers [from those teams]. This weekend I had [offers] to race in Euroformula with two teams. But I refused. Also Formula Regional, a lot of stuff. Like from the heart, it’s very painful, but it’s better to continue my journey in GT and to be a professional driver.”

Aside from sleeping in the truck and enjoying his cooking, what is it like to work with Canevisio, and why has Oregon been so successful in revitalising the careers of single-seater talents? How has he taken his passion and put it in everybody else?

“I think he’s the best person I ever met in the paddock, really,” replies Pulcini.

“He’s like an angel for me. I didn’t have money at the beginning of the year and I was almost finished my career, and Jerry suddenly called me on the phone.

‘What you do this year?’
‘I don’t know’
‘Okay, you don’t stay at home, you come to race with me. Now you are my driver.’

“He’s a businessman, he’s a very good businessman, but it’s a team with very good potential of money because they are businessmen as bosses, but they are such amazing persons, and have such amazing people that are around here. All of their passion, basically put together also with the mechanics, and they are investing so much in here and it’s really one of the best – maybe the best team I’ve ever worked with, because it’s becoming like a family, you know? So I’m very happy to be here.”

Linking back to earlier comments, it seems Jerry knew Pulcini (and co-driver Kevin Gilardoni) would go on to win in Super Trofeo when he hired him, and therefore bring in more money for the team by doing so, making Pulcini an investment that paid for itself. An astute business move, and one that earned Pulcini money too as a professional driver from the off.

“Yeah. And Jerry is also the manager of drivers,” Pulcini reveals. “I’m really in good health. I’ve never had a manager before, because I didn’t want it. For me the manager is the person that you don’t have to pay him. They have to come to you to bring money to you [to race with], and give you a perspective for your future and maybe you can win some money in the future [rather than ones] who speak about taking some percentage of your income. It’s not that I want manager, I pay a manager and [Jerry becomes] my manager. No, Jerry’s another sort of manager. He’s like a second father for me now.”

With Pulcini and other young drivers, Jerry has looked out for their futures while also running them in his teams, and it is no surprise several have ended up becoming factory drivers in sportscars.

“He has a really good relationship with Lamborghini, so there are very good chances to work together in the future with Lamborghini, also [for any more young drivers who come in].”

So many of Oregon’s single-seater refugees, most of whom are now hot property with a roof over their head, have spoken so glowingly of the team that it only made sense to find out what the fuss was about. And it certainly wasn’t what we expected.

And when we left the truck to say thank you to Jerry for his time, he was busy washing the plates from the lunch his team had just enjoyed.

More single-seater to sportscar journeys
Podcast: How Aston Martin’s F1 tester Nick Yelloly forged his career
Catching up with motorsport’s only European and World Cup winner
The story behind one of junior single-seaters’ greatest comebacks
The F2 champion who could have ended up in Bottas’s Mercedes seat
The Yugoslavian who’s left his mark on motorsport history
Davide Rigon: The story of Ferrari’s football-famous test driver

The post The gang of self-titled pirates saving single-seater hopefuls’ careers appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: Macau GP Organising Committee

This weekend marks a big change for grand prix racing, as a new sprint race is run to decide who takes British GP pole. Sprint qualifying will be 100km, a distance most drivers last raced over in their junior careers

The second-shortest world championship Formula 1 race is set to take place this Saturday, with a 17-lap bout around Silverstone acting as the focal point of a format shake-up the owners of F1 have been angling over for some time.

It will controversially declare its winner the poleman for the British Grand Prix, which is the first time a series at a national level or higher has used something other than session laptimes (from practice or qualifying) or championship points (often when weather has led to session cancellations) to establish who officially gets pole other than IndyCar’s Iowa heat races in 2012*

Knockout events such as the Formula Ford Festival do use the winner of preceding races to set grids, but those heat races have their own qualifying sessions where the statistical record of taking pole is awarded.

That factor alone isn’t just what’s making this a step in the dark, as F1 has never scheduled races to be this short. Previous occasions where grands prix have ended up just north of 100 kilometres, or just over half that in the case of the flooded 1991 Australian Grand Prix, have been due to red flags. Drivers and teams prepare their cars for 200km or more.

The British F1 championship never ran races this short in the 1970s, and ignoring Bologna’s F1 Indoor Trophy events then the last race to use F1 regulations and be scheduled to be shorter than 100km were the 1967 Spring Cup heats at Oulton Park.

So when was the last time each of this year’s F1 field were sprinting for success in a single-seater?

Nikita Mazepin, Mick Schumacher & Yuki Tsunoda F2 2020 Sochi sprint race
Distance: 29.041km

A huge accident involving Jack Aitken and Luca Ghiotto cut this race short just as the Formula 2 title battle was getting tense, and half-points being awarded cost Yuki Tsunoda the title runner-up spot (if his finishing position went unchanged had this race run for the full duration).

Aitken and Ghiotto collided as they ran side-by-side through the very long Turn 3 left-hander as they fought over fourth.

Both went into the outside barriers at high speed, after Ghiotto’s car had already been sent airborne, and were able to retrieve themselves. Ghiotto did just in time before his car set on fire. The damage to the barriers neccessitated a red flag stoppage, and the length of those repairs meant the race wasn’t restarted and the results taken from the end of lap five.

Reversed grid poleman Guanyu Zhou was therefore named winner, ahead of Nikita Mazepin, Mick Schumacher and then the would-be retirees Aitken and Ghiotto. This proved costly in points terms for Schumacher’s main rivals Yuki Tsunoda and Callum Ilott, who were classified sixth and seventh.

Nicholas Latifi F2 2019 Sochi sprint race
Distance: 87.521km

Ghiotto withstood pressure from new F2 champion Nyck de Vries to seize victory in another truncated Sochi sprint race the year before, following a heavy lap one accident involving Aitken and Mazepin that led to Mazepin going wide and flying back onto the track and into Nobuharu Matsushita. Both ended up hurtling into the barriers, and the race was red flagged.

With de Vries having wrapped up the title in the previous race, his main rival Nicholas Latifi had nothing to lose. However the Canadian finished fourth, behind de Vries after starting ahead of him, and only got his finishing position after DAMS team-mate Sergio Sette Camara was penalised five seconds for rejoining the track unsafely.

De Vries finished second in the restarted 15-lap race, and Ilott was third.

Lando Norris & George Russell F2 2018 Monaco sprint race
Distance: 100.11km

The eventual 2018 F2 title contenders individually all had their worst weekends in Monaco, with Lando Norris doing the best job in making the sprint race podium but also being the only of the year’s top four to actually score on Monaco’s streets.

Ferrari junior Antonio Fuoco started from reversed grid pole, having finished the feature race in eighth place despite a drive-through penalty for putting Ghiotto in the barrier at the start.

Norris, who also picked up a feature race penalty for contact, started third and took a place immediately from a slower-starting Aitken, who then lacked power up the hill and had to retire with a technical issue.

An early virtual safety car to clear cars stranded on the grid was followed by a full safety car when Sean Gelael crashed heavily at the Swimming Pool on lap four of 30.

After initially building a one-second lead at the restart, Fuoco’s advantage was cut by Norris to just 0.3 seconds at one stage, before a particularly slow lap from the McLaren junior increased the gap to 1.7s.

Following a brief VSC when George Russell crashed on lap 20, Fuoco’s lead went above three seconds, where it remained until the safety car returned on lap 27 when Alex Albon and Roy Nissany collided exiting the tunnel.

With little warning, the race was restarted with two laps to go with Norris right up behind Fuoco, but the Italian enjoyed a good gap once he put his foot down out of the Swimming Pool section. The race was immediately neutralised once again though as Nirei Fukuzumi and Santino Ferrucci skated deep into La Rascasse on the restart.

That secured Fuoco victory and Norris second, but post-race both were found to have breached the VSC regulations and had the time they had illegally gained added to their race time. That had no effect on Fuoco, but dropped Norris to third behind Louis Deletraz.

Pierre Gasly FE 2017 New York E-Prix 2
Distance: 95.697km

Photo: Formula E

Photo: Formula E

The absence of Sebastien Buemi due to World Endurance Championship commitments meant Pierre Gasly was called up to run in Formula E’s two New York E-Prix races in 2017 during his title-challenging sole season in Super Formula.

It wasn’t a great start as he clouted his car against the circuit limits during qualifying for Saturday’s E-Prix, and it meant he started from 19th place. He maqde up for it later in the day by charging up the order and scoring six points with a seventh place finish.

It was a turnaround of form for the next day too, as he topped the entirety of group qualifying, but a major wide moment in the super pole session limited him to fourth place on the grid when pole was definitely on the cards. With laptimes of just over a minute, it meant the whole 49-lap race of Sunday could be completed in under an hour.

He dropped back at first, but was rapidly closing in on the battle for second place at the end. In fact he approached the battle too quick, slamming into the barriers at the final corner as looked at making a move on the two Mahindra cars ahead of him before they met the chequered flag.

Once Buemi was back in the series, Gasly’s time in FE was quickly forgotten. However he is the first FE driver to then go on to win a F1 grand prix.

Charles Leclerc F2 2017 Monaco sprint race
Distance: 100.11km

The first races on home soil for Charles Leclerc went, quite frankly, dreadfully. The F2 rookie took pole, and was controlling the feature race until a safety car interruption shortly after his pitstop.

The issue was the safety car picked up long-time leader Leclerc rather than yet-to-pit Oliver Rowland, who was then able to streak past Leclerc and make his own pitstop without a loss.

It only got worse for Leclerc, as vibrations on the front-left wheel led to a second trip to the pits. He rejoined the action, but then retired and that left him down in 17th on the grid for the sprint race.

While fellow rookie de Vries led home his veteran Rapax team-mate Johnny Cecotto Jr for an impressive first win, Leclerc toiled again as contact with Norman Nato at Rascasse put Nato into retirement and earned him a 10s penalty. His car wasn’t responding well after the clash though, and he soon retired too in the pits.

There was more turmoil in the coming weeks for Leclerc, but he put in some of the performances of his life thereafter to take a dominant title win.

Antonio Giovinazzi GP2 2016 Monaco sprint race
Distance: 100.11km

Photo: GP2 Media Service

A feature race error cost a potential maiden GP2 win for Antonio Giovinazzi on the streets of Monaco, but he instead left the principality with his first four races ending in 11th, retirement, 11th and 18th. A few weeks later he made up for it with a memorable double win in Baku.

He originally finished seventh in the Monaco feature race, but a penalty for cutting the chicane dropped him to 11th, and therefore took him from second to 11th on the sprint race grid.

There was no impressive comeback from the Italian, as he dropped to last on the opening lap and at first only gained places from drivers ahead retiring.

He passed Latifi, but that only brought him up to 18th and he remained in that position for 20 laps.

Honda junior Nobuharu Matsushita was promoted to pole off the back of Giovinazzi’s penalty, and he made the most of it to dominate. Marvin Kirchhofer finished a distant second, and Raffaele Marciello rounded out the podium.

Esteban Ocon GP3 2015 Abu Dhabi sprint race
Distance: 77.641km

Esteban Ocon claimed the 2015 GP3 title in the season finale at Yas Marina Circuit, while Campos Racing protege Alex Palou claimed his maiden series win.

Palou led the field off the line from reversed grid pole and quickly pulled away from Fuoco to triumph by 4.2 seconds.

Ocon made a strong start to his race from fifth on the grid, despite making light contact with title rival Luca Ghiotto. He went past Ghiotto and Matt Parry to move into third, which was enough to be champion.

Ghiotto did pressure Ocon for position for several laps but he couldn’t find a way through, meaning his five wins wasn’t enough against Ocon’s podium consistency for the ultimate prize.

Future Zakspeed star Jimmy Eriksson finished fifth, and Emil Bernstorff was sixth.

Max Verstappen F3 2014 Macau Grand Prix
Distance: 91.800km

Photo: MGPC

Photo: MGPC

The biggest race of Max Verstappen’s sole year in junior single-seaters was his win in front of his home fans in the Masters of F3 event at Zandvoort. That came in at 107.675km, but the shorter Macau Grand Prix carried more prestige.

Verstappen qualified third around the Guia Circuit, and moved up to second early on in the qualification race. However his inexperience got the better of him as he wrecked his rear suspension with contact and had to go to the pits to retire.

That left him in 24th place on the grid for the grand prix itself, denying any chance to use his pace to win. But it didn’t stop him from trying.

Five places were gained on lap one as a multi-car quagmire appeared following a collision between Vertstappen’s FIA European Formula 3 rivals Tom Blomqvist and Ocon further up the field. The resultant red flag delayed the action by some time, and wheen green flag racing ensued it became an early Verstappen masterclass.

He picked off on average one car per lap to rise all the way up to seventh place, taking fastest lap by almost a quarter of a second on the way. In addtion, he was the highest placed Volkswagen-powered driver in a race dominated by Mercedes’ unit.

Carlos Sainz Jnr FR3.5 2014 Hungaroring race 1
Distance: 96.382km

Roberto Merhi claimed his third Formula Renault 3.5 win in four races in a wet Hungary, finishing almost 30s clear of the field.

The Spaniard made his way from seventh on the grid to second at the start, then put several laps of pressure on poleman Oliver Rowland, who eventually cracked when he ran deep at turn one.

Merhi then ran away at an astonishing pace, while countryman and points leader Carlos Sainz Jr had a strong beginning to the race too to overcome a bad qualifying session. From 14th on the grid he made it to fourth, but further progress was halted by fellow Red Bull junior Gasly who defended hard.

As the track dried, Gasly then hunted down Rowland for second successfully as Sainz settled for fourth and a cut to his championship lead. It was a performance that, while impressive, didn’t help his ambitions of a 2015 F1 seat.

Series debutant Ocon held off the attention of Jazeman Jaafar to take ninth.

Valtteri Bottas FIA F3 Int. Trophy 2011 Macau Grand Prix
Distance: 91.800km

Photo: MGPC

Photo: MGPC

Valtteri Bottas’s main focus in 2011 was GP3, which he won the title in, and he also got his first F1 test with Williams. At the end of the year the focus was on a F3 return at the Macau GP with Double R Racing, and it started off encouragingly as the Finn went fourth fastest in qualifying.

He then kept it clean to retain that position in the qualification race, with some drivers able to get past but making mistakes that undid any advantage they briefly had over Bottas.

The main race was a different matter though, with far more risks being taken given what was on the line, and in the last of his three-wide moments going into Lisboa with Dani Juncadella and Felipe Nasr he braked later than his opponents – with rear brakes he was already struggling with – which left him with too much speed as he turned and he clattered the barriers. His race was over.

Daniel Ricciardo FR3.5 2011 Monaco
Distance: 100.200km

FR3.5 only held one race in its Monaco rounds, and that freed up Daniel Ricciardo to spend Thursday driving for Toro Rosso (now AlphaTauri) in F1 free practice.

When he hopped back into his usual car he was fastest in practice and qualifying, and that set up a lights-to-flag win. Brendon Hartley and Robert Wickens applied pressure through the first handful of laps, but Hartley started being more cautious and Wickens was saving his challenges for the end.

Two safety car interruptions kept Wickens on the tail of the leader, but strong corner exits for the leader meant there was nowhere around the circuit where Wickens could make a move. The result was Ricciardo’s second Monaco win, his fifth FR3.5 win and another point to take to Dr Helmut Marko to convince him he was already F1-worthy.

Sergio Perez GP2 2010 Monaco sprint race
Distance: 100.200km

Having brilliantly won the feature race the day before – his first win in the main GP2 series – Sergio Perez was therefore tasked with doing what he could from eighth on the grid in the sprint race. In one of the more chaotic Monaco races, Addax driver Perez kept his head cool to salvage a point.

Incidents for Scuderia Coloni’s Alberto Valerio and Racing Engineering’s Dani Clos, as well as a drive-through for Rapax’s Pastor Maldonado for jumping the start, allowed Perez to slide into the top six (and thus the points) despite being passed by Trident’s Cecotto.

At the end of the race, Perez was pressuring Rapax’s Luiz Razia while also holding off Arden’s Charles Pic. Up front, DAMS’ Jerome d’Ambrosio beat Addax’s Giedo van der Garde by a narrow margin, while ART Grand Prix’s Jules Bianchi made bold moves to take third on a track he would rise to stardom on four years later.

It was a rather incident-heavy race, with five drivers including Maldonado picking up penalties and seven of the 24 drivers not seeing the chequered flag.

Sebastian Vettel FR3.5 2007 Monaco
Distance: 83.500km

Photo: Renault Sport

Future two-time Monaco Grand Prix winner Sebastian Vettel would have had a stronger chance to win on the streets in FR3.5 not long before his F1 call-up with BMW Sauber if not for a simple luck of the draw.

The qualifying groups that year were decided with a draw, and Carlin driver Vettel was placed in what was the group that appeared to have the slower track conditions.

Tech 1 Racing’s Alvaro Parente was the lucky man on the day and put it together to stick it on pole despite hitting the wall, and future FE racer Salvador Duran thought he was on pole but set his fastest lap while yellow flags were being waved.

Parente nailed the start and had to withstand pressure throughout the 25-lap race from Vettel, who was never more than 1.5s behind. Vettel had a moment on lap 15, cutting the Swimming Pool chicane, but kept the pressure on until the end.

Duran barged his way from fifth to take third after passing Milos Pavlovic at the start and inheriting the final podium spot after Clivio Piccione spun late on. Future F1 driver van der Garde rounded out the top five.

Lewis Hamilton GP2 2006 Hungaroring sprint race
Distance: 100.756km

Photo: GP2 Media Service

The Hungaroring sprint race was held in abysmal conditions shortly before F1’s first wet race at the circuit. Hamilton was in the midst of the toughest round of his GP2 season, while title rival Nelson Piquet Jr aimed to be first to complete a perfect weekend.

Giorgio Pantano spun off on the sighting lap for GP2 drivers, and the race began under the safety car. The cars were released on lap three, with Hamilton starting from 10th following a recovery from crashing in practice, spinning in qualifying (which put him last) and then using scintillating pace to rise to 10th despite a drive-through in the feature race.

Jose Maria Lopez spun off early in the sprint race after starting from pole, before Andre Negrao had a huge shunt that allowed Piquet and Hamilton to make up ground. Piquet also made crucial moves on E.J. Viso and Hamilton’s ART Grand Prix team-mate Alexandre Premat for second.

That became first when Racing Engineering’s Adam Carroll, who was leading, spun into the barriers. Piquet enjoyed a five-second lead over Premat, who did not make it easy for his team-mate to get by.

Piquet went on to complete the first GP2 perfect weekend – pole, both wins and both fastest laps – while Hamilton salvaged a second place from 10th on the grid and Premat completed the podium.

While the Hungaroring sprint race marginally exceeds the length of F1’s first sprint race, Hamilton did end the previous year with victory, pole and fastest lap in the 82.332km F3 Euro Series finale at Hockenheim.

Kimi Raikkonen FR Eurocup 2000 Spa-Francorchamps
Distance: 76.648km

Photo: Renault Sport

Kimi Raikkonen is synonymous with Spa-Francorchamps, so it’s only apt that he triumphed in a Formula Renault Eurocup outing in the Ardennes having already clinched the United Kingdom crown a month earlier.

Charles Zwolsman was on pole, but Manor Motorsport’s Raikkonen got by on the run down to Eau Rouge and simply sprinted off into the distance after that, opening up a lead of four seconds to a charging Matteo Grassotto, who started fifth.

Grassotto had to battle with Raikkonen’s future Ferrari team-mate Felipe Massa to take third place before working his way past Zwolsman for second.

Such was Raikkonen’s pace in the race, he told Autosport at the time that “the first day was tough” when qualifying was held, but that “in the race, it was okay again, and I was able to back off to conserve my pace”. Another future F1 driver – one-off star Markus Winkelhock – finished sixth and Massa came home in eighth.

Fernando Alonso FOpen by Nissan 1999 Valencia Ricardo Tormo race 2
Distance: 100.125km

While Fernando Alonso clinched the Formula Open by Nissan title in the finale at Valencia in his most recent sprint race, there was controversy surrounding it.

The Campos Racing rookie worked his way past title rival Manuel Giao on lap two of the race to take second place behind future IndyCar racer Tomas Scheckter, but Scuderia Famo’s Giao felt the move was done under yellow flags.

Alonso undercut Scheckter in the pits to take the win and the title in the finale. Giao protested the overtake but to no avail, and he later appealed the decision.

Behind Alonso was series debutant (and race one winner) Scheckter, with Angel Burgueno rounding out the podium ahead of Giao.

*This article originally ommitted mention of IndyCar’s 2012 Iowa races, where qualifying and a knockout format combined for a final heat where the winner was awarded pole for the main race. The race had its own points format to reward its finishers rather than awarding a point for pole.

The post The last time each current F1 driver did ‘sprint qualifying’-distance races appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photos: Clement Luck / DPPI

Losing a place on an F1 junior programme can mean the end of the dream for many, especially those short on funding, but Victor Martins has been welcomed back to the new-look Alpine Academy after just a year away

It doesn’t have the reputation of the Red Bull Junior Team, but Renault’s young driver programme – now operating under the Alpine brand together with its Formula 1 team – has still made some fairly ruthless decisions over recent years.

Any expenditure has to be justified, and with places on the scheme having been on offer to the winners of certain championships, tough targets have had to be set. Sacha Fenestraz was one notable victim of that: signed after beating Robert Shwartzman to the Formula Renault Eurocup title but dropped again after a single difficult season in Formula 3 in 2018. He’s quickly reinvented himself in Japan, but any F1 aspirations had to be effectively parked.

One year later, another top prospect – who like Fenestraz happens to also be French – found himself on the outside. Victor Martins could have considered himself particularly hard done by, having effectively lost his place on the academy to Oscar Piastri after finishing just 7.5 points shy in their 2019 Eurocup title duel. Now though, having clinched the Eurocup crown in his third season in the series, he’s back in the Enstone fold and preparing to follow Piastri’s move into the FIA F3 Championship.

Academy director Mia Sharizman is somewhat coy on the circumstances of Martins’ absence from the programme in 2020, but is happy to see him back.

“I wouldn’t say we went our separate ways,” the Malaysian says.

“He was still in Eurocup and we had a plan for him obviously after two years in Eurocup to move up into Formula 3. Having said that, he and his management decided to do another year [in Eurocup] and we respect that.

“But when we brought him up from French Formula 4 we always believed that he is in the Formula Regional champion level of drivers. Victor is, I have to say at the moment, the best driver at that level.

“To have him back with us, it was never an automatic thing, but to find a way to progress into F3, I think it’s a positive for the academy and I’m sure for Victor it’s where he should be.”

It’s clear that Martins staying in Eurocup for another season was more the product of circumstance than design. He doesn’t have wealthy family backing, but he has had Sebastien Philippe – team boss of ART Grand Prix – looking after his career. And once he lost out to Piastri, and the ideal move to FIA F3 became even more difficult, he was instead tasked with leading ART’s return to the Eurocup.

Meanwhile, Piastri went on to win the FIA F3 crown at the first attempt in a plum Prema seat, and for 2021 joins Guanyu Zhou and Christian Lundgaard (who stepped up from F4 to FR2.0 with Martins three years ago) as Alpine juniors in Formula 2.

“I think to be honest it was tough to accept because I never knew that I was going to do a third year in Formula Renault,” Martins says. “That was obviously not the first plan. Actually as a driver you always want to step up, so it was a tough decision to take with my personal management.

“I think during the season in 2020 I just learned how important it was to focus only on myself and not on the others. Because I can be frustrated if I see Christian or Oscar in Formula 2 and me still in Formula Renault but I think the most important for me is to just focus on myself, keep growing my skills and just have a good development as a human being and as a driver also.

“I just also tried to tell to myself it’s an opportunity to go through situations that I didn’t go through in the past years, like to lead a championship and not to be P2 and chasing another driver.

“So that was a really great year for me and also to just create a good environment around me with a new team, a team which is doing its return after 15 years. Now I’m just so proud of what we achieved because I definitely can’t be more ready than I am today, so I just need to keep focused on myself and with the people I work with.”

The way Martins coped mentally with the blow of losing his academy status and having to stay in the Eurocup is particularly impressive. So is the progression he’s shown in the three years since he was first unveiled as a Renault junior as a 16-year-old: snapped up after finishing runner-up in French F4 off the back of a brief but successful karting career, culminating in the world junior title in only his third full season of competition.

“To go for a third year [in Eurocup] I knew I had to win the title and nothing else, because it was a great opportunity for me to keep growing as a driver,” he says.

“I took it maybe not positively at the beginning but after that I just moved on and said ‘how can I handle that situation with what I have and with the people I work with?’ and I just managed to build a really good environment around me. Maybe it was the toughest year I have been through, because there are all the critics around you, so I try to manage that as well as possible and I think I did pretty well, so I am really proud of 2020.”

While Sharizman says that Martins rejoining the academy was not ‘automatic’ if he won the title, he also says it was not dependent on winning the title either. And while expectation may have been that Martins would stay with ART to move up to FIA F3, it was the opportunity for Alpine to place both he and his Eurocup title rival Caio Collet at MP Motorsport that really made both a graduation to the series and the academy return possible.

“He lost to Oscar by 7.5 points and I think at that time we had to make a decision, and we wanted to move him up,” Sharizman adds.

“Having said that, sometimes the world goes around, and we got back together, and he knew before the start of the [2020] season what is required of him. Yes, you win the title, we come in. It’s not a given thing as well, we need to get you a competitive seat to challenge for honours.

“I think it all came together and we knew already when he was with Caio all the way back-and-forth for the five rounds in the middle of the year. At that time we knew we were going to take both of them, basically. It wasn’t about who was the winner and who was second.”

MP Motorsport placed sixth in the FIA F3 teams’ standings in 2020, with Richard Verschoor its best-placed driver in ninth. The previous year had ended with a shock Macau Grand Prix win and with a bolstered technical department, the team had been expected to build on that success.

Piastri was champion for Prema by three points ahead of ART’s Theo Pourchaire, and Collet – managed by Nicolas Todt – was unsurprisingly linked to both of those teams, testing with them as well as MP last October.

Sharizman frequently refers to the placing of his drivers with MP as a ‘project’ and there is an expectation upon the two Alpine juniors to work together to help drive Sander Dorsman’s team forward.

“It’s easy to have one with ART and suddenly going for the championship and you go to MP, and that’s the first thing that everybody’s going to say: why not go to Prema, why not go to ART?

“I think it’s testament to Victor and also Caio as well that they understood and they believe in the project that we put together with MP. It has been a long time coming, Sander can attest to it, but it is something we hope everybody will have the right package and we will see the end result at the end of the year.”

Joining MP is not uncharted territory for Martins, and he left a strong impression on the Dutch squad when he ran Piastri close two years ago.

“Obviously Victor drove for our team in Eurocup in 2019 so we know him really well,” says Dorsman.

“And since we heard a bit of a rumour that the aim was [for him] to move into FIA F3 we were fully on it; it was our objective to have him back with us and we are really happy that he is coming home I would say.

“I think his real strong point has always been in my opinion his qualifying. I think he is really a qualifying animal basically. The year he did Formula Renault with us, he destroyed the record in qualifying with the number of pole positions he had.”

In addition to 21 poles across three seasons, Martins also holds the Eurocup’s record for most wins (15) and points (846.5).

“So I think that’s a real strong point and I think he’s a real mature racer,” Dorsman continues.

“If I look at Victor when he arrived to us at the start of 2019 and if you see where he is now, I think he grew a lot mentally and he is a really professional guy, how he looks to each and every situation, so I think that combination makes him a really great and talented driver basically.”

In 2020, Prema fielded the two most exciting graduates from Regional F3 by pairing Piastri with his title-winning counterpart Frederik Vesti from Formula Regional European Championship. MP will arguably be in the same position this year by taking on Martins and Collet, with reigning FREC champion Gianluca Petecof having jumped to F2, and Dorsman hopes that will help the team take the challenge to Prema, reckoning the right combination of team and drivers can be “unbeatable”.

“For us as a team it’s a really good opportunity to have two really strong drivers. Especially with, for example, limited free practice time, it’s always good if you have two team-mates that can push each other and also generate some good data and that always pushes the team as a whole forward.

“I think it’s a fantastic opportunity for us as a team to make another step forward in FIA F3 and I expect we can do a bit the same like we did last year in F2, which is to make a good step forward and that is naturally our objective here.”

MP’s improvement in F2 last season – when unfancied rookie Felipe Drugovich won three times – was helped by the recruitment of two former Prema engineers in Paolo Angilella and Daniele Rossi. The new calendars for F2 and F3 this year – where the championships will no longer race on the same weekends – creates opportunities for teams that field cars in both championships to deploy staff across both programmes.

Dorsman expects this to be especially the case with engineers more so than mechanics (who he says are kept busy enough turning one set of cars around between races), and there are hints from both him and Sharizman that MP’s F2 engineers will now also work with Martins and Collet in F3.

“Everything is about timing. For everybody here [in the academy] it’s about going to F1 and it’s about timing. But sometimes in F3 is also about timing because this year is the first year that F2 and F3 are not on the same race weekend,” Sharizman says.

“Therefore it’s the first time that you could do things that you could never have done before. And that was what we looked at together with MP, and to be honest with you it’s something that would only work if Victor had a strong team-mate as well.

“So, I think in this case, if you look at the expected grid of the championship, the timing is right. We are silently confident. We looked at the timing was right for us to try something and I think the boys accepted it and can see what it is going forward. “And fair play to them, because we need them at the end of the day to sometimes be proud of it and own it, because if they are willing to accept it, this can see where we want to go with it and the results will come. I’m 100% sure of it.”

When two drivers battle closely all season for a title, it would be natural for there to be some animosity, and Martins and Collet are now once again rivals in terms of career prospects as part of the same junior team. But it’s clear that they do get along well.

“I think me and Victor, we have a really good relationship out of the track,” Collet says.

“Last year we had respect for both of us above everything. Of course the first one I want to beat is him, the first one you want to beat is your team-mate, but I think for us to work together and build the team up, we need to really build a relationship.

“I mean it’s hard in a way but we need to be kind of friends to work together to make the team grow. I think it’s quite clear.”

Sharizman adds: “We’ve never looked at it as a head-to-head. Yes, they were fighting head-to-head in Eurocup and they were in the Academy together in the year before, but coming into F3 the project that we’ve put together, together with MP, Caio and Victor, we needed two drivers of equal level to work together as a package together with MP, to bring up everybody whether it’s the drivers as well as the team, and that can only work if the two of them work together.

“Yes they are competing with each other, yes the tendency if they are at the front is that they will fight each other, and to me at the end of the day there will be two drivers in a F1 team where they will have to be team-mates anyway in the future.

“So to me it’s more that at this current moment it’s for them to work together, to develop the team, to develop themselves. If they push each other, they beat each other, they will be higher up the grid.”

Further reading
Why Alpine’s new academy is more ‘restructure’ than ‘rebrand’
A guide to modern-day Formula 3
2020 Formula Renault season review
Where Formula Renault is headed next, and how it got there
Q&A: Martins & Collet in the middle of their Eurocup title fight

The post What Victor Martins did to get a rare F1 academy recall appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: Clement Luck / DPPI

The Formula Renault Eurocup was as strong as ever this year, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, and other French-engined series also had a bit of a renaissance in Argentina, western Europe and Scandinavia

Off the back of a successful switch to Regional Formula 3 regulations in 2019, the Formula Renault Eurocup had much to look forward to in 2020. There was the return to the championship of junior single-seater powerhouse ART Grand Prix and Manor Competition, as well as the revamped Zandvoort circuit that had last hosted the series in 2000.

The year-defining pandemic then arrived, and Renault Sport was one of the very fastest to safeguard its calendar. It added Imola as it lost Silverstone, then after losing its Formula 1 support slot on the streets of Monaco it added another Imola round on the weekend F1 visited the circuit for the inaugural Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.

Rounds in Hungary and Abu Dhabi were also lost, but in came far cheaper alternatives at Magny-Cours and Hockenheim.

Manor’s return as the outfit behind the series’ Fernando Alonso-branded team didn’t happen on schedule either, with long-time partner MP Motorsport taking the running of those cars in-house from the start of the season and keeping the level of competition up, and when Arden’s Jackson Walls pulled out that handed Alex Quinn a seat that he was able to keep for the full season and make great use of.

The only loss of the season that didn’t have much of a silver lining was crack Toyota Racing Series team M2 Competition pulling out after the first two rounds and refocusing its efforts on 2021. But expect it to be near the front on its return.

Three of the top five drivers from 2019 returned, with title runner-up Victor Martins the firm title favourite despite switching from proven winner MP to ART GP – which was totally new to the Tatuus T-318 car but was quick in testing.

Photo: Clément Luck / DPPI

His main rival was expected to be R-ace GP’s Caio Collet, who was a winless fifth in 2019 but retained his Renault junior status as the rookie title winner while sophomore racer Martins won six races and lost his Renault links.

The season began at Monza with Quinn and MP’s Franco Colapinto stealing their thunder. Arden stand-in Quinn took pole for the season opener and led until Colapinto nabbed him after a safety car restart. Colapinto had become Quinn’s closest rival after a clash with Martins, which required the Frenchman to pit, and after taking the lead he drove well in defence for his first win. Quinn, who like Colapinto did a few rounds in 2019, finished second while Collet came third.

Martins was on pole for race two of the weekend, and like Quinn he was the race leader until the safety car bunched the field up. Collet fought his way through into the lead a few laps after the restart, bringing Colapinto with him, and with his first win he took the points lead.

The question of how Martins would respond to Collet’s win in the first bout was drowned out in round two at Imola, as car racing debutant David Vidales joined last-minute with JD Motorsport and made history by bagging pole for his debut and then taking two hugely impressive wins to rocket straight into third in the points. Martins meanwhile was sixth in the standings.

The title picture had changed by the end of the next round at the Nurburgring, where Martins dominated every session and even led a ART GP 1-2-3 in the second race there. Slow starts in both races hurt Collet, now five points off new leader Martins.

But unlike Martins’ average Imola showing, where most teams besides JD struggled with set-up, Collet’s response to Martins drawing ahead was to push him to the absolute limit next time out at Magny-Cours. In a joint interview during their title battle, both pointed to this weekend as being the closest they had been to each other in battle, and with a win apiece the gap at the front was brought down to two points. The only driver rivalling them there, and in the standings, was Vidales.

It was a similar story at Zandvoort, where the top two got a pole each and then opened up huge gaps to the rest of the field while fighting for victory. But with matching results, there was no change in the title fight at the halfway point.

Next up was Barcelona, Martins’ specialist circuit from his previous years in the Eurocup, and as expected nobody could match him over one lap let alone a whole race. Were it not for a safety car interruption in race two, he could have beaten Collet to victory by over 10 seconds in both races. Further down the order, MP’s debutant Kas Haverkort starred by finishing fifth.

In unique circumstances because of the pandemic, and the late addition of the F1-supporting Imola round, it meant the final four race weekends all ran one after the other. This was a gruelling physical and mental demand for the drivers, and the month-long trip started off on an odd note when Bhaitech driver Lorenzo Colombo had his nose injured during a mandatory COVID-19 test and had to miss the races at Spa-Francorchamps.

The Italian’s third season in the series had been a tricky one, with the move from MP to Bhaitech for 2020 moving him down the grid rather than up it. While initially frustrated at not being able to fight for the title, he seemed to find inner peace during his unusual absence and returned all guns blazing for the final three rounds at Imola, Hockenheim and Paul Ricard.

While he was gone, Martins extended his points lead again and Colapinto and Quinn came through to take wins in the rain.

Vidales was expected to throw another spanner in the works in the title battle on the second visit to Imola, but JD had lost its speed advantage and the Spanish teenager qualified eighth on his return. It was Colombo who took the first pole of the weekend, but a slightly messy race cost him a chance at victory and it was Collet who won. Vidales was hit out on the first lap.

It got even worse in race two, as Vidales turfed Collet into retirement on lap one while Martins took his record 15th series win and ended the weekend with a lead that had grown by 10 points. There was very little time for Collet to recover the gap.

During that weekend it was announced that the Eurocup would be discontinued after 2020, as predicted by Formula Scout, and that its Renault engines would instead supply cars in the rival Formula Regional European Championship as of 2021.

Collet went to the next round at Hockenheim and emphatically took pole, victory and fastest lap in race one to claim R-ace’s record 44th Eurocup win, but his Sunday began with a clutch change before qualifying and he ended up down the grid for race two – a race he failed to finish thanks to mechanical problems. Martins was a comfortable second in both races, as Colombo took Bhaitech’s first win on Sunday.

A 44-point gap existed between Martins and Collet ahead of the Paul Ricard season finale, and in the pre-event test Colombo and Martins set identical laptimes at the top while Collet was only 0.017s behind.

Martins broke the track record in free practice, where he was just 0.095s up on Collet, and the order went Colombo-Martins-Collet in both of the qualifying sessions.

Colombo was shadowed by Martins early in the season’s penultimate race, before the ART GP driver fell into the clutches of Collet – whose move for second on his rival was as pronounced as it was crucial. Martins lost another place to Colapinto, who now led Quinn and Vidales in the battle for third in the points, and with fourth place he secured the Eurocup title.

The 30th and final Eurocup season ended with another Colombo win, this time with Martins providing a challenge all race long, and resulting in Vidales losing fifth in the points to the Italian and losing the rookie title to Quinn.

Colombo’s late-season charge also brought him up to second place in the all-time list for points scored in the Eurocup, some 309.5 points behind Martins and 26 points ahead of Collet. Unfortunately nobody will ever get to rival those results in the future, although Renault has been linked to a formative concept of a Formula E feeder series…

Formula Scout’s Top 5 Eurocup drivers

Key Percentage of team’s points scored (TP), Average qualifying position (QA), Average points per race (AP)

5. David Vidales SPAIN JD Motorsport
6th in standings, 169 points (2 wins, 1 pole, 2 fastest laps, 6 podiums) – TP 65%, QA 7.8, AP 9.4

Pole and victory on his car racing debut, in an international F3 race no less, then making the podium in six of his first seven races were simply spellbinding statistics by Vidales. He was one of the series’ top drivers as soon as he landed, having originally been headed to FREC with US Racing for his long-awaited single-seater graduation, and it was only when the paddock was pushed to its working limits in the four rounds running in a row that JD and Vidales’ form dropped.

Without the crashes on his Imola return he probably would have been fourth in the points, and had he done the full season he may well have been third.

4. Alex Quinn BRITAIN Arden
4th in standings, 183 points (1 win, 1 pole, 1 fastest lap, 5 podiums) – TP 67%, QA 6.4, AP 9.2

The Briton earned a top five spot in Formula Scout’s equivalent 2019 list, despite only doing three rounds, and it’s clear to see why. Arden was not the fastest team on the grid but Quinn got the maximum out of the car he had despite being called up late at the start of the season. His close relationship with the team no doubt helped and he finished in the top five in two thirds of the races. While Vidales moves to Prema for FREC 2021, Quinn should be joining him on the grid with Arden.

3. Franco Colapinto ARGENTINA MP Motorsport
3rd in standings, 213.5 points (2 wins, 2 fastest laps, 9 podiums) – TP 75%, QA 5.6, AP 10.7

The Spanish Formula 4 champion made the top 10 once in his two-round 2019 cameo, but Colapinto went straight to the top on his 2020 return. MP’s form seemed to waver quite a bit – Renault junior team-mate Hadrien David tended to be further off the pace at the same races Colapinto was – but he was on the podium at seven of the 10 rounds. His racecraft was exciting, but not always on point, and his focus was sometimes more on his coaching/engineering commitments in Spanish F4.

2. Caio Collet BRAZIL R-ace GP
2nd in standings, 304 points (5 wins, 3 poles, 4 fastest laps, 12 podiums) – TP 87%, QA 3.2, AP 15.2

Collet repeated what Martins did in his second Eurocup season, so you wonder if Renault will repeat the same mistake twice and drop him from its ranks. Recent comments from the Renault Sport Academy suggest not, and with good reason too. There were so many occasions where Collet was equal to Martins, or just a tenth behind, and you can put that gap down to experience. The Brazilian also got unlucky on several occasions, and the points gap probably should have been half of what it was.

1. Victor Martins FRANCE ART Grand Prix
1st in standings, 348 points (7 wins, 10 poles, 8 fastest laps, 14 podiums) – TP 74%, QA 1.9, AP 17.4

Returning to the Eurocup for a third attempt at the title was a risk, but Martins literally had no other options for 2020 so he took what he could and turned it into the title-winning season he came very close to against Oscar Piastri in 2019. The move to ART GP paid off handsomely, not only because of the success it brought this year but because it strengthens his chances of landing a FIA F3 promotion with the team next year – potentially alongside Collet too.

Photo: Ultimate Cup Series

Ultimate Cup Series

Created last year and slotting seamlessly into the place where VdeV Single-Seater Challenge – which launched the careers of Alex Peroni and Nico Varrone – had once been, the Ultimate Cup Series Single-Seater Challenge took on the mantle of Europe’s main FR2.0 series after the Eurocup abandoned the classic formula to adopt its current Regional F3 form.

But the ambitions of the people behind UCS went beyond being the pick-up of the all the last two generations of FR2.0 cars dotted around the continent, and it too brought in the Tatuus T-318 as the car for its top class. And given all of those cars had to use official Renault Sport engines, it in effect meant it became a three-class Formula Renault series.

European Le Mans Series team Graff Racing, which won the 2002 Eurocup with Eric Salignon, joined in and it had three drivers on the grid for the Dijon season opener. Nine Regional F3 cars and nine FR2.0 machines lined up for the first round.

On pole for the first race was Graff’s 17-year-old prodigy Konstantin Lachenauer. He’d only started karting in Switzerland in 2018, but was already making his single-seater debut in UCS by the end of 2019 and had signed up for the full 2020 season.

His team-mates were Graff’s gentleman drivers from sportscars, Lamo Racing had Corsican karter Pierre-Albert Fusella partnered by another two gentleman drivers in the top class, Formula Motorsport fielded two club racers alongside 2010 VdeV champion and Porsche Supercup backmarker Philippe Haezebrouck – who for reasons unknown raced under the pseudonym Steve Brooks – and Christophe Hurni raced for his own Sports Promotion team.

Hurni, previously the head of Swiss motorsport, is perhaps best known for racing in GP3 in 2011 when aged 48.

Back to the action.

Lachenauer comfortably beat Hurni to victory in the season opener, and ended the weekend with victory and fastest lap from all three races. Under the guidance of ELMS LMP3 race-winner and 2015 VdeV champion David Droux he got even faster, and claimed another triple win at Magny-Cours. It was the same again on the return trip to the circuit, where he won race three by over 10s.

Rounds in Spain and Portugal, which were to run with higher points coefficients, were called off because of the pandemic and the season instead ended at Paul Ricard in December with another triple-header.

Formula Motorsport turned up with only one F3 car for the finale, but it was being driven by 2011 VdeV champion and new GT World Challenge Europe Silver Cup champion Simon Gachet, so Lachenauer finally had a challenge on his hands.

Lachenauer took pole by half a second over Gachet, and both were beaten off the line in race one by Lachenauer’s team-mate Adrien Chila after he massively jumped the start. Gachet and Lachenauer ended the opening lap in third and fifth, as Eric Trouillet led the chase of team-mate Chila. Gachet took the lead in a three-wide move at the Mistral chicane on lap three, then pulled away as Lachenauer took another two laps before he gained a spot and Chila was penalised.

After a side-by-side battle with Trouillet, Lachenauer finally made it up to second place on the penultimate lap but he ended up 16s down on Gachet. His weekend got harder as he had to start from the back in race two, only recovering to third place as Gachot claimed a 14s win, then stalling from third on the grid in the finale but finishing a not too distant second to Gachet to end a title-winning first year in cars.

Sports Promotion’s series sophomores David Kullmann and Loris Kyburz went into the final race fighting over the FR2.0 title. They were both beaten by TS Corse’s karter Gianluigi Palego in the finale, Kyburz finishing second and Kullmann becoming champion by four points in third place, having taken two wins in 12 races to Kyburz’s four.

Photos: Argentinian FR2.0

Argentinian FR2.0

The South American karting scene provided the top two in the 41st season of the Argentinian championship, although they were kept on their toes by the experienced Eduardo Moreno who was champion in the 1.6-litre class two years ago.

National lockdown meant racing didn’t get underway until late September, and it was Gabriel Werner Competition’s Lautaro Pineiro who claimed the first pole of the season at Buenos Aires.

The opening race took place on a damp track, and the safety car was required multiple times as drivers spun and clashed. Moreno emerged from the chaos to take a comfortable first win, ahead of Thomas Pozner and one of Argentina’s top junior karters Ayrton Chorne. There was more drama in race two, which was won by 2019 title runner-up Mateo Polakovich.

A month later the field headed to Autodromo Oscar Cabalen, and Moreno headed GW Competition’s Isidoro Vezzaro, who was karting in Europe two years ago, by just 0.089s in practice. He extended that advantage to a third of a second over Pineiro in qualifying, but in the early laps of the opening race it was Vezzaro who led Moreno.

Moreno then spun off, and when Pozner did the same the safety car was required. Vezzaro held off pressure from Croizet Racing’s Jorge Barrio to win. A wet and eventually muddy track made the second race of the weekend an even trickier contest, and Moreno redeemed himself by fending off Barrio to win.

The same track was used for round three a week later, and the top three were covered by just 0.051s in practice. Pineiro took pole again, with Barrio beating Vezzaro to second on the grid by 0.001s. All three were jumped by a driver from further down the field at the start of the race, but once they were cleared out the way it left the path open for Vezzaro to win.

He had to play second fiddle to Barrio in race two, but still extended his points lead ahead of the return to Buenos Aires where Spanish F4 part-timer Ignacio Montenegro joined the field.

In soaking conditions Barrio bettered Vezzaro for pole, with Pineiro third, Polakovich fourth and Moreno fifth.

The circuit dried in time for the first race, but the drama ramped up as Barrio and Moreno slumped down the order while Polakovich and Pozner raced into the lead ahead of Vezzaro. Pozner retired in the second half but that didn’t help much, as Moreno and Barrio only recovered to fourth and sixth while Vezzaro extended his points lead by coming second to Polakovich.

Barrio led from the front in the final race, but Vezzaro sat behind him and banked the points for second place.

The season finale was scheduled to take place last weekend at Autodromo Uruguay, a circuit in Argentina that has been deemed unsafe to race on by the series. Whether Vezzaro will be crowned champion or another round will be organised is set to be announced imminently.

Formula Nordic

The currently Swedish-based series, where Linus Lundqvist started his career, was relaunched by its teams last year after its promoter it went bankrupt. Formula Nordic’s 2019 grids were small, but it bounced back in style with its FR1.6 cars in 2020.

Swedish junior karting graduate Joel Granfors took a double title win, and has since tested with Van Amersfoort Racing in F4 machinery. He missed the first round at Falkenberg though, and it was Havard Hallerud who dominated the first two races of the season.

Fifteen-year-old Granfors, who had tested the series’ car twice pre-season, had originally planned to enter in 2021.

His arrival at Karlskoga left an immediate impact, with pole (after Hallerud’s car failed to clear parc ferme) and two wins. The first of those wins was almost by 10s, while in race two a poor start meant he had to fight his way past Hallerud for a 8s victory. From sixth on the reversed grid in race three he was set for at least second place until a failed overtake for the lead dropped him to fourth.

Photos: Formula Nordic

At Drivecenter Arena he did the triple, after Hallerud topped qualifying again but had car issues, but a combination of factors primarily out of his control left him down the grid at Anderstorp and with little chance of dominating. He was the top car on slick tyres in race two, when rain meant the grooved compound was required, and also won the reversed grid race.

Granfors’ first proper pole came at Mantorp Park, and he converted it into another win. He then spun a good result in race two, and Hallerud – whose season was being plagued by mechanical issues – closed the points gap to leader Granfors.

The two-race title showdown took place in the wet at Ring Knutstorp, and Hallerud beat Granfors to pole – and the five points that go with it – by 0.010s. Granfors got the title wrapped up in race one though, overtaking Hallerud on the opening lap to record an eighth win of the season and become overall and Junior champion.

After finishing fourth in the season finale, Granfors said his plan was still to race in FNordic in 2021, although being champion makes that a very unlikely prospect. A prize Danish F4 test, as well as his time with VAR, suggests F4 is the next step.

The rest

Austro-Hungarian junior karting graduate Oliver Michl won the poorly contested Austrian FRenault Cup with Gender Racing Team in his rookie year of cars. The grid peaked at three cars for the Monza season finale.

The FRenault Asiacup fared even worse, despite big plans for 2020. It planned to follow its European counterpart in bringing in F3 cars, while also allowing the old FR2.0 cars to continue to race so not to isolate its existing teams. The plan was when Asian F3 wasn’t running, the cars in that series would swap Alfa Romeo power for Renault and race in the Asiacup.

Entries were scarce, despite a support slot at the Vietnamese Grand Prix. The pandemic’s arrival meant that round got called off, as did a visit to Buriram in Thailand. A postponed three-round calendar based entirely at Zhuhai was then presented, and one-by-one those were called off until we were left with no season at all.

Further reading
Where Formula Renault is headed next, and how it got there
Ten of the best Formula Renault Eurocup seasons
In Conversation: Victor Martins & Caio Collet
Scout Report: Kas Haverkort
Ten of the best junior single-seater racing debuts
Why the FIA had to undo its confusing Formula Renault decision (April 2020)

The post 2020 Formula Renault season review appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: M2 Competition

Isack Hadjar set a last-second lap to top the opening day of the Formula Renault Eurocup rookie test, which was effectively Formula Regional European Championship’s first Renault-powered group test day.

The confusing naming of the test, organised by a series that now no longer exists for only its teams, was also muddied by the fact that several experienced racers from the Eurocup took part.

It was Euroformula racer Zane Maloney who set the early morning pace for Arden, lapping in the 2m19s. M2 Competition’s French Formula 4 graduate Hadjar brought that benchmark down by two seconds before R-ace GP’s Renault Formula 1 junior Hadrien David chopped another second off.

Maloney and team-mate Alex Quinn spent the final half-hour of the morning pushing each other at the top, and on the hour Quinn brought the fastest lap down to a 2m13.292s.

Quinn kicked off the afternoon by immediately going faster, setting a 2m11.797s. He made further improvements to stay in first place until ART Grand Prix’s Gregoire Saucy brough the laptimes into the 2m10s.

The track was greasy, and everyone returned to the pits not long after. MP Motorsport’s Mercedes junior Paul Aron used this opportunity go out on his own, and pumped in a 2m10.148s lap.

Quinn waited before reclaiming top spot, using his first lap back on track to set a 2m09.416s. Ferrari-backed team-mate Dino Beganovic was then closest and there was another round of pitstops before Aron replied an hour later with a 2m08.544s.

With the track constantly getting quicker, those who stayed out were rewarded. MP’s Kas Haverkort and Hadjar were in 13th and 14th but jumped to first and second by being first into the 2m07s. Quinn saw their pace, left pitlane and through a succession of laps brought the benchmark down to 2m04.976s.

Maloney remained in the pits for longer, then went tit-for-tat with Quinn again before both pitted. In their absence, Italian Formula 4 champion Gabriele Mini and ART GP team-mate Saucy went quickest with a 2m03.887.

Haverkort went half a second up on that in the final minutes, and with a minute to go Hadjar went 0.008s up.

Maloney ended in third, while Quinn was shuffled to seventh.

Test results

The post Hadjar heads FREC’s first group test with Renault power at Paul Ricard appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: Renault Sport Series

Italian Formula 4 champion and title runner-up Gabriele Mini and Francesco Pizzi will join Gregoire Saucy at ART Grand Prix in this week’s Paul Ricard test for Formula Renault Eurocup teams.

The two-day test on December 8/9 was set up to be the Eurocup’s post-season rookie test, but the end of that championship means the test is now without a series to its name and the cars are set to run on the Pirelli tyres used in the similar Formula Regional European Championship.

As of next year, FREC will switch from its current Alfa Romeo engine supply to use the Renault units that were in the identical Tatuus T-318 cars that appeared in the Eurocup. It will also adopt some of the Eurocup’s regulations.

All eight of the Eurocup’s 2020 teams will be in action at Paul Ricard, although ART GP is the only team so far – and the only expected to – to announce its drivers.

FREC teams were invited to the test, but moving their cars from Vallelunga in Italy, where last weekend’s title decider was held, over to France and then rebuilding the cars around Renault engines they had yet to even purchase made the logistics of entering too difficult.

Saucy drove for ART GP on its Eurocup return this year, and claimed two podiums on the way to seventh in the points.

Mini and Pizzi meanwhile, who are both expected to race in FREC in 2021, had stunning debut seasons in car racing. Pizzi started 2020 by winning the F4 United Arab Emirates title, then Nicolas Todt protege Mini made a winning start in Italian F4 and ended up becoming series champion with a round to spare.

There is also a two-day FREC test this week at Vallelunga, although it is unknown how many cars are taking part.

The post Mini, Pizzi and Saucy to drive for ART GP in ‘FREC’ rookie test appeared first on Formula Scout.