Photo: MGPC

10 years ago today, Max Verstappen debuted in F3. Less than four months later he joined Red Bull’s Junior Team, and the week after was signed by its second F1 squad Toro Rosso. But what if F1 hadn’t been waiting?

With hindsight, the decision by Red Bull to put Max Verstappen in a Formula 1 seat after just a year in car racing looks indisputable. But as Frits van Amersfoort says, an F1-ready talent was visible right from the day he appeared in Formula 3.

Verstappen had two top F1 teams, Red Bull and Mercedes, fighting over his signature just a few races into his F3 career. But which would he have partnered with had Red Bull not owned two F1 teams, the key factor that made a 2015 race seat possible?

Patience is a word absent from Jos Verstappen’s dictionary, and when it came to son Max he was always in a hurry to move on and up.

After a successful karting career, the younger Verstappen made his car racing debut in the Ferrari Driver Academy-organised and Formula Abarth-spec Florida Winter Series at the start of 2014. From 12 races in the entry-level cars he took two wins, three other podiums, three fastest laps and three poles.

Dutch team Van Amersfoort Racing had then been approached to run Verstappen in FIA European F3. But not by his dad.

Rather it was former F1 driver Huub Rothengatter, who had managed Jos’s career in the 1990s. Rothengatter “knew Max was something special,” VAR’s team boss van Amersfoort recalls to Formula Scout.

“Jos wanted to do Formula Renault [2.0],” he adds. “Together with Huub, I always said put Max straight in an F3 car. Forget about these single-make things like FR2.0 because they are highly political and when they don’t give you the right engine, you’re basically fucked.

Photo: Asensi Carricondo

“Jos wasn’t too convinced, so he kept his eyes on FR2.0. Max tested a lot of FR2.0 teams and cars and in December he tested for Motopark in F3 in Valencia.”

Verstappen “was totally fast but it was difficult for us in those days because somehow Jos was not convinced about our competitiveness”, admits van Amersfoort.

VAR took Jos Verstappen to the 1992 Formula Opel Lotus Benelux title, launching him on the path to F1, and by the early 2010s it was running mainly in German F3. That was less competitive than the European championship, and its debut season in the latter in 2013 certainly didn’t indicate any title-challenging potential.

After the month in Florida, “Jos was really unhappy” and felt that his son had not been given equal equipment. With the clock ticking down, it was Rothengatter who made the decision to commit to F3.

“There were many other people [around] Max who said ‘we are going to help’, but in the end they didn’t, and Huub put his money where his mouth was, put the money in to buy a car because we couldn’t finance the car ourselves and making the first down payment to get going, to pay the entry fees,” recalls van Amersfoort.

“We got a free engine from Jost Capito at Volkswagen, so that helped a lot. We put the car together and one week later we were on our way to Hungary for the first official test. On our way to Hungary, we stopped at Most in the Czech Republic to do the roll-out.

“From the beginning it was fantastic. Even before that we knew that it was going to be special. Of course, the pressure on us was pretty heavy, because we knew Jos was sceptical, but there wasn’t much to say from Jos’s side because Huub paid.”

Rothengatter and Verstappen subsequently fell out in a big way, “making war over a 16 year-old kid who still needed to prove himself”, much to van Amersfoort’s sadness.

Photo: FIA European F3

Third fastest in the two-day Hungaroring test, Verstappen then topped the times four days later in the second official test at the Red Bull Ring.

“In the first test we had a gearbox problem,” reveals van Amersfoort. “Jos jumped in his car and drove to Dallara, up and down. And the next morning he was back with a new gearbox. And that’s also Jos – everything for Max.”

The season opener took place at Silverstone on April 19-20, supporting the World Endurance Championship. Verstappen qualified fourth for race one but the team “suffered some technical problems with the car – we chose the wrong clutch and we had some clutch problems”.

Verstappen retired in race one, was fifth in race two then passed eventual champion Esteban Ocon to be second in race three.

“We changed the clutch and went to Hockenheim [for round two] and the technical mayhem started again because he drove pole but the car died on the outlap. It was the loom,” continues van Amersfoort.

“Eyebrows with Jos and bla, bla, bla, not easy, but the mechanics changed the loom between the races. That was fantastic because there was not much time and then he won the last race.

Verstappen would go on to score another nine victories, including a mid-season streak of six in a row at Spa-Francorchamps and the Norisring. “And then the whole roller coaster started…”

The teenager was now hot property in the car racing world. But Jos was determined to hold out for the best possible deal.

“There was already contact between Jos and Helmut [Marko, head of Red Bull’s driver development]. That also shows how good the view from Jos is on a talent like Max. He kept Helmut at bay.”

Photo: Philip Platzer/Red Bull Content Pool

Those conversations were unbeknown to van Amersfoort at the time, stressing that he was not party to any of the discussions directly, but he understood “that at the point where Max was winning, Helmut came back, and the deal was done”. The deal was finally signed following the series’ visit to the Red Bull Ring in early August.

Jos Verstappen said on his family’s website that he had been unable to sleep “for three weeks” prior to putting pen to paper.

“Especially during the Euro F3 weekend in Austria, when we talked to Dr. Helmut Marko. Every morning I was wide awake at 4.30am, whereas Max was sound asleep,” he admitted.

“I remember that Sunday morning, when we were phoning at six in the morning and Raymond [Vermeulen, the manager of both Verstappens] and myself were ploughing through several documents whilst negotiating. It was all very intense, also because Red Bull were so driven and engaging.”

The Verstappens then disclosed the 2015 F1 move to certain parties by inviting them to their house, including van Amersfoort.

“At a certain point in the middle of the season our team was invited to come to Limburg where [the Verstappens] lived and they told us in confidence that Max had signed for Toro Rosso. So, he moved straight from F3 to F1. Unbelievable!”

Once the Red Bull Junior Team membership was confirmed, VAR had to swap its team colours for the instantly recognisable Red Bull livery on Verstappen’s car. “But we were happy to do that, of course,” says van Amersfoort.

In the next round at the Nurburgring on August 16/17, engine reliability problems struck again. The unit “had to go back to [tuner] Spiess lots of times and in August it all went wrong because a conrod went through the engine and the [grid] penalty in those days was three times 10 places, but in the end, it also fits in the story”.

Photo: FIA European F3

There was a break of almost two months before round 10 at Imola, which was “a race weekend I will never forget” for van Amersfoort.

“Max was flying. And he did something you hardly see in F3 going from P11 to P2. It was incredible. What people never see is that the dramas in the paddock because Trevor Carlin was furious with Spiess thinking we had a special engine. It was absolutely fantastic!” he smiles.

“We had a normal Volkswagen. It was the days when F3 was really F3. In the end it was the best decision to do F3 because in those days F3 was much more free than now. You could do some things in the car. The engines of course were the real F3 engines. And it was a fantastic year.”

The car itself now belongs to Rothengatter, the man who put the money down to buy it in the first place. For a long period, it graced the entrance to VAR’s factory in the Netherlands but “is now hidden”.

Verstappen finished third in the standings, 67 points behind Ocon. But since it was a 33-race schedule, and more than a third of that gap was built by Ocon in a race Verstappen missed, he was only outscored on average by 1.31 points per race.

That impressed the motorsport world, but if no F1 seat had been available for 2015 what would Verstappen have done next?

As is now well-known, Red Bull ultimately won out over Mercedes-AMG in attracting Verstappen to its junior team because it could offer an immediate step up into F1, bypassing GP2 or Formula Renault 3.5.

“Max was very good in karting, was good in F3, and it was clear that he was a big one that’s growing,” said Mercedes-AMG F1 team principal Toto Wolff on F1’s Beyond the Grid podcast in 2023.

Verstappen in the DTM? (Photo: Jim Moir)

“We talked to them in the initial phases and it was a nice discussion with Jos and with Max as well But it was clear we couldn’t give him a seat because we had Nico [Rosberg] and we had Lewis [Hamilton]. We offered to support Max in Formula 2 [known as GP2 at the time], but since Red Bull was able to offer them the AlphaTauri seat – or Toro Rosso back in the day – it got Max into the seat.”

Had Red Bull had not had that benefit of owning two teams in F1, or had not been prepared to use it by placing him at Toro Rosso in 2015, would Verstappen’s career and possibly the last 10 years of motorsport have looked very different?

As Wolff explained, the best Mercedes could offer was GP2, where neither it or Red Bull had an affiliation with a competing team. Although Mercedes had supported young drivers for many years, its F1 junior team was only launched in 2014 and in its preferred path for F3 graduates had been to send them to DTM where its Mercedes-Benz touring cars were raced. Pascal Wehrlein was already in the DTM when the junior team launched, and after winning the 2015 title he got moved to F1 with the Mercedes-powered Manor team.

It is, however, inconceivable that the Verstappen camp would have considered spending a year away from single-seaters.

Wolff had a longstanding relationship with ART Grand Prix’s then-team boss Fred Vasseur, and the team competed in the DTM (with a Mercedes car) and in single-seaters. Ocon got snapped up by Mercedes in early 2015 and with ART GP made a sideways move to GP3 (now known as FIA F3), where he won the title and earned a 2016 graduation to the DTM with the team before joining Wehrlein at Manor later in the year.

That first move highlighted that ART GP’s GP2 seats for 2015 were already unavailable. McLaren junior Stoffel Vandoorne had one, and a partnership with Honda meant the other went to its protege Nobuharu Matsushita. So would Mercedes have had to look elsewhere? And if so, where?

Top team or cheap seat? GP2 was a no-go for Verstappen

With Verstappen’s talent and Mercedes’ backing, a seat would surely have been identified. But would he have had the equipment to defeat the dominant Vandoorne in a battle of the Belgian-born stars?

In any case, it is unlikely that Mercedes would have promoted him to F1 even for 2016 with Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg dominating the previous two seasons. Would he have been farmed out to Manor, F1’s de facto backmarker team?

Though a seat there would hardly have matched the Verstappens’ expectations, he would have then been in an ideal position to be drafted into the Mercedes line-up after Rosberg’s surprise retirement at the end of the year.

Had Wolff known that Rosberg was going to retire at the end of 2016 would he have acted differently?

“Well, maybe, but if I would know where the stock market is next year, I would decide to invest in it or not. We would be very happy and rich people if we would know what happens in 12 months,” he said on Beyond The Grid.

He also told ESPN that while he “certainly” regretted missing out on having Verstappen in the Mercedes fold, “it wasn’t an option back in the day”.

For their part, neither Jos nor Max expressed any regret at turning down Mercedes, despite the team’s dominance from 2015 to 2020.

Red Bull had alternatives it could have presented Verstappen in 2015, both in and out of F1. In GP2, DAMS fielded one of its juniors, Pierre Gasly, alongside 2014 GP3 champion and Williams’ new development driver Alex Lynn.

Perhaps realising that Verstappen’s fast-track promotion meant his chances of progressing to F1 with Red Bull were rapidly evaporating, Lynn had left the RBJT by mutual agreement at the end of 2014.

Photos: Philip Platzer/Red Bull Content Pool

The alternative to GP2 in Europe was FR3.5, and Verstappen had tested a car in torrential rain at the Red Bull Ring on his first day as a Red Bull junior. Furthermore, that series was a proven step between F3 and F1 for Red Bull juniors, examples being Sebastian Vettel and Daniel Ricciardo.

Carlos Sainz Jr, another Red Bull junior, was 2014 FR3.5 champion with DAMS and Arden’s Gasly was a distant runner-up. They were two of the four contenders to be Verstappen’s Toro Rosso team-mate in 2015, and Sainz was the chosen one.

The risk for Verstappen, as father Jos understood very well, was that today’s hot prospect can very quickly go cold if the results don’t follow. Although it was Verstappen’s rapid rise that prompted, although the FIA would never admit it, the creation of the superlicence points system that tied drivers down to multiple years in junior series before being eligible for F1.

In 2015, Verstappen noted that Ferrari junior Raffaele Marciello had swept to the 2013 European F3 title then took one win in three GP2 seasons, and as far as single-seaters was concerned his star had faded. He didn’t want GP2 to stall his own career.

With no F1 drive potentially on offer, would Jos Verstappen have held off for another year in a junior series, hoping to reel in the top teams with another sensational performance?

That seems unlikely, as the Verstappens were already struggling to finance their F3 campaign without the inflow of Red Bull cash mid-season. A second season there would have been completely out of the question for the impatient Verstappens.

“I think we see now there’s a perfect match between Helmut and the family of Verstappen. They fit together,” concludes van Amersfoort.

“I knew that there was contact also with Toto but, you know, Mercedes is just more careful and the Verstappens don’t know what ‘careful’ is. They go for it and I think that the characters fit together perfectly and we see it now.

• Read more: Verstappen’s explosive arrival in single-seaters – the first time around

“Jos can really be a pain in the arse for the team but, whatever, he’s full throttle all the time. And as a team you have to cope with it. For sure, we learned a lot in that year,” he adds.

“To be the top you have to be special, and for sure Max was.”

The post What if Red Bull was unable to offer Verstappen a way into F1 in 2015? appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: Jose Manuel Zapico

Marc Gene has recalled the importance of his 1998 Euro Open by Nissan title, a championship whose opening season he conquered 25 years ago today to earn a spot on the Formula 1 grid.

The Spaniard had previously contributed to the series creation after he put the series promoter Jaime Alguersuari Sr in contact with Enzo Coloni, who would design the car.

“Coloni wanted to create a new series with the same concept [of FISA Golden Cup Superformula] but bigger,” Gene explained to Formula Scout. “Coloni had a very clear mind about the concept of car he wanted and Jaime Alguersuari Sr., who was coming from the world of motorbikes, had a great mind for business. He was extremely good commercial-wise and he understood it was the right moment for him to make the switch to cars.”

Gene then signed with the newly born Adrian Campos Motorsport team of former F1 driver Adrian Campos for the championship’s inaugural campaign, in what turned out to be a highly successful combination.

• Feature: Gene and Garcia celebrate Adrian Campos and their 1998 Euro Open title

“I knew there was a Formula 1 test as end-of-the-year prize. When the date approached, I was staking a lot. It was one of those trains that only pass once in life. You must get on board. I prepared that championship really well, I was fully focused because I knew it was an opportunity like no other.

“I wasn’t thinking much about debuting in F1, I was thinking about testing a Formula 1 car, that was the first dream I had back then. And it’s true I did some very good weekends. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I soon opened a gap atop the standings and then I kept the advantage.”

After retiring from the first two races, Gene claimed six victories in a row, which he followed with a fifth and three third places. This meant he was crowned champion at Albacete with one race and one round to spare.

“That allowed me to start preparing the F1 test like one month in advance [before the end of the championship],” he said. “I prepared physically and spoke to some F1 drivers because I knew it was a unique opportunity, and then I performed really well in the test.

“Winning the championship before the last round allowed me to devotedly prepare the F1 test. It boosted my popularity as well. I was better known and helped to get the support of Telefonica, which is the company that bet on F1 and also backed me.”

That F1 test with Minardi at the Barcelona circuit in February of 1999 earned him the seat for the season, and then he stayed for 2000 as well.

“It might have still happened [without Telefonica’s support] because winning this championship, Alguersuari got fully involved to take me to F1. He knew that would be a great boost for his championship, and it was.

“Jaime gave his all to take me to F1, and I’ll be eternally grateful for that,” Gene stated.

The post A quarter of a century on from the title that took Marc Gene to F1 appeared first on Formula Scout.

Fotos: José Manuel Zapico

Marc Gené y Antonio García, primeros pilotos en la historia de Campos Racing, rinden homenaje a su fundador Adrián Campos en el 25º aniversario del equipo

Tras retirarse de la competición en 1997, Adrián Campos fundó su propio equipo de carreras con la intención de impulsar el talento español hacia la Formula 1 y otras categorías de prestigio. Menos de un año después, en 1998, los coches de Adrián Campos Motorsport rodaban sobre el asfalto.

Campos tenía un ojo clínico a la hora de escoger a sus pilotos. Sus dos primeras elecciones, Gené y García, cosecharían numerosos éxitos en el mundo de la resistencia. El tercero, Fernando Alonso, se convertiría en uno de los mejores pilotos de la historia. De su mano también llegó Alex Palou, quien alcanzaría la gloria en IndyCar y, en la actualidad, Pepe Martí sigue sus pasos triunfando en FIA Formula 3 con un equipo que ahora dirige Adrián Campos Jr.

Mientras que Gené ganó el Euro Open by Nissan en la temporada de debut en 1998 y al año siguiente subió a la Formula 1 con Minardi, García se mantuvo dos años más en el equipo hasta conseguir el título en el 2000. En 2002, regresaría tras una infructuosa temporada en la F3000 con los colores de Red Bull, algo que también hizo Gené en 2003 compaginándolo con sus labores de piloto probador de Williams en Formula 1.

La recién nacida estructura de Campos se alzó con los títulos tanto de equipos como de pilotos de las tres primeras temporadas de la historia del campeonato, una categoría creada por el también español Jaime Alguersuari y que posteriormente se convertiría en las World Series, primero by Nissan y más tarde by Renault. Ya en 2016, el campeonato fue rebautizado como Formula V8 3.5 tras la pérdida del apoyo económico de Renault y cesaría su actividad su actividad a finales del año 2017 como consecuencia de ello y del apoyo de la FIA a su principal rival en la escalera hacia la Formula 1, a quien otorgó más puntos de superlicencia. 

Formula Scout se sentó con Gené y García para recordar la figura de Adrián Campos en el 25º aniversario de Campos Racing, así como la influencia que tanto él como aquella temporada 1998 tuvieron en sus posteriores carreras.

El piloto catalán recuerda que “muy pronto nos pusimos de acuerdo” cuando Adrián Campos, uno de sus referentes en sus inicios en el mundo del automovilismo, lo contactó para incorporarlo a su equipo.

“Yo lo había seguido en la Formula 1. Recuerdo que llegué a tenerlo a él y a Luis Pérez Sala como fotos de carpeta del colegio. Era un poco un referente para mí y nos habíamos saludado. Teníamos una relación que él cuando supo que yo estaba en el mercado, él quería un piloto supongo top y hacer un equipo muy bueno pues con Antonio y conmigo, un piloto experimentado y un piloto nuevo que venía del karting. Nos conocíamos, pero me fichó como el que busca en el mercado y mira a ver cuál es la mejor opción”, relata Gené sobre su llegada al equipo.

Adrián Campos Motorsport se mostró enormemente competitivo desde el principio, consiguiendo la victoria en las ocho primeras carreras del campeonato. García subió a lo más alto del podio en las dos iniciales en Albacete, pero fue Gené quien cogió el testigo y dominó los tres fines de semana posteriores en Barcelona, Jerez y Donington Park tras dejar atrás los problemas en la caja de cambios de la primera ronda y terminó ganando el campeonato con el último fin de semana aún por disputar.

Pieza clave en el éxito inmediato fue Ermanno Cuoghi. Quien fuera jefe de mecánicos de Niki Lauda en la escudería Ferrari resultó el elegido por Adrián Campos para dirigir el departamento técnico de su nuevo proyecto, lo cual situó al equipo un paso por delante de sus competidores.

“Tengo muy buenos recuerdos”, afirma Gené en referencia a la temporada 1998. “Tengo también muy buenos recuerdos del ingeniero Ermanno Cuoghi, que venía de la Formula 1 y había estado en Ferrari con Niki Lauda. Él tenía muchísima experiencia. Los primeros test que hicimos, vimos que era un Formula 3 con mucha carga aerodinámica porque tenía el efecto suelo. Me adapté muy rápido. Al principio tuve algún problema con la caja de cambios de este coche, de hecho la primera carrera no la pude acabar debido a la caja de cambios. Ese es el único problema que recuerdo que había de vez en cuando.”

Victorias de Campos Racing en el segundo escalón de monoplazas

Euro Open by Nissan
1998 8 victorias: A Garcia (Albacete x2), M Gene (Barcelona x2, Jerez x2, Donington Park x2)
1999 7 victorias: F Alonso (Albacete, Jarama, Donington Park x2, Barcelona, Valencia), Garcia (Jarama)
2000 6 victorias: Garcia (Valencia, Jarama, Magny-Cours, Valencia), P Gay (Jarama, Monza)
2001 1 victoria: M Bobbi (Valencia)   2003 1 victoria: Gene (Zolder)
GP2 Asia
2008 1 victoria: V Petrov (Sepang)
GP2/Formula 2
2007 3 victorias: G Pantano (Magny-Cours, Monza), Petrov (Valencia)
2008 4 victorias: L di Grassi (Hungaroring, Valencia, Monza), Petrov (Valencia)
2014 1 victoria: A Pic (Hungaroring)   2015 3 victorias: R Haryanto (Bahrain, Red Bull Ring, Silverstone)
2016 1 victoria: M Evans (Red Bull Ring)
2019 3 victorias: J Aitken (Baku, Silverstone, Monza)   2023 1 victoria: R Boschung (Bahrain)

Más allá del potencial técnico del equipo, Gené destaca la capacidad de Campos para reunir patrocinadores que apoyaran el proyecto, lo que llevó tanto a él como a García a convertirse en pilotos profesionales.

“Era un coche muy rápido y lo que recuerdo también es un campeonato comercialmente que nadie había hecho en España con anterioridad. Con muchísimo público, muy buena promoción en cada ciudad en la que íbamos y Campos un equipo súper profesional con muchísimos sponsors. Teníamos eventos con sponsors el fin de semana de la carrera y esto es algo que solo he visto yo en la Formula 1 porque ni actualmente en la F3, F2, nunca he visto nada como lo que consiguió realmente Adrián. Eran sponsors además potentes: Lease Plan, Grefusa, NH Hoteles. El coche era bonito porque estaba lleno de sponsors. Un equipo muy bien organizado con departamento de marketing. Era un lujo.

“De hecho fue la primera vez que yo realmente me sentí piloto profesional. Más allá de que fue la primera vez que me pagaron por correr, hasta entonces nunca se había dado el caso. Pero el equipo estaba extremadamente bien organizado. Era un auténtico lujo. En mi caso luego ya fui a la Formula 1, pero cualquiera que corriera para Adrián, era algo que no era lo normal en España, un equipo tan bien organizado y tan profesional como el que él consiguió armar.”

“Equipos que tengan esta capacidad comercial de involucrar a empresas yo creo que en fórmulas de promoción posiblemente en el mundo no ha habido nunca nadie como Adrián. Adrián realmente fichó a Antonio y a mí. Nos fichó y no nos pidió ni un sponsor ni nada. Él tenía toda la financiación del equipo. Esto nunca más se ha dado yo creo en ningún equipo en el mundo.”

Tanto Gené como García coinciden al relatar los inicios humildes del equipo en una época que dista mucho de la actualidad. Por aquel entonces, predominaba el papel y la pista, mientras que las visitas a la sede de la escudería eran algo ocasional.

“Íbamos a la fábrica, pero tampoco íbamos mucho. El trabajo se hacía más en la pista. Yo soy una persona muy metódica, con lo cual me apuntaba muchas cosas. Tengo las agendas del set-up que tenía. Hablaba mucho con Ermanno, hablaba mucho con Adrián, con Colomina que aún está.

“El día a día no lo recuerdo muchísimo más allá de que cuando iba a Valencia dormía en casa de Adrián. Muy familiar todo. La verdad es que la relación era exquisita con todos los componentes del equipo y lo celebrábamos todo muchísimo. Había mucha, muchísima unión entre todos, lo que posiblemente fue una de las claves para ganar este campeonato”, afirma Gené, quien también destaca la capacidad de Campos para seleccionar pilotos y proporcionarles todas las herramientas necesarias para triunfar.

“Él [Campos] era muy bueno en esto, en tener esta visión de fichar a pilotos. Y era muy bueno también en la cultura del piloto. Él había sido piloto y tenía muy claro lo que necesitabas para rendir al máximo nivel. Pequeñas cosas que te hacían sentir bien y te hacían dar lo mejor de ti. En este aspecto realmente se notaba que él había sido piloto y sabía lo que necesitaba un piloto.”

Por su parte, García, quien tras pilotar para el equipo en sus inicios regresó como accionista y consultor en 2012, enfatiza en la necesidad de adaptarse a los cambios.

“En los primeros años era todo muy… no sé si es la palabra correcta para definirlo, pero era muy analógico. No teníamos datos del coche. No teníamos prácticamente nada. Era casi como en el karting. Si no recuerdo mal, ni siquiera teníamos radio para hablar con los ingenieros. Escribíamos las notas en un papel. Empezamos así y cada año se fue desarrollando.”

“Cuando volví al equipo después de muchos años en turismos y GT, noté una gran diferencia. Ha habido un cambio enorme entre cómo eran las cosas entonces y ahora. Pero así era todo a finales de los años 90. Ahora tenemos muchas herramientas a nuestro alcance para mejorar el equipo y necesitamos aprovecharlas. Si no lo haces te quedas atrás.”

Ambos pilotos no dudan a la hora de reconocer el papel crucial que jugó Adrián Campos en sus carreras como pilotos profesionales y para el automovilismo español. No obstante, reconocen que no fue el único y coinciden al destacar también la figura de Jaime Alguersuari, promotor del Euro Open by Nissan.

“Tuvimos la suerte de que Adrián se retiró y quiso formar un equipo y de que personas como Jaime Alguersuari tuvieran la idea de poner en marcha un nuevo campeonato”, reconoce García.

“Estuve en el momento justo en el lugar adecuado. Hasta entonces había corrido en el karting con bastante éxito. Con Adrián, como corríamos ambos, nos encontrábamos habitualmente al final de cada temporada en las ceremonias de premios. Adrián nos conocía a Fernando y a mí y cuando decidió crear el equipo y participar en el Open Fortuna, sabía que necesitaba también algo de experiencia. Por eso escogió a Marc Gené. Pero por otro lado, sabía que los mejores pilotos que venían del karting éramos yo y Fernando justo después.

“Estoy muy agradecido por aquellos años. Tuve la gran suerte de estar en el mejor equipo durante ese tiempo. Adrián formó un muy, muy buen equipo y lo demostramos ganando tres años seguidos el campeonato. Eso impulsó muchas carreras, la mía y también la de Marc y Fernando. Cada uno luego siguió su camino, pero creo que fuimos unos afortunados al tener a Campos en aquel momento.”

Por su parte, Gené tiene claro que sin ellos él nunca habría competido en Formula 1.

“Yo seguramente sin Adrián no hubiera llegado a la Formula 1, es muy posible. Estoy bastante seguro de esta afirmación. Le debo mucho a Adrián, le debo mucho a Jaime Alguersuari, le debo mucho a mi familia, obviamente sin ellos no habría llegado tampoco. Pero Adrián y Jaime en mi caso fueron claves para llegar a la Formula 1 y desde entonces pues aún estoy allí.”

“Un gran, gran talento como Alonso es posible que hubiera llegado sin Adrián o sin Jaime. Nunca lo sabremos, pero yo creo que cuando hay un talento tan brutal como el suyo se acaba viendo y te encuentras con un Briatore, un Ron Dennis. Ahora serían otros, ahora serían más las academias. Pero en mi caso fue súper importante y estoy seguro de que con Antonio García también. Pilotos de nuestro nivel que éramos muy, muy buenos pilotos, pero no de este nivel de excepcionalidad, de este nivel de talento tan descomunal como Fernando, nos fue un espaldarazo enorme.”

The post Gené y García celebran a Adrián Campos y el título del Euro Open 1998 appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photos: Jose Manuel Zapico

Campos Racing’s first driver line-up pay tribute to Adrian Campos as his team celebrates its 25th anniversary

After retiring from racing himself in 1997, Adrian Campos founded his own team, aiming to promote Spanish talent in the pursuit of Formula 1 as well as a racing career in other prestigious motorsport categories. In 1998, Adrian Campos Motorsport’s cars took to the track for the first time in the new Euro Open by Nissan series.

Campos had a sharp eye for driver selection. His first two picks, Marc Gene and Antonio Garcia, would achieve great success in endurance racing. The third one, Fernando Alonso, is now regarded as one of the best racing drivers in history. IndyCar champion Alex Palou also drove for the team in his first seasons of single-seaters and, currently, Pepe Marti follows their footsteps shining in FIA Formula 3 in a team now steered by Adrian Campos Jr.

Whereas Gene became champion of that inaugural Euro Open season in 1998 and stepped up to F1 with Minardi the year after, Garcia spent three seasons in the series with Campos, claiming the title in 2000. He then returned in 2002 after an unfruitful year in Formula 3000 adorning Red Bull’s colours. Also Gene would return for the first half of the 2003 season while he was F1 reserve driver for Williams.

Campos claimed both the Euro Open by Nissan driver and teams’ titles three years in a row from 1998. The series was created by Jaime Alguersuari and years later became the World Series, first by Nissan and then by Renault. In 2016 it was rebranded as Formula V8 3.5 as Renault withdrew its funding, and the series was shut down after the 2017 season as a consequence of that and also the FIA’s decision to back FV8 3.5’s main rival and make it worth more superlicence points.

Formula Scout sat with both Gene and Garcia to remember the character of Adrian Campos in Campos Racing’s 25th anniversary as well as the impact he and the 1998 season had in their racing careers.

Gene recalled that he and Campos “reached an agreement very soon” for the 1998 season when Campos — one of his racing idols — contacted him to join the team.

“I had followed him [Campos] in F1. I remember having pictures of both him and Luis Perez Sala in my school folder. He was kind of a model for me and we had met each other.

“We had a relationship that when he knew I was on the market, he wanted I guess a top driver and to build a very good team with Antonio and me, one experienced driver and a new driver coming from karting. We knew each other, but he signed me like the one who goes to the market looking for the best option available,” Gene explained of his arrival to the team.

Adrian Campos Motorsport was extremely competitive since the beginning, proved by winning the first eight races of the championship. Garcia stood on top of the podium twice in the opening round at Albacete. Then Gene dominated the next three rounds at Barcelona, Jerez and Donington Park after being held back by gearbox issues in round one. Those results allowed him to be crowned champion with one round to spare.

Aiming to build a strong team, Campos had hired Ermanno Cuoghi, formerly Niki Lauda’s chief mechanic at Ferrari. He was the person responsible for Adrian Campos Motorsport’s technical department in those early days and his contribution immediately placed the team one step ahead of its competitors.

“I have great memories,” Gene affirmed. “I also have great memories of the engineer Ermanno, who came from F1 and had been at Ferrari with Niki Lauda. He had loads of experience.

“In the first test, we realised the car was a Formula 3 car with a lot of downforce because of the ground effect. I adapted myself really quickly. In the beginning, I had some issues with the gearbox. In fact, I couldn’t finish the opening race due to a gearbox issue. That is the only issue I remember that appeared from time to time.”

Gene also highlighted Campos’s capacity to pull together sponsors that supported his project. As a result, he and Garcia became professional race car drivers.

Campos Racing victories in single-seaters’ second tier

Euro Open by Nissan
1998 8 wins: A Garcia (Albacete x2), M Gene (Barcelona x2, Jerez x2, Donington Park x2)
1999 7 wins: F Alonso (Albacete, Jarama, Donington Park x2, Barcelona, Valencia), Garcia (Jarama)
2000 6 wins: Garcia (Valencia, Jarama, Magny-Cours, Valencia), P Gay (Jarama, Monza)
2001 1 win: M Bobbi (Valencia)   2003 1 win: Gene (Zolder)
GP2 Asia
2008 1 win: V Petrov (Sepang)
GP2/Formula 2
2007 3 wins: G Pantano (Magny-Cours, Monza), Petrov (Valencia)
2008 4 wins: L di Grassi (Hungaroring, Valencia, Monza), Petrov (Valencia)
2014 1 win: A Pic (Hungaroring)   2015 3 wins: R Haryanto (Bahrain, Red Bull Ring, Silverstone)
2016 1 win: M Evans (Red Bull Ring)
2019 3 wins: J Aitken (Baku, Silverstone, Monza)   2023 1 win: R Boschung (Bahrain)

“It was a really fast car, but I also remember it was a championship like no other before in Spain commercial-wise. It had great attendance and very good promotion in each city we visited. And Campos was a super professional team with lots of sponsors. We had sponsor events during the race weekends and that is something I have only seen in F1. Not even currently in F3 and Formula 2, I have never seen something like what Adrian achieved. They were also big sponsors like Lease Plan, Grefusa, NH Hoteles. The car was beautiful because it was full of sponsors. It was a very well structured team with a marketing department. It was a privilege.

“Indeed, it was the first time I truly felt I was a professional driver. It was also the first time I was paid to race. Until then it had never happened. But the team was extremely well organised. It was a true privilege. In my case, I already stepped up to F1 after that, but for anyone who raced for Adrian, such a professional, well-organised team like the one he set up wasn’t common at all in Spain.

“In junior formulae, I believe there has never been anyone in the world who had the ability to get companies involved like Adrian did. Adrian really signed Antonio and me up. He signed up both of us and never asked for sponsors or anything. He had all the funding for the team. I think this has never happened again in any team around the world.”

Both Gene and Garcia agreed in their description of the team’s early days in an era of motorsport that was completely different to nowadays. Back then, notes on paper and on-track action prevailed and visits to the factory didn’t happen as often as they do now.

“We went to the factory, but we didn’t go too often. Most of the work was done at the track,” Gene said. “I’m a really methodical person, so I wrote everything down. I still have the notebooks with all the car set-ups. I used to talk a lot with Ermanno, Adrian and also Colomina, who is still part of the team.

“I don’t remember much of the day-to-day activities. I remember I used to sleep at Adrian’s home when I went to Valencia.

The post Gene and Garcia celebrate Adrian Campos and their 1998 Euro Open title appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

At the British GP, Roy Nissany became the most experienced driver ever in the second tier of single-seater racing. He is yet to get a taste of racing at the top level, but did other F2 long-timers make the step up?

Formula Scout went through the history of second-tier series across the globe, considering the evolutions of series like European Formula 2 which turned into International Formula 3000 and was later replaced by GP2 (which rebranded to F2 six years ago), the USAC Mini-Indy Series which is now known as Indy Nxt, non-championship bouts across the globe contested by the stars and teams of Formula 1’s main feeder series, and many more championships.

With results from the 1960s and 1970s proving hard to verify via online research, old magazines needed to be consulted for certain races to find out who were the entrants who made the start and were either outside the points-scoring positions or retired. Equally, mentions of non-starters were key for making sure there were accurate lists from that period.

Then there was the tricky situation of Japan. Super Formula now sits alongside F1, IndyCar and Formula E at the top level of single-seater racing. But it used second-tier machinery until an overhaul for 1996 turned it into Formula Nippon. While it is an easy distinction to make that every race prior to then counted towards a driver’s second-tier CV, the conundrum of the 1996 campaign was that only one chassis was built to FNippon’s regulations, and the rest were F3000 cars running Japanese engines and with modified bodywork. In today’s terms, an F2 car with different aesthetics (note Brad Pitt’s upcoming F1 movie) does not turn it into a top-tier single-seater car. But if it’s entered into a top-tier series, surely the driver at the wheel has contested a top-tier race…

We’ll revisit that argument again later down this list, which looks at the 10 most experienced drivers in the second tier:

=9. Fairuz Fauzy MALAYSIA 133 races
GP2 (62 races): 5pts   GP2 Asia (14 races): 1 win, 3 podiums, 25pts   FR3.5 (57 races): 1 win, 2 poles, 10 podiums, 181pts   Top tier A1GP (22 races): 1 win, 2 podiums, 57pts

Photo: GP2 Media Service

After the Malaysian Grand Prix’s induction on the F1 calendar in 1999, it was only a few months before a Malaysian driver reached the pinnacle of single-seaters. Alex Yoong made it into SF, F1 and CART in the early 2000s, and Malaysian investment remained in F1 through the next decade, helping more drivers from his country embark on international racing careers.

Fauzy was the next big hope for the nation in open-wheel cars, although his results in Britain’s Formula Ford, Formula Renault and Formula 3 championships did little to suggest he would one day race in F1.

But when he arrived in GP2 in 2005 with a turquoise car sponsored by Malaysian petroleum company Petronas, who supplied fuel to the Sauber F1 team, it was clear he had the backing to make it to the top.

His rookie GP2 season with DAMS was lacklustre, with four top-10 results but no points under the sporting regulations of the time, but the week before the season finale he was already making his top-level debut as he represented Malaysia in the new nation-based A1GP series. He would be called up again by A1 Team Malaysia three years later, and won the 2008-09 season opener in treachorous conditions at Zandvoort. In the next race he was second, and finished third at Algarve.

Such results initially proved harder to come by back in the second-tier series. A points-free GP2 season in 2006 was followed by a Formula Renault 3.5 campaign in 2007 where he got a pole and three podiums but could only score seven times.

At the start of 2008 he joined the new GP2 Asia series, and won in treacherous conditions at Sentul. This time it wasn’t rain, but rather the track literally falling apart and cars driving through dust clouds (which led to overheating engines). A return to FR3.5 beckoned after that, and remarkably Fauzy came second in the 2009 standings with a win and four other podiums.

That and his A1GP form made for perfect timing as the Malaysian-owned Team Lotus joined the F1 grid in 2010 and he was signed as its reserve driver. But they released him from his contract at the end of the year and Fauzy returned to GP2 and FR3.5 for 2011. One podium from 32 races that year was not enough to keep him on the single-seater map.

=9. Luca Ghiotto ITALY 133 races
FR3.5 (17 races): 26pts   GP2 (22 races): 1 win, 4 podiums, 111pts   F2 (94 races): 6 wins, 2 poles, 24 podiums, 609pts

Photo: Carl Bingham / LAT Images

Ghiotto put his name on the map by winning on the iconic Pau street circuit in FR2.0 in 2013, and from there he stepped up to FR3.5 where his name swiftly disappeared from the map as he came 17th in the standings with three points finishes.

So Ghiotto stepped down to the third tier of single-seaters in GP3 and made an immediate impact with pole on debut. His full season in the series resulted in five wins and second in the standings, so when he returned to the second tier in GP2 for 2016 there were raised expectations once again.

His first season with Trident went arguably as well as it could with a team often mired in the midfield, as Ghiotto was a regular scorer in the feature races but usually only a podium contender in the reversed-grid sprint races. His first win in one of those came in the penultimate round at Sepang.

Ghiotto became super consistent in his second season with Russian Time, only twice in 22 races finishing outside of the top eight and scoring in more races than anyone else. But with a single sprint race win and six other podiums he could do no better than a distant fourth in the standings.

Russian Time did win the teams’ title, but Ghiotto then moved on to Campos Racing (who had been ninth in the teams’ standings) for the 2018 F2 season and he could only muster three podiums from the year. His next team switch was more canny, joining the debuting Virtuosi Racing and kicking off their partnership with a pole and a win at Bahrain.

Three more wins and four second places followed and Ghiotto fought for the title. He now had nothing more to prove in F2, but also no money to go to F1. So Hitech GP, another debuting team in F2, called upon his services for 2020.

Ghiotto reckoned the team had “twice as much work” to do as others and later expressed regrets about staying in GP2/F2 for a fifth year, despite winning in his fifth race with the team. But it was his lowest-scoring season yet and left him in no better career position than he was at the end of 2019. A cameo with DAMS at Monza last year brought Ghiotto up to 133 starts.

8. Johnny Cecotto Jr VENEZUELA 137 races
GP2 (117 races): 4 wins, 3 poles, 10 podiums, 306pts   GP2 Asia (6 races): 3pts   FV8 3.5 (6 races): 1 win, 1 podium, 42pts   F2 (8 races): 1 podium, 16pts

The son of the 1975 350cc motorcycling world champion, F1 driver and DTM star of the same name, Cecotto – like Fauzy – was somewhat of a state-funded talent as shown by the rear wing in the above picture.

Although he was driving second-tier machinery in just his second year of car racing, it was previous-generation F3000 machinery in the Euroseries 3000 series that had been inherited the cars made redundant by GP2’s creation.

In total he made four starts there before his career in contemporary second-tier single-seaters began with the final two GP2 rounds of 2009. He also did the GP2 Asia season opener in November with Trident, and stayed with the team for a full GP2 season. Cecotto was inconsistent and only scored once, a fourth place in the Monaco sprint race. A sign of things to come.

In 2011 he went points-free in GP2 and GP2 Asia, then a move to reigning champion team Addax for 2012 resulted in being mired in the midfield once again until he rocked up to Monaco and claimed pole position. He converted it into victory in the feature race, but then spun and caused a multi-car pile-up on lap one of the sprint race. Cecotto had a reputation for being a driver as likely to cause chaos as he was to get a strong result, and the Monaco weekend was the epitome of that.

Next time out in Valencia he had a nightmare weekend, but then he turned up to Silverstone and qualified and finished second. Following that was Hockenheim, where he could only qualify 18th but then used local knowledge to choose slick tyres on a wet track in the feature race. He assumed the lead when everyone else chose to pit, then made his own compulsory pitstop and won by nine seconds.

The rest of Cecotto’s GP2 career followed a similar pattern, and it was hard to tell over that time if he improved as a driver. He claimed Monaco pole again in 2013, and duly crashed out on lap one of the feature race. Even worse, stewards punished him for the incident by barring him from entering the sprint race.

That podium-free season was followed by his most competitive one in 2014. At Barcelona he could only qualify 16th, but was seventh after a chaotic opening lap of the feature race. He led by lap eight, and it only took two laps following his pitstop to return to the front and take a convincing win. At the Red Bull Ring he took pole and won the sprint race, and three further podiums put him fifth in the standings.

Cecotto drove for four teams over the next two years in part-time campaigns, and won in Formula V8 3.5 in 2016 as the RP Motorsport team sought to use his experience. Once he had proved they had a winning package, he was out of the door.

His time in the second tier ended with three rounds in F2 in 2017 before he was replaced by the next man on this list.

7. Sergio Canamasas SPAIN 138 races
FR3.5 (33 races): 1 pole, 1 podium, 69pts   GP2 (91 races): 2 podiums, 76pts   F2 (14 races): 21pts

Photo: Alastair Staley / GP2 Media Service

Like many Spanish drivers in the 2000s, Canamasas went straight into his national F3 championship for his first year in single-seaters. After three seasons and three podiums, he then stepped up to FR3.5 in 2010 with Interwetten Racing.

The team lacked performance, and so did Canamasas, with a best finish of 14th in his rookie season. A switch to the BVM-Target alliance for 2011 produced significantly better results, with a pole and a podium coming at the Hungaroring. Consistent scoring meant Canamasas finished eighth in the standings, behind a roster of future racing superstars.

But it wasn’t until Canamasas’s fifth year in GP2 that his total points tally in the series surpassed what he scored in a single year in FR3.5. It was a 27-race wait for Canamasas to score his first GP2 point – he managed to get excluded from a qualifying session before that for deliberately forcing a driver off-track – but nine races later he was on the podium.

In an impressive weekend in Monaco in 2014, Canamasas used an undercut strategy to rise from 12th to fifth in the feature race and in the sprint race he jumped from fourth to second at the start and then held his position to the end of the race. Through the rest of the season, Canamasas scored twice and got disqualified once for dangerous driving and causing collisions.

In the Monza sprint race he had a lap one collision with Adrian Quaife-Hobbs by cutting the Ascari chicane, and that led to two other cars colliding at almost 200mph. He later collided with Rene Binder and Raffaele Marciello, in consecutive corners no less, before getting shown the black flag.

Canamasas went through three different teams in 2015, but he got another Monaco podium from ninth on the grid in the feature race – thanks to a rival being penalised – and followed that up with a fourth place. At the next round an apparent dispute between himself and MP Motorsport meant he didn’t take to track and then he lost his seat with the team.

He found berths at Team Lazarus and Hilmer Motorsport for the rest of the season, and managed to score points once. In 2016 he stayed with one team, but lost his Carlin seat for one round. Canamasas rounded off his time in the series with an incomplete 2017 campaign where he switched teams after four rounds. Impressive longevity.

6. Artem Markelov RUSSIA 141 races
GP2 (66 races): 1 win, 3 podiums, 151pts   F2 (75 races): 8 wins, 14 podium, 417pts   Top tier Super Formula (5 races)

Photo: FIA Formula 2

In stark contrast to Canamasas’s route around the paddock, Markelov’s first 100 starts in GP2/F2 were all with the same team.

The Russian Time outfit that Markelov became synonymous was established with the engineering support of German team Motopark, which Markelov had driven for through his first three years of car racing in ADAC Formel Masters and German F3, but by the time he reached GP2 in 2014 the operation was actually being run by iSport International, and later by Virtuosi.

It took a while however for Markelov to get up to speed in GP2, scoring once in his rookie year, but he slowly and steadily improved as he gained more experience and built a reputation of being a clever strategist with good tyre management skills.

The first podium arrived in his sophomore season, then the first win – a feature race success in Monaco – coming in year three. His fourth campaign was his most complete, kicking 2017 off with victory at Bahrain that required a perfectly executed one-stop strategy. He won four more times that year and was championship runner-up to Charles Leclerc.

Markelov was very much like the Sergio Perez of GP2/F2, and although he won three times in 2018 in the new F2 car and became a Renault F1 test driver, his peak had already happened and he needed to find another series to show off his talents.

That opportunity came in Super Formula in 2019, but he struggled to leave an impact and instead became one of the go-to substitutes in F1’s primary feeder series. He got called up for three rounds that year, then made a full-time F2 return in 2020 as the debuting HWA Racelab team sought to utilise his experience. He only scored twice that year, and hasn’t appeared since.

=4. Kunimitsu Takahashi JAPAN 142 races
Japanese F2000 (13 races): 3 wins, 1 pole, 8 podiums, 139 points   Japanese F2 (58 races): 1 win, 5 podiums, 236 points   Japanese F3000 (71 races): 4 podiums, 59pts   Top tier: F1 (1 race)

Photo: Minoru Kobayashi

Takahashi made his first appearance in single-seaters’ second-tier with a single race in Japanese Formula 2000 in 1975.

He made four starts in 1976, earning his first podium and points, then in ’77 was championship runner-up as he won three times and only missed out on the podium once in eight races. Takahashi actually scored more points than anyone else, but the regulations included dropped scores and his supreme podium-finishing consistency actually cost him the title.

The series switched to using F2 cars in 1978, and Takahashi took what would be his last win in the season finale. The next year he could only make the podium twice, then he endured three podium-free seasons.

In 1983 he returned to form with two podiums, but then went on another three-year run of failing to get a top-three finish.

Takahashi remained on the grid when the next big shift came as the series adopted F3000 cars, but over the next eight cars only got four more podiums. In 1991, now a remarkable 51 years old, he failed to qualify twice and he went three seasons without scoring a single point.

But in 1994 he bowed out in style with two eighth places and then a podium. That season he raced against a driver who was just one year old when he made his series debut.

=4. Julian Leal COLOMBIA 142 races
FR3.5 (34 races): 1 podium, 22pts   GP2 (102 races): 4 podiums, 177pts   GP2 Asia (4 races)   GP2 Final (2 races)

Photo: Julianlealweb

Leal had plentiful experience of old F3000 cars by the time he debuted in FR3.5 in 2009, and aside from a podium at the Hungaroring his average finishing position that year was 17.9. And that was with Prema, a team now known for dominating junior single-seaters.

His second season resulted in the same number of points, 11, but collected in three different races. Once again his season was mostly populated by low finishing positions or retirements.

For 2011 he made the sideways step to GP2, and remained in the series for close to five seasons. He made his debut in the Dallara GP2/11 in the two-round GP2 Asia series, with a best finish of 17th, then in the main series got two top-10 finishes in his first year but scored no points as both were in sprint races.

It took 36 races in the car before Leal broke his points-scoring duck, and despite scoring nine points in 2012 he still finished outside of the top 20 in the standings.

The next year he moved to Racing Engineering, and Leal did get two sprint race podiums. But the team was far more competitive than that, shown by team-mate Fabio Leimer scoring three times as many points and winning the title.

Eager to still prove himself, Leal signed with Carlin for 2014 and he made the podium in each of the first two races. He sat second in the standings after four races, but then only scored four times in the remaining 18 races and dropped to 10th in the standings. Team-mate Felipe Nasr scored more than three times as many points as him.

Leal remained with Carlin for 2015, but after reaching 100 races in the main GP2 series he announced his ‘retirement’ from it and missed the last three rounds of the season.

=2. Davide Valsecchi ITALY 161 races
FR3.5 (32 races): 1 win, 4 podiums, 80pts   GP2 Asia (33 races): 4 wins, 1 pole, 11 podiums, 116pts   GP2 (96 races): 7 wins, 3 poles, 17 podiums, 331pts

Photo: GP2 Media Service

A champion, at last! And more than that, a double champion! Valsecchi was never consistently a frontrunner in GP2, but he managed to win two titles.

Two years in FR3.5, with the return of a win and three other podiums, preceded Valsecchi’s five years in GP2 where he started every single race run using the series’ cars in that time period.

He started off in Durango, contesting the Asian and the main series in 2008 and ending the year with victory on home soil in the Monza sprint race. A win and three other podiums in GP2 Asia over the winter made the combination a dark horse for 2009, but ultimately Durango was not competitive enough and Valsecchi only scored three times, but did get a podium.

As soon as the season ended he moved to iSport, and he dominated the Asian series. Victory, two second places and then another two wins in the first five races all but secured him the title with three races to go, and he scored almost twice as many points as the championship runner-up. But once again that form didn’t quite translate into the main series.

He got a pole and a win on the series’ two Asian tracks, but was not a victory threat on any of the European circuits. His first feature race win in the main series came after 59 starts, and was a standout moment from a 2011 season spent with a debuting AirAsia team that was mostly learning rather than performing.

Finally it all came good for Valsecchi when he moved to DAMS in 2012. They had mastered the Dallara GP2/11 in its first year of use, and so started the season as the team to beat. Valsecchi delivered, taking three wins and a second place in the first five races on his favoured tracks in Asia, then once everyone caught up to DAMS’ pace in Europe he had a points lead to control.

He went from having a 37-point margin to falling behind Luiz Razia mid-season, and only regained the lead at the penultimate round. Valsecchi still became champion by a handy 25 points.

=2. Kazuyoshi Hoshino JAPAN 161 races*
Japanese F2000 (15 races): 7 wins, 13 poles, 13 podiums, 211pts   Japanese F2 (59 races): 12 wins, 17 poles, 38 podiums, 653pts  Tsukuba Champions Race winner: 1 pole   European F2 (4 races): 3pts   Japanese F3000 (82 races): 19 wins, 9 poles, 36 podiums, 356pts   Top tier: F1 (2 races)   SF (10 races): 1 win, 1 pole, 4 podiums, 31pts

Photo: Lola Heritage

Now known for running Team Impul in Super Formula, Hoshino is one of the all-time greats of Japanese motorsport but most of his years as a driving powerhouse came when his country’s top single-seater series used second-tier cars.

He first raced in Japanese F2000 in 1974, making the podium on his debut, and won the title in ’75 with four poles, two wins, a second and a third from four starts. Hoshino kept on going like that for years to come.

There were two wins from two starts in 1976, seven poles from seven attempts in ’77 as he became a two-time champion, and in the first F2 season in ’78 he added another title. Hoshino was runner-up in each of the next five seasons, and also won the Tsukuba circuit’s Champions Race for F2 cars from pole in 1979.

The first winless season was 1983 (which was also the first with his own team), and there wasn’t another until 1992. Hoshino was champion of the inaugural Japanese F3000 season in 1987, as he won four races in a year for the first time.

In 1990 he won six of the season’s 10 races to oblierate the opposition, and the year after was racing and beating Eddie Irvine and Michael Schumacher aged 44.

Although 1992 was a bump down to earth with two points finishes and one race he didn’t qualify for, Hoshino bounced back in 1993 with his sixth title in Japan and did so on victory countback against Irvine with two wins to his one.

Hoshino retired in 1996 with another impressive campaign that included a win and a pole. That was the first year of FNippon, and there were a contingent of Reynard 96Ds built to the series’ rules as it became a top-level series. But drivers were also allowed to race using their F3000 cars, and Hoshino did just that.

After a lot of deliberation, the Formula Scout team concluded that Hoshino’s ’96 season counted towards his time in the top tier of single-seater racing, and therefore alongside his starts in F1 (a series which was once open to F2 cars).

1. Roy Nissany ISRAEL 162 races
FR3.5/FV8 3.5 (53 races): 4 wins, 1 pole, 14 podiums, 417pts   F2 (109 races): 1 podium, 42pts

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

The above decision means that earlier this month at Silverstone, Roy Nissany broke the record to become the most experienced driver ever in the second tier of single-seaters.

The Israeli only has one podium from his 109 starts in F2 to date, and only two top-five finishes in total. But he’s not totally unproven at this level, as from 2015 to ’17 he raced in FR3.5 (and latterly FV8 3.5) and in his second season there picked up three wins and three poles with the Charouz Racing System team. He also won a race with RP Motorsport in 2017.

Seven years on from FV8 3.5 and Nisany is driving for Charouz again in F2, with two ninth places in sprint races being the highlight of their reunion in what is so far a points-free season.

That’s a stat that Nissany has avoided until now, having scored at least one point in every year he has spent in F2 prior to 2023. In total he has 14 points finishes to his name, with eight of those coming in 2022 while driving for DAMS.

Nissany made his F1 test debut with Sauber while still in F3, where he had a best finish of sixth from 63 starts, and he then drove for Williams in 2019 post-season testing. After that he was signed as a test driver, and over the next three years got handed six free practice outings before leaving the team.

If Nissany sees out the 2023 F2 season, and stays on the grid for 2024, there’s a chance he could reach 200 races at this level.

The post The most experienced drivers in the second tier of single-seater racing appeared first on Formula Scout.

Alpine junior Olli Caldwell completed his first F1 test at Silverstone this week, a proud moment not just for him but for Kevin Korjus and Matt Parry, two former F1 juniors who have coached his car racing career

We were at, I think it was the Hungaroring. We’re at the side of the circuit and we were watching, and I’m pretty sure the conversation was we were discussing our careers and thinking a little bit like ‘how the hell are we here? At the side of the track watching cars go around?’

That’s Matt Parry’s recollection of the starting point of a conservation with fellow racing driver Kevin Korjus that would go on to become the incentive to set up a company now working across junior single-seaters: Peak Performance Management.

I didn’t have anyone looking after me [one-to-one when racing], which I think I was lacking. And I think for Matt a bit the same way, so we were just laughing, we were joking around that maybe we should try to help young drivers from our experience. First it was just a joke, but then a few months later we got the idea ‘maybe let’s give it a try’, and that’s how it started. 

And that’s Korjus’s memory of how it all began.

Now 29, Korjus was a teenaged sensation during his racing career. Aged 17 he became the youngest ever Formula Renault Eurocup champion with Koiranen GP, won on just his second start in FR3.5 aged 18 and tested for the Renault Formula 1 team later that year, and the year after that he was Lotus’s reserve driver for the Italian Grand Prix.

He was part of the Gravity Sports Management driver development company that ran Lotus’s junior team, and Parry describes that position as being “very much on that pedestal of nearly making it”, which he was on himself.

Photo: mattparryracing.co.uk

Parry had raced in Formula Ford and won Britain’s Formula BMW-based InterSteps series, but he didn’t truly put his name on the map until he turned 18 as he became an F1 junior with Caterham then won the FR Northern European Cup and the McLaren Autosport BRDC Award. That was achieved in 2013, and his F1 test debut with McLaren came a year later

“We were in that let’s say inner circle, or bubble of these prospects that were potentially going to F1,” Parry explains.

“Obviously there was a big road still to get there, but we at least got into that bubble of winning our junior championships etc. So years later we were on the side and thinking ‘fuck, how did this happen?’ to a degree. We’d taken our different routes: he’d done some stuff in the Renault Sport Trophy [sportscar series], I’d done the GT3 stuff.

“We both had parents that were very much disinvolved with the day-to-day running of motorsport because they had businesses or other commitments. How good would it have been if we’d had managers that we’re not here commercially finding sponsorship – obviously if we today have that opportunity we can try to engage that – but we’re not particularly there [for that with PPM], we’re there as a performance base. So we were talking about that, and how good that would have been if we had someone like that. That’s what a lot of these new management groups are, they’re very performance-focused.

“Looking at the driver, looking at how their career’s going and where best to place them, so to the right team in the right year with the right championship with the right opportunity to maximise results. Results obviously being the main thing that talks. And then from that, finding their inner circle as well. What best people can we put with them, whether that’s driver coaches, physios, all these different people that we can bring together and make a really good inner circle, a really good team surrounding the driver to maximise their performance.”

Parry pays credit to the work of ADD Management (behind Lando Norris and Sacha Fenestraz’s careers) and Infinity Sports Management (George Russell, Logan Sargeant) that “basically laid the pathway” for driver management becoming more centred on performance than finances, and thinks PPM has a distinct quality from its industry rivals.

Photo: ACI Sport (L-R: Parry, Caldwell, Vesti, Aron)

“Where we come with a uniqueness is if you look at all the guys who are doing this, me and Kevin are the only guys who have actually done that pathway [as drivers ourselves], to a degree. Who else, in terms of you look at the big guys who are doing this, have actually gone halfway through that process, or three-quarters of the way [to F1].

“[Former BMW Sauber tester] Marko Asmer looks after Juri very much and taking that one-to-one stage, but he hasn’t set up let’s call it a camp across [series]. So after I think we come in with our uniqueness if that we’ve been there, been in that position, know what it’s like when we’ve made the mistakes for the team [in this environment].

“We’ve gone through that process where we were not picking the right team and the right championship, and have the right people around us. So that’s sort of our tact and our angle and our objective when we sat there was ‘we’re going to do this, we’re hopefully going to be able to bring the experience that means that these drivers don’t make the same mistakes we did’.”

After both Korjus and Parry’s single-seater careers fizzled out following seasons in GP3 with Koiranen, the pair ended up in driver coaching in Formula 4 and then the FR Eurocup before setting up their own business venture. They’re still very busy with one-to-one coaching, but also have a pool of contacts that includes the likes of Esteban Ocon’s trainer Tom Clark and his colleagues at the Formula Performance coaching consultancy to call upon for other driver support services away from the race track or at it too when PPM’s lead pair simply can’t be at multiple race tracks at once. Travelling to all the tests and races obviously costs a lot, but PPM didn’t need any start-up finances before it started attracting clients.

“We didn’t need anything to set up, obviously the value becomes, without sounding big-headed, me and Kevin anyway. Our family, other investors, and sponsors had already invested heavily on that experience, so we didn’t need to pay any more.”

PPM therefore is a secondary return for all the years previously invested in Korjus and Parry’s own careers, with both spending time where they were reliant on the backing of F1 teams – a position earned through talent – to continue racing.

Photo: World Series by Renault

Korjus reveals “after two rounds I didn’t have any money left” during his title-winning Eurocup campaign and was able to continue it as “because I had budget for the first two rounds, and I was leading the championship after those two, and it was a new team, then they let me keep driving because they wanted promotion as well”.

It ended up being a record-breaking season, with nine wins from 16 races, and becoming champion meant Korjus got Renault backing and €500,000 for his step up to FR3.5. The contract he signed also guaranteed that Renault would pay for all of the costs of his racing for 2012 too, an unusual step. Gravity chose Korjus’s team for his rookie season, sending him to Tech 1 Racing. There was six days of pre-season testing, all paid for, and then nine race weekends.

Korjus retired from his debut race at Motorland Aragon, a “miserable” encounter in which locked up several times and got a puncture, but then the next day took victory, continuing strong form at the track after he won in the wet and dry there during his maiden Eurocup weekend. It was also where he claimed his sole RS Trophy win in 2016 in his last year of racing.

After a zero-to-hero first event in FR3.5, it was back to zero at Spa-Francorchamps with a double retirement. In race one he had a technical issue, then in race two he “I got hit at the start and my rear wing flew off in Blanchimont” he recalls.

“I saw something was wrong because the rear wing was [sloped], dropped from like seventh maybe down to 15th, but I had massive straightline speed because the wind was there – and I kind of got carried away, entered Blachimont. It’s easy flatout, but I turned in and the rear wing flew off and straight into the wall. A massive shunt.”

Korjus’s fortunes flipped again in round three at Monza as he won, despite worsening tyre vibrations, but then at the start of race two his rear-right tyre punctured in an opening lap incident with Red Bull juniors Daniel Ricciardo and Jean-Eric Vergne. It was Vergne who was at fault, and received a 10-second penalty that was later rescinded after appeal. It was a lesson learned.

“He called me actually a few weeks later, and apologised,” reveals Korjus. “I remember I was 18, I was going to the beach in Estonia, driving the car with somebody, and some French number was calling me. And it was Jean-Eric calling.”

Kevin Korjus

After fourth place in Monaco, Korjus came third in the opening race at the Nurburgring and then remarkably won race two.

“I got spun on the first lap, and I was 25th and last after three corners, but good pace and good timing with the pitstop. It eventually started raining last two laps as well actually, and I managed to win from last place.”

One of Parry’s backers in his career was Sport Wales, the national development and funding body for sport in his home country. He says it was “so influential” in his career, and using its facilities and focus on the physical side of performance not only guided his vision for PPM but also led to him moving to live in Cardiff’s Sophia Gardens where Sport Wales is based.

It’s outside of race weekends where Parry says most of PPM’s work is done with its clients, with FIA Formula 3 racers Nazim Azman and Oliver Rasmussen and Formula Regional European Championship rookie Joshua Dufek its focus in single-seaters with Caldwell coached through F4, FREC and FIA F3 before he ‘graduated’ to Formula 2 this year with Alpine and Infinity’s support.

“We do all the testing. The testing is actually where the most of the work is, and very much the race weekend is all about just keeping those cues up. So in a test perspective there could be a certain area you needed to work on, you worked on a cue with them in terms of whether it’s as simple as ‘this particular corner, make sure when you’re feeling the level of grip you’re turning in late enough, you’re not creeping into the corner too early’. Just this stuff.

“But then you’re utilising those things you’ve learned in the testing through the race weekend. But it’s obviously a very short snippet of information there because firstly the environment changes very quickly from qualifying to the racing, so the approach is very different because with qualifying it’s that one-lap, ultimate pace, and then the race is about managing traffic, all the cars, overtaking and track position and stuff.

“It’s a small snippet of information [we deliver to them], but those are the main things what we do attending, is the driver gains all the information from the test, then it’s all about executing that information from the test into the race weekend.

“So then our job is a lot more simpler in that sense. It’s just about keeping the driver [calm], making sure they’re managed there in terms of everything around them then. Making sure, even the simple stuff, like drinking enough water and having an effective warm-up before the race and then keeping them calm and relaxed and ultimately enjoying the racing as well; that’s always the best way to get performance out of them too.”

Both Korjus and Parry emphasise how much they wish they had equivalent one-to-one support, and over a decade on from when their car racing careers began, “the guys are ultimate professionals even at the age of 14, 15 now [at car racing’s entry level]” according to Parry and “they’re fucking on it” describes Korjus. So driver coaching companies now focus on that, without dominating the little free time young drivers have to still keep up an academic education or a paying job or anything that would be considered a more ‘traditional’ lifestyle than racing.

“The fantastic thing with motorsport is ultimately you’re learning so much as a young driver,” Parry says enthusiastically.

“Whether that’s motorsport-specific or just life in general. Look at the different people that we’ve got here, within this Argenti Motorsport tent [in the British F4 paddock]. Say Aiden Neate, he has to engage with [lots of people], at different levels of almost intelligence he is as well. You’ve got engineers who have been to university and they’re very much hanging on to your feedback to then adjust the car.

“Motorsport is an expensive learning place to be, but ultimately it’s one of the best lessons you can learn as a youngster: to engage, communicate, how to effectively use the people around you. You’ve got your mechanics, engineers, data engineers, tyre guy, you’ve got all these different people, all these different roles within it that you’ve got to kind of maximise each individual. Driver coaches, physios, managers, you’ve got everything. So you’ve got to be able to communicate with them all effectively, and it’s all different types of people. You won’t get that in a school. Ultimately maybe I’ve got a biased opinion to a degree because I love the sport.”

Photo: Zak Mauger/GP3 Series Media Service.

“You’d have everyone in the same same age, same setting [at school],” Parry adds. “It’s all about learning in that sense of everything’s on a whiteboard etc, whereas this is real life. This is very much how do you maximise the people around you. I mean it’s one of the greatest skillsets you can learn, isn’t it? How to talk and communicate effectively with various people in different roles and different capacities.”

School, at least in Britain, is usually delivered in a one-to-many format where a teacher gives out information and a group of students consume it with some relation back to assess if they have learned it. But racing has a full two-way communication flow, and as Parry says it’s the ability to maximise that – in addition to learning about driving and the car – that can make as much different to your ability to win a race. Look to F1, and it’s the drivers who have been able to maximise the people around them and help lift the team such as Lewis Hamilton and Michael Schumacher that have gone on to find that extra level of performance when the margins are tight.

There’s a danger that drivers become mono-focused on achieving their motorsport dream, particularly when it doesn’t work out, but Parry knows the lessons of racing have enough applications outside of the driving seat for further down the line.

“I go back to that lessons learned, there’s so much that you can correlate down to everyday life. Look at me for example. Obviously I stayed within motorsport, but I’m in a completely different form of life, and still all those skillsets when I was younger put me in a position now to be able to do what I do and still be involved very heavily in motorsport on lots of different capacities as well. Whether it’s driver coach, driver manager, just life coach in general. I think it’s all been very much related.”

Aside from the obvious, his McLaren F1 test, there are two highlights for Parry in his motorsport career. The first, from his time driving, is his FR NEC title. And the second, from his time coaching, is Caldwell’s first FIA F3 win at Barcelona in 2021.

“Winning NEC with the guys at Fortec, with Alex [Ridge], he was my engineer then. Ben Salter, who was the other engineer. That team dynamic was really, really good, and that was a mega year. We had some really good standouts.

“We should have won Pau too, we had a really good working relationship and the year was mega in general. So I’d still go back to that as well as that’s a great if you wanted to look at the accumulation of the results and the season. Like that one special moment, of course the McLaren Autosport Award, but that whole build up from the whole season, winning the championship with guys that I really respected was probably still very much a standout. I learned a lot from Alex, particularly, Matt Howson as well who we had as the driver coach. It was a special team.  When I look back at that, that was a key moment in terms of my learning stage on and off-track.”

And an explanation of why Caldwell’s win, in the end his only one from two years in the series before stepping up to F2, also means so much.

“In a coaching perspective, winning the first round of FIA F3 last year was a pretty special moment because of all of the hard work that went into that. We had came off quite a difficult year with Trident in 2020, and he managed to really piece together – even from that off-step, straight away in the race, he actually ended up winning the race.

“It was a really solid weekend and he came away P2 in the points. It was just a combination of all of the hard work over the course of the winter. And we obviously came there better prepared than everyone else, and of course Prema are fantastic, and we all know it too. Olli did an unbelievable job that weekend, actually I don’t think got enough praise for that weekend himself, just in his driving, his positioning. There was that big accident in the race, and he managed to avoid that and calculate that well and it was a really strong race from him, mega pace. So that was probably a standout moment, all that work [amassing]. He’s on like the world stage of being like the top junior guy [that weekend], to win was special definitely.”

Korjus has already described his FR3.5 wins, which along with his Eurocup title are highlights, and unfortunately there wasn’t much to celebrate after that. In his second season he enjoyed being team-mate to the more experience Jules Bianchi at Tech 1, and pleased himself with how he was able to match his pace early on and feature highly in an ultra competitive season for the series. However, and key to what sent Korjus on to a life where he does not race any more, was how his sophomore FR3.5 campaign then unravelled.

Photo: World Series by Renault/DPPI

“The level was amazing, so anyway [round three at] Spa I go to qualifying and I didn’t have any gears. So I start 24th, I go the grid and I didn’t have any clutch. Second day, again something with the car, so zero points. Monaco was still OK, I was P4, Jules was P2. And after that it was just a shocker. My car didn’t shift gears properly, there was some differential issue and until the fourth round I lost close to – I think the maximum was 9kph to Jules on the straight line. I checked the data, and I asked [Tech 1] if they could do anything about it and it went on for three, four rounds. The only way was to buy a new engine. And neither Lotus or me had the money. Like Kevin Magnussen had the problem, he bought the new engine: boom, back in business. I didn’t have the same thing.”

FR3.5 had introduced an all-new car for 2012, and while it proved popular it also had unreliability issues that influenced the career prospects of several drivers over its first two years of use.

“The first year there was a massive issue with the engine. I can’t remember what was the exact condition. But I did the last three rounds with [the Charouz Racing System-run] Lotus, and Marco Sorensen was my team-mate. Before I joined he had won a race. And first race weekend at Hungaroring he was a bit quicker than me, but then Paul Ricard and Barcelona I was quite a lot quicker than him in the dry. So we finished the Barcelona weekend, the season’s finished, then it’s Monday off and Tuesday is the post-season test. They changed the engine on my car, then I think Marlon Stockinger jumps in and he beats Marco by several tenths. First ever time in the car, and Marlon was not a fast driver. And then they’re thinking like ‘man, this guy is a superstar as Marco is normally top three in Barcelona and this guy’s just beat him’.”

Off the back of that, Stockinger was signed by Lotus to be a junior while Korjus was dropped by the team.

“They stopped the data because one car had changed the engine and one didn’t, and it was like 8kph again like the difference in the speed. So Marco stopped the test day, changed his engine, next day’s Marco P1. And on the race weekend he was P11 or P10. And it was just such an unlucky season for me with the wrong time at the wrong place.”

Korjus was able to continue racing as Koiranen moved into GP3 and called upon his services for 2013 (and wanted him for longer than that), then switched to sportscar racing with ART Grand Prix the year after but retains the links to his old team.

“That’s where I met Matt. I hadn’t driven single-seaters for one-and-a-half years, but there was one pre-season test and Koiranen was lacking one driver and asked me if I want to come driving. So I said ‘okay, why not’, I did one test day and I met Matt because he was then racing with Koiranen.”

For the pair, the target is still F1 and Caldwell’s recent test – despite him having now moved into Infinity’s driver roster – brings them one step closer to that.

“As neither of us made it to F1, our goal now as management is to get a driver into F1,” Korjus concludes.

The post The GP3 duo who made Caldwell F1 test-ready appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: James Black

Andretti Autosport is best known for racing in IndyCar, but it’s also run the last three Indy Lights champions. As it continues its push to enter F1, we look at other junior single-seater outfits that attempted the same

There’s a possibility that an 11th team will join the Formula 1 grid in the coming years, but the championship is seeking a full manufacturer entry such as Audi rather than the all-American racing outfit that is Andretti Autosport.

Headquartered in Indianapolis, Andretti has over 90 IndyCar wins, is one of the big hitters in the Formula E world championship and also races in the groundbreaking Extreme E series with success. Not only that, but it’s finding the racing stars of the future by competing in Indy Lights and running its own driver development programme.

The list of names to have raced for Andretti is simply incredible, and one any F1 team would be envious of. In fact, its current driver roster is one to look up to as well with 2016 Indianapolis 500 winner Alexander Rossi, former F1 star Romain Grosjean and the record-breaking 22-year-old Colton Herta fronting its IndyCar efforts while in FE it runs the series’ 2021 super rookie Jake Dennis and 2019 Indy Lights champion Oliver Askew. Outside of single-seaters, its off-road programme in XE was able to sign Formula Renault Eurocup race-winner and World Rallycross champion Timmy Hansen.

The high-profile figures working in engineering and team management roles for Andretti also is something to boast about, and of course the team was founded and still run by former McLaren F1 driver and 1991 IndyCar champion Michael Andretti.

At the end of the day, however, it’s looking unlikely that Andretti is going to fulfil his F1 team boss dream. And he wouldn’t be the first to create a title-winning team in open-wheel racing that’s achieved everything but make it to single-seaters’ pinnacle. Here’s 10 teams that tried to join F1, and the impressive number of teams’ titles they won elsewhere.

ART Grand Prix
Titles: GP2 (2005, ’06, ’09 & ’15), GP2 Asia (2008), GP3 (2010, ’11, ’12, ’13, ’15 & ’18), F3 Euro Series (’05, ’06, ’07, ’08 & ’09)

Photo: FIA Formula 2 / Jakob Ebrey Photography

ART GP’s roots come from ASM Formule 3, a team founded by Frederic Vasseur that competed in the French Formula 3 championship. He joined forces with Nicolas Todt and rebranded his squad as it moved into GP2 for 2005, and the rest is history.

Through the 2000s it was the team to beat in continental F3 and quite frequently in GP2 too, running Lewis Hamilton and Nico Hulkenberg to titles in both. Its list of F3 champions also included Romain Grosjean and Jules Bianchi, while in F1’s primary feeder series (which evolved into Formula 2) it made champions of Nico Rosberg, Stoffel Vandoorne, George Russell and Nyck de Vries.

After an uber-successful 2009, ART GP started work on an entry into F1 for the 2011 season. However by summer the financial pressures of both the start-up costs to enter and also those being applied by the global recession meant the French squad withdrew its application to the FIA for a place in F1 and it instead continued its focus on junior single-seater series.

The announcement said ART GP’s F1 “will have to postpone its project until a later date”, but there’s been no pick-up in the decade since and its two lead men have moved on to the F1 paddock in different roles. Vasseur is team principal of Alfa Romeo Racing, while Todt is a driver manager through his All Road Management company.

Super Nova
Titles: Int. F3000 (2000), A1GP (2006-07), Auto GP (2012 & ’13)

Photo: GP2 Series Media Service

In a rather chaotic and comedic interview with Formula Scout, 1990s F1 backmarker Taki Inoue revealed his involvement in the found of the initially Japanese but then Norfolk-based Super Nova team and how it came to conquer the levels below F1.

Its first sniff at the top level was directly linked to Inoue, possibly providing the platform he needed to make his F1 debut, but in partnership with an existing operation in the world championship.

With each year in the 1990s the team grew as a force in International Formula 3000, while also picking up correspondence with struggling F1 entities to see if it could make its way onto the grid. Nothing came to fruition with any of the teams that Super Nova spoke to, and when the FIA opened up F1 to several new teams for 2010 there was strong rumours once again that Norfolk’s finest were interested.

By that point its focus was on keeping its GP2 squad competitive though, as well as racing in the F3000-based Auto GP series. In 2012 the team went global as GP2 absorbed its Asian series into its main F1-supporting championship and Auto GP expanded from its European base to race in Africa, North and South America.

The good times wouldn’t last, and Super Nova ended its time in racing by running the Trulli GP team through the first season of Formula E in 2014-15.

DAMS
Titles: A1GP (2005-06), GP2 Asia (2008-09 & ’11), Auto GP (2010 & ’11), GP2 (2012 & ’14), FR3.5 (2013 & ’14), F2 (2019)

Photo: DAMS

Under its new ownership led by Charles Pic, an entry into F1 is back on the map for a team that in addition to substantial success in Int. F3000 and the series that succeeded it was also the original pacesetter in FE.

In partnership with Renault, DAMS won three teams’ titles in a row and since partnering with Nissan in 2018 has won two ePrix races. While it did get to race in FE once the series was awarded world championship status, it has recently given up operational responsibility of its FE team to Nissan following a season-and-a-half of poor results.

A very long time before that, DAMS sought to race at a world championship level by designing (with Reynard) a car that it could enter into F1 in 1995. A lack of finances prevented the creation under its own name being raced, and by the time it was being tested on track over a year later it was a redundant design in F1’s fast-paced technical world.

Pic, an F1 driver himself, is also involved in the CAP Racing team which holds similar ambitions of moving up the single-seater latter. But having eggs in multiple baskets, and considerable financial clout too, probably won’t be enough to bring him back into the F1 fraternity – particularly when one of DAMS’ F2 rivals is known to be eyeing up F1 right now too…

iSport International
Titles: GP2 (2007), GP2 Asia (2009-10)

Present from the start of GP2 in 2005, iSport had most of its success with Timo Glock as he won two races in a half-season with the team in 2006 and then won the title in 2007. The team continued winning races until its place on the grid was taken by Russian Time in 2013, but a year later it was back in the series as it became the operation behind the Russian squad.

Its team founder Paul Jackson announced its F1 interest in April 2009 when the FIA revealed the tender process for new teams to join under a £30 million budget cap. But with that budget cap not actually being applied it killed off the bids to join of iSport and many other teams, with former GP2 team Campos Racing ending up as one of the three teams being chosen to race in F1. However Campos, which had sold its top junior single-seater operation to Addax, had its planned ‘Campos Meta’ F1 team collapse pre-season and instead Hispania Racing Team made it onto the grid as a phoenix of Campos.

While iSport only returned to GP2 for the one year, Campos’s own 2014 return continued into the series’ evolution to F2 and it still races there today. What’s more, it’s once again linked to a bid to become F1’s 11th team.

Carlin
Titles: FR3.5 (2011), GP3 (2014), British F4 (2015, ’16, ’17 & ’20), Indy Lights (’16), F2 (2018)

Photo: LAT Images / British F3 International Series

Trevor Carlin’s eponymous outfit was created in the late 1990s and has actually made it to professional single-seater racing as it ran in IndyCar from 2018 to 2021, and is supporting Juncos Hollinger Racing’s entry this year, while in FE its services were called upon to run the Mahindra team in the championship’s inaugural season.

Back in 2006 it lodged its application to join F1 for 2008, at a time when it was racing in Formula Renault 3.5 (the rival to GP2 in the secondary tier of single-seaters) and British F3 under its own name while running Lebanon’s car in A1GP.

It too hinged its F1 hopes on a reduction of costs being enforced in the championship, but was confident it had the infrastructure required to compete and also that is financial model at the time was sustainable enough to be looked upon by the FIA as suitable to F1.

Ultimately the Carlin to F1 story didn’t go any further than paperwork and factory preparations, with the team not chosen by the FIA. But it’s windtunnel experience and move to America, first in Indy Lights and then in IndyCar where it had to do its own damper development and develop the Dallara DW-12 car, makes it one of the best prepared entities in junior single-seater racing for a present-day step into F1.

Durango
Best result in teams’ championships: 3rd in 2003 Int. F3000

Last year Durango ran Enzo Trulli to the Formula 4 United Arab Emirates title in partnership with Cram Motorsport, but its racing focus in the past was usually at the level just below F1 while it occasionally tried to make it into that series too.

Its first serious bid was in 1997, when it had a car designed to support its plans, but months of work went to waste when contracts couldn’t be signed and it returned its focus to Int. F3000. Durango tried again to make it to F1 in 2010 and ’11, with its outlandish bids attracting the support of none other than 1997 F1 world champion Jacques Villeneuve who wanted to put his name on the team.

The FIA said no to the GP2 race-winning outfit, which soon disappeared entirely before reappearing in single-seaters some years later via Il Barone Rampante founder Giuseppe Cipriani (pictured above) in Formula V8 3.5. He scored twice as a single-car entry in the 2016 season, then the team vanished again along with its F1 ambitions.

Epsilon Euskadi
Titles: FR3.5 (2005), FR2.0 Italy Winter Series (2006), FR Eurocup (2007), FR West European Cup (2009)

Photo: Renault Sport / DPPI

There’s a very messy financial story behind Euskadi, which did actually end up manufacturing its own top-class prototype sportscar and had a windtunnel model of its planned 2011 F1 car even though the FIA hadn’t given the team a grid spot.

For 2010 it had also bidded to join and got onto the reserve list, but it wasn’t oversight from the FIA to choose other teams as scandal emerged around the team in the years after. The team founder Joan Villadelprat went to court under allegations of corruption and negligent management of public funding, as his team had received money from the local Basque Country government, and administrators had to take over Euskadi (then known as EPIC Racing).

In addition to its manufacturing capabilities and windtunnel, the team was for a few years a big-hitter in junior single-seaters. It ran Robert Kubica to the 2005 FR3.5 title then claimed two FR Eurocup crowns with Brendon Hartley and Albert Costa before its shaky finances caught up with it.

BCN Competicion
Best result in teams’ championships: 2nd in 2004 Int. F3000

Photo: GP2 Series Media Service

Another Spanish outfit, BCN was harbouring F1 ambitions as far back as 2004 but it wasn’t until the FIA’s opening of an application process in 2006 to join the grid two years after that did the team commit to F1 as an idea.

Unlike many on this list, it actually found success hard to come by in the junior single-seater series it competed in – namely Int. F3000, GP2 and Spanish F4, but its boss Enrique Scalabroni was always thinking big and in 2004 there was an opportunity to be best of the rest behind the dominant Vitantonio Liuzzi in F3000 and BCN driver Enrico Toccacelo took it, winning one race and coming second in the points.

When the next bidding process to join the F1 grid came about ahead of 2010, BCN was out of contention as it had sold to former F1 driver Tiago Monteiro, relocated to Portugal and become Ocean Racing Technology. He described the team as “under construction” when he purchased it late in 2008, which is no position to be in for a wannabe F1 entrant if it’s already racing in GP2. In its four years as Ocean, the team won two GP2 races and also spent a year in GP3.

Shannon Racing
Best result in teams’ championships: 10th in 1996 Int. F3000

Irish-registered and Italian-funded, Shannon rocked up to F3000 in 1996 by buying out the Danielson team and entering the first two rounds with future sportscar legend Tom Kristensen and Italian F3 champion Luca Rangoni.

Kristensen did both the Nurburgring race and the Pau Grand Prix with the team, taking pole but retiring in the latter, while Rangoni only did round two in Pau and finished sixth in what would be his sole appearance of the season.

At the same time, Shannon was getting its fingers into F1 by buying into the struggling Forti Corse team which was frequently failing to qualify for races. But by the second half of the season there was no Forti F1 team left and instead a big argument over Shannon’s involvement in its downfall and ownership status of the Italian brand as founder Guido Forti had tried to take back control from an organisation that now had major fraud allegations against it.

All the while there was a Shannon presence in Italian F3 (although not as a team entry as it were in F3000), and then an attempt to get into F1 under its own name after the Forti chapter had been closed legally and financially. It failed.

Litespeed

Photo: Readro

A part-time British F3 entrant in 2008 with its own car, although one admittedly it had not designed itself but rather bought from the people who conceived it, Litespeed was early to the mark in announcing its interest in joining F1 in 2010 and its bid actually attracted some serious attention.

Its four weekends in British F3’s National Class in its rookie season resulted in a best overall finish of 16th and a class podium, while in 2009 it ran the full campaign with one car and had a second do three events. Full-time entrant Victor Correa claimed a National Class win by coming 12th in race one at Hockenheim, while one-off team-mate Aaron Steele got a class podium in 16th place at Snetterton. Litespeed also supported Jay Bridger in the top class, and he had a best result of seventh.

Former F1 technical director Mike Gascoyne supported its F1 bid, and its car design was touted as going to be ready by the time the FIA made its decision in June 2009 on who would be joining the grid. What occurred instead by that date was Litespeed made public its plan to race under the name of a fellow Norfolk-based brand, Lotus, and later on Malaysian backing turned that pipedream into a reality. So while the infrastructure of Litespeed’s bid was effectively given approval by the FIA, it was in fact much like Campos’s collapsed plans as it was ‘Lotus Racing’ that was racing in 2010 instead.

The post 10 junior single-seater teams that tried, and failed, to enter F1 appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photos: Formula Motorsport Limited

After a breakthrough 2021 in F3, Charouz Racing System is on the up. Roger Gascoigne paid them a visit

Tucked away behind a Ford service centre and a petrol station halfway between Prague and Pilsen in the Czech Republic is perhaps not where you would expect to find a race-winning team in both Formula 2 and FIA Formula 3.

But the unassuming location is home to Charouz Racing System’s 3,500 square-metre engineering facility. As team principal Bob Vavrik notes with a smile: “It might not be Maranello but it is also not a 20-year-old garage.”

Formula Scout sat down with Vavrik at the headquarters during the winter to find out more about the team’s history and ambitions for the future.

As we talk, Vavrik is busy fielding calls from potential drivers for the team’s seats for 2022. On the back of a best-ever fifth place in the teams’ championship in F3 last year, demand is high.

“We’ve been talking to more than 10 drivers; it will come less but it’s still more than the seats you have. In F2, we have had good results in the past, so although this season didn’t look so good for us there’s still a lot of interest.”

But pitted against some of the biggest names in junior single-seater racing, is fifth place the best position it can realistically achieve?

“Of course, we want to win the F3 championship but you need to be honest with yourself and to be objective,” replies Vavrik. “The dream is always stronger than the mind!

“With this team, I think we are able to fight for the championship, I’m pretty sure. I don’t want to say it will be next year as, of course, we also need to be lucky enough to put together a good package.”

Photos: Roger Gascoigne

Getting the right mix of drivers is crucial. “If we had had three drivers like Logan [Sargeant] last season, then we would already have been fighting for the top three easily, because we had one driver who scored nearly all the points for us to be P5.”

So, with three times the points “you are easily fighting for the championship”.

“If you start something like this, you need to really survive in the category for at least five years to get the results. You learn how the people work in the organisation, you need to know who to talk to, who to ask.”

The larger teams will inevitably attract the most highly-rated and best-financed drivers but “the top three teams have only nine seats [between them], not everybody can fit into nine seats”.

“We are a small team, we need to put together the performance of the driver and the budget. Not all drivers can fulfil both requirements. [But] once you are in the top three you can ask for more money.

“For us it is not a question of how much of the budget is left for the owner of the team. Toni Charouz doesn’t race to make a profit. However, we are no charity, so we have a budget and it is fully spent, but not to make Toni more rich. For him, it’s to enjoy it because he’s a fanatic of motorsport and race cars. Racing is his passion.”

Team owner, Antonin (Toni) Charouz, is himself a former racing driver who began hillclimbing in his native Czechoslovakia back in 1975 at the wheel of a Fiat 127.

He won the “Golden Steering Wheel”, for being the most successful Czech racing driver of the year five times between 1985 and 1992, and in the mid-1980s competed in the World and European Touring Car Championships at the wheel of a Toyota Corolla GT, winning his class at Brno in 1987. Vavrik recounts how his boss’s driving career turned into team ownership.

“Toni started with Skodas and Zastavas and all these little cars in the Czech championship and that’s how he built up his own team. They were working from his own house in his garage. Once the Iron Curtain came down [in 1989] we could go and race outside [the country].”

Vavrik himself has been involved with Charouz since 1995 although “I can’t remember exactly how I started working with him, we just started and then got closer and closer”.

The team moved into single-seaters with Formula BMW, and achieved success in Auto GP and International Formula Master where it ran Charouz’s son Jan to the 2006 title.

Charouz ran the Czech team in A1GP, taking one victory with Tomas Enge at the wheel. In the second season, the team also took over the running of the Brazilian entry owned by Emerson Fittipaldi. Charouz’s relationship with the Fittipaldi family is deep and long-lasting, with his grandsons having raced for the team in recent years.

The team participated three times in the top class of the Le Mans 24 Hours, and as Aston Martin Racing Eastern Europe in 2009 finished fourth as well as winning the Le Mans Series outright with Charouz, Enge and Stefan Mucke at the wheel of its Lola-Aston Martin B09/60 LMP1 car. At the same time, the team was active in rallying, GT sportscars and one-make saloons.

“I think there was a season when we had around 20 cars from different categories, which was pretty busy,” comments Vavrik.

The next step was Formula Renault 3.5 in 2011, in a tie-up with the Gravity Sports Management driver development company helmed by Eric Bouiller that was intrinsincly tied to the then-owners of what is now the Alpine F1 team. That meant it was entered as Lotus for six years, even after the brand left F1. Charouz won both titles in the series’ final year, when it was known as Formula V8 3.5 after Renault’s withdrawl of support, with Pietro Fittipaldi in 2017.

The introduction of a new chassis to F2 then provided the trigger for the team to make a sideways move, and with Ferrari Driver Academy branding on its cars after ending its Lotus association.

“It was the most logical step because we had the team, the facilities, everything was just ready to do this sport. And of course, FV8 3.5 was already a really high category from the professional side,” Vavrik explains.

Charouz had failed to “get in on the first go” when applying to enter what was previously GP2, but as FV8 3.5’s champion team this time they were accepted “because they [F2 promoter Formula Motorsport] are looking for a team which is stable in motorsport, and also, let’s say, credible” with not just their presentation and history, “but also budget-wise”.

Antonio Fuoco and Louis Deletraz formed Charouz’s line-up for its rookie F2 season, which returned it to the F1 support paddock after 14 years away having contested GP2’s predecessor International Formula 3000 in 2003.

Charouz had been in discussions with Deletraz for some time: “Fuoco was part of the Deletraz deal, somehow, because FDA supported Fuoco but Charouz also supported Fuoco, and part of the deal was also Deletraz.”

Initially there was no direct link with Ferrari, “but then we made a link,” adds Vavrik.

Despite taking two wins with Fuoco, including a one-two in the Monaco sprint race, the FDA connection lasted only a year after “Massimo Rivola, the driver manager for the FDA guys, left FDA to go to MotoGP, and then came the idea to work together with Sauber”.

The 2019 tie-up with Sauber (the Swiss F1 operation now racing as Alfa Romeo Racing) seemed to establish Charouz as a major player on all rungs of the F1 ladder, as it entered the new FIA F3 Championship and also partnered with Formula 4 team US Racing. Most teams in FIA F3 had contested the GP3 series it replaced, but Charouz had no experience of single-seaters’ tertiary tier bar its FMaster campaign 13 years prior.

Photo: Zak Mauger / FIA Formula 2

Charouz in A1GP

But at the time, Antonin Charouz heralded the Sauber deal as “the beginning of an exciting new chapter in our team’s history” and was confident in its F3 entry. So why did the team decide to join the fledgeling series?

Well, with Charouz working alongside US Racing in F4, the “whole idea was to generate at least a few [drivers] from all of them, who would continue with us” into F3 to then progress to F2.

But the expansion proved more difficult than Vavrik expected: “From FV8 3.5 to F2 was simple because it was just going from two cars from two cars, but to get another three cars, means another five drivers, five sponsors or fathers, and it’s a mess. But once we grabbed this also on the side, it was not a big step [technically], but from the human resources perspective, it was much more difficult for us.”

However, the relationship with Sauber became, in Vavrik’s words, “crazy big, because we thought it will be more serious, but the deal went up and then down, not in the best way for either side, but more for us because it cost us some money”.

According to Vavrik, the relationship foundered due to “a combination of factors; both performance and finance. It was not based on our results, of course they’re looking for performance, but they’re looking also for longer and better co-operation, and it’s always easier if you have someone next to your door than from so far [away]”.

Vavrik is reluctant to discuss the divorce in more detail as “it’s still a bit fragile, a bit sensitive”.

It’s clear that expectations of the relationship quickly diverged, with Vavrik “expecting kind of more technical support from them and this was never going to happen”, and like with the FDA the partnership lasted just one season.

The tie-up with US Racing, however, proved extremely successful. The team took Lirim Zendeli and Theo Pourchaire to the ADAC F4 title in 2018 and ’19 respectively, and Zendeli and Pourchaire’s F4 team-mate Roman Stanek both went on to race for Charouz in F3.

Photo: Malcolm Griffiths / FIA F3

Photo: ADAC/Gruppe C Photography

There’s no involvement in F4 anymore post-Sauber, but “we didn’t split [with US] for good; we still speak to each other. it’s a cooperation which is more about friendship, because Toni has been a very good friend of Gerhard for ages.”

With F2 and F3 heavily populated at the top by drivers from F1 junior teams, is it still possible for a team running a line-up without that associated support to compete for titles?

“All these academies are supported by people from these F1 teams, who are dedicated just to search for the driver, take care of them and bring them to the next category. The drivers get support from Alpine, Ferrari or whoever. Then he goes to F4, F3 and of course, it’s much easier for these guys.

‘If you have a look on the results, where was Hitech in 2020? Where were we this year? We came to the last race just one point behind Hitech and we finished one point ahead, and that’s only with one driver scoring points. So, you have straightaway the answer. If you have the drivers, you have the results.”

Fighting against better financed and larger teams requires tight control of budgets. Charouz for example was forced to part company with David Beckmann midway through the 2021 F2 season for budgetary reasons.

“If he stayed with us for the rest of the season, we would have been able to make good results, even victories or podiums. We really liked the guy and we worked well together but you need to think of the future, to be sure that your decision doesn’t kill the team.”

The compact nature of Charouz does provide greater flexibility, Vavrik believes, and some drivers flourish in the more family-like atmosphere. Enzo Fittipaldi, younger brother of Pietro, even moved to Prague after joining the team for F3 last year. He ended 2021 in its F2 line-up, and remains there for the upcoming season alongside former Esports star Cem Bolukbasi.

Over winter HWA Racelab left F2 and F3, and rumours often swirl that teams such as Charouz may end up on the market.

“Toni doesn’t plan to leave but, of course, he is a businessman,” Vavrik reassures. “As he says, ‘everything is for sale, if somebody can come with some offer’. We are not on the way to leave, but anything can happen tomorrow, you never know.”

In recent years, Antonin Charouz has exited some of his other business activities, ostensibly to be able to devote more time and funds to the racing “where his heart is”.

And as mentioned at the begining, that heart lies in a workshop in the Czech countryside. Is being based away from motorsport’s traditional heartlands, such as Italy and the UK where many of its rivals are, a disadvantage?

“To be honest, I don’t see any advantage or disadvantage in being based in the Czech Republic,” he says. It helps with logistics that “we are in the middle of the Europe, so everywhere you go it’s not so far”.

“The team draws on talented engineers and mechanics from across Europe, and even beyond. We have like six or seven nationalities, sometimes even from Russia or Japan. It’s like a football team, you’re also looking for the best players, no matter the nationality. We have Czech guys, and even more for this season but it’s not just a question of grabbing some Czech guys and making a team.”

“Of course, I am a big patriot at heart. We are all fighting as a Czech team. Being Czech myself, I feel I do something for our flag. When we are there it’s always nice if the Czech boys come from a little country and kick the arses of all the English or French teams in a sport which they think is theirs.”

What have been the highlights so far in Vavrik’s varied career in motorsport, including almost 17 years with Charouz?

Photo: LAT Images

“All of us liked the LMP1 times and cars. It was Toni’s idea, he brought that together with Prodrive.”

During the successful Aston Martin project, Vavrik spent two years living in the English market town Banbury where Prodrive, F1 team Haas and Formula Regional entrant Arden are based. Another highlight was far more recent.

“The Monaco F2 race where we had the double podium was also something very special and I’m not sure how many times in your life you can get something like this. And in your first season in F2, that was also something really good.”

And disappointments?

“I don’t think I have any. Of course, it’s a sport – you have wins and losses and the human brain is geared to remember only the positives. Maybe it’s different from the real life or financial side of the business, but from the sporting side you can have only an optimistic view. I am first and foremost a sportsman. When you love it, you do it from your heart.”

Top Charouz Racing System stars

A list of drivers who raced for the team during their junior single-seater careers. Results with Charouz in italics
Antonio Fuoco – 5th in 2021 World Endurance Trophy for GTEAm, 3rd in 2016 GP3 – 7th in 2018 F2
Matthieu Vauxiviere – 3rd in ’21 WEC, 3rd in ’21 Le Mans 24H – 2nd in 2015 FR3.5
Callum Ilott – currently 19th in 2022 IndyCar, 2nd in 2020 F2 – 11th in 2019 F2, 6th in ’19 Macau GP
Marco Sorensen – 2016 & 2019-20 WEC GTE champion, 11th in 2014 GP2 – 6th in 2012 FR3.5
Jan Charouz – 2009 LMS champion, 4th in ’09 Le Mans 24H, 12th in 2006-07 A1GP, ’06 Int. FMaster champion
Rene Binder – ’21 ALMS champion, 7th in ’21 ELMS, 28th in ’18 IndyCar – 4th in 2017 FV8 3.5
Pietro Fittipaldi – 23rd in ’20 F1, 15th in ’19 DTM, 26th in ’18 IndyCar – 2017 FV8 3.5 champion
Lirim Zendeli – 17th in ’21 F2 – 18th in ’19 FIA F3, 2018 ADAC F4 champion
Logan Sargeant – 3rd in ’20 FIA F3, 3rd in ’19 Macau GP – 7th in ’21 FIA F3
Jaroslav Janis – 3rd in ’06 FIA GT, 14th in ’05 SF – 8th in 2003 Int. F3000, 3rd in ’06 Int. FMaster, 12th in ’06-07 A1GP

Further reading
Why Pizzi believes his ‘unexpected’ FIA F3 move with Charouz is the right step
F2 testing hinted at who will be at the front, but F3 did the opposite
Why Sauber now has its own junior team [February 2019]

The post Charouz: the independent Czech team with big ambitions in F2 and F3 appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: IGTWC

The young driver Aston Martin will be calling upon for post-season F1 testing is Nick Yelloly. He may be better known as one of BMW’s factory racing drivers, but he’s also pretty handy in a single-seater

At an age when many drivers now are already testing and some even racing in Formula 4, Nick Yelloly was karting competitively for the first time. That late start didn’t slow him down, as once he reached senior class karts he was getting strong results in the national championships and was soon already putting his eyes onto Formula Renault 2.0.

Six years after that he was a paid member of a Formula 1 team, racing against and beating some of the greats of modern-day motorsport on the way, and next month he gets to show the value of his behind-the-scenes work at Aston Martin by getting behind the wheel of its AMR21 in the official F1 young driver test.

We spoke to Yelloly about his route to becoming Aston Martin’s go-to man for F1 tests, from growing up “watching Ricciardo, Verge and Wickens, and then being able to mix it with them” in FR3.5 with two underdog teams, becoming a GP3 benchmark by accident, not showing “how competitive I could be through a whole season until I actually moved to GTs”, knocking on the door of BMW several times and winning one of the most prestigious races in the world last year.

You can listen to the podcast below, or find it on Breaker, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, RadioPublic, Castbox, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

The post Podcast: How Aston Martin’s F1 tester Nick Yelloly forged his career appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photos: Fotospeedy

Had Andy Soucek changed his answer to a single question during his junior career, then his future may have had a different look – and led to an F1 seat currently occupied by a driver whose answer went the other way

Valtteri Bottas’s future as team-mate to Lewis Hamilton at the Mercedes-AMG Formula 1 team is under more scrutiny than ever going into the Hungarian Grand Prix, often the peak of ‘silly season’ for contract negotiations before the summer break, and rumours swirl that 2018 Formula 2 champion George Russell will be promoted from Williams to take his place.

But could Mercedes, with one small decision change, have ended up with an F2 champion in contention for a seat far earlier?

Let’s rewind the clock back to 2001.

Spanish karter Andy Soucek is stepping up from the junior ranks to the senior machinery, but at the same time has found the time to debut in single-seater racing in a series called Formula Novis Portugal.

“It was sort of between a Formula Ford and a Formula 3 car,” Soucek recalls of the cars used in the series. “It was tubular steel chassis, it wasn’t carbon [bar bodywork]. It had a Ford engine with around about 200bhp, but it had front wing, rear wing, and the laptimes were about six seconds slower than F3, so it was already a quite good car.

“There I started when I was 15 years old, so I actually combined karting and Formula Novis. And at that time, starting when you were 15 was very early. Nowadays you have kids in Formula 4 who are 14, 15, 16, and we see that as normal. Back then it was like everybody said we were crazy to start so early, but it paid off and it was the right thing to do. It was a good learning school for me.

“I didn’t struggle too much to adapt. For sure the first few laps were a disaster. I was looking at the gearbox, I didn’t know how to change gears. I only did a few tests before. It was all very new for me. But it was a good learning and in the end I ended up doing some pretty good results at the end of the season, and that was good preparation for F3.”

After finishing off his karting career at the end of that year, he jumped up to Spanish F3 with Racing Engineering.

“Early times [for F3] when I was only 16. I did F3 four years, was always sort of fighting for top spots. But I won it finally in 2005, and that allowed me to do a test with Toyota Formula 1 at Paul Ricard. It was for winning the championship, which had Toyota engines and was backed by Toyota back then. That was my first experience in a F1 car, when I was only 18 years old. It was pretty cool.”

Soucek took pole on his F3 debut but didn’t make the podium as a rookie. Another pole, along with three podiums, left him fourth in the points in season two and he repeated that position a year later. When he finally hit top form in 2005, with Llusia Racing, he won three races and claimed two poles.

After testing Toyota’s V10-powered pole-claiming car, Soucek moved into Formula Renault 3.5 and found success far quicker, winning from pole on his fourth start at Istanbul Park and leading the standings after the penultimate round…

“But then it was weird, because they gave points back to some drivers, Pastor Maldonado and Borja Garcia who were disqualified at Misano and Spa-Francorchamps, and they ended up just a few points in front of me. So I ended up fourth in the championship. But I was leading the championship up until then.”

In the Barcelona title decider “a small incident at the start” damaged Soucek’s nosecone and he spent four laps in the pits as it was repaired. The resultant non-score cost him the title regardless of the outcome of penalty appeals, with Alx Danielsson taking the most remarkable of crowns.

It wasn’t all negativity for Soucek, as after the race the Spaniard (of Austrian descent) was approached by that year’s Dubai 24 Hours winner about working together. Or in Soucek’s words: “I was offered a contract by Toto Wolff, there at Barcelona.”

Photo: Jean Michel Le Meur / DPPI

Beyond winning sportscar races, and coming second in the Austrian Rally Championship, what was Wolff up to at the time?

“He was managing Eric Salignon, and a few other guys. I think Bottas maybe not then, but a few years later became his driver too [early in 2008 after a tip-off from Motopark boss Timo Rumpfkeil].

“And we said no. At that time I didn’t need it – that’s what I thought, we thought – my management and my father and myself. When you look back, and you say ‘look, I should have obviously taken the contract because maybe most probably I would be in F1’. Yeah, for sure, but anything can happen and life changes very quickly.”

Three years later, Wolff would buy into the Williams F1 team and become part of its decision-making team, not that Soucek could have known that in 2006.

“Yeah, but it was a sort of a highlight in my career, because I didn’t take it. And then every time I meet Toto, I see him again, he reminds me of that, in a fun way.”

However the decision would actually bite when they crossed paths again as Wolff established himself and Bottas in F1…

“In 2007 and ‘08 I did GP2 for two years. And it was sort of difficult,” Soucek says. “I got some podiums and sometimes it was good, but most of the times I was not really right up there. I struggled, and it was quite frustrating because I don’t think I ever had the package to perform, and I was always beating my team-mate, or when I had a very good team-mate like Alvaro Parente I was at the same level. But I never really could enjoy it the way I wanted, so it was frustrating.

“I thought the team made a big difference, because when I tested with ART Grand Prix at the beginning of the year I was the fastest guy on track and the car felt amazing, so I understood there was a big difference in the team.

Photo: GP2 Media Service

“It’s true with DPR we started really bad, but then we ended up really well and we were one of the top teams in the last part of the season.”

After failing to score across the first nine rounds of his rookie season, and sapping all career momentum, Soucek laid 26th in the standings. In the final two rounds he claimed two podiums and vaulted up 10 places in the championship.

He missed the opening round of the 2008 season, before joining Super Nova and DPR as a stand-in for injured drivers. That opened the door to stay with Super Nova for longer, and this time he came 14th in the standings.

“After that, Jonathan Palmer and his [MotorSport Vision] Formula 2 idea came about, with equal cars, same championship, same mechanics, same engineers for everybody. Rotating like a single structure, with no teams involved. And I said to my dad, ‘look if I’m really good enough, I should win this’. Because if all the cars are the same and there are no team differences and so on, if I don’t win then it’s game over. So we went, I won, already two races before the end of the season. 51 points. And I did another F1 test, with Williams. That was the Young Driver Test. Everybody was there, Daniel Ricciardo was there with Red Bull, Bianchi, Brendon Hartley, Paul di Resta, Gary Paffett, Mike Conway.

“I did one of the best laps I remember in my career, probably, and finished P1 two tenths ahead of P2. And that was good enough to gain a lot of respect from all the F1 teams.”

Williams’ director of engineering Patrick Head heaped praise on Soucek, telling the press that he would have a future in F1 and that his feedback on the FW31 he drove was “interesting” for the team.

“So I got offered a contract by Williams as a third driver. And soon after that, a few days, I went into 2010 thinking ‘well, that’s great news’. And I remember Patrick Head calling me and saying ‘Andy, I’m deeply sorry, but Toto Wolff just brought some shares in the teams and he wants Valtteri to be our third driver’.”

Soucek “never signed the document” before new shareholder Wolff placed Masters of F3 winner Bottas in Williams as test driver. He was promoted to a reserve driver role and then a race seat by 2013, establishing himself so well that his manager Wolff – by then team principal of Mercedes-AMG – signed him to replace retiring world champion Nico Rosberg for 2017.

It’s not hard to imagine Soucek being in Bottas’s position had he said yes to Wolff in 2006, quite possibly to the point of making it to a Mercedes F1 seat alongside Hamilton and winning grands prix. But alas…

“So that was very frustrating, because then I had to find something else, and that was difficult because at the time everybody wanted some budget, and we didn’t quite have it. So we ended up at Virgin Racing [as test and reserve driver], which was a new team. Richard Branson was behind it, we thought it was a good option to start my career in F1, but the car was made only in CFD, too small fuel tank to start.

“And they had so many issues. They promised me a test that never happened, because they always put their race drivers in and I was there just waiting for my opportunity that never came. So at some point I was also frustrated that I didn’t get into the car, I didn’t get to drive. I was doing a lot of simulator work, but that was not really what I wanted.

“In the meanwhile, I was doing Superleague Formula too. I did a DTM test, which Toto actually invited me to, with Mercedes.”

Soucek drove for the clubs run by Eurointernational in SLF in 2008, then returned to the series in the middle of 2010. He claimed a podium for Sporting Lisbon at Brands Hatch, and one for Flamengo at Ordos, then ended up in commentary for the non-championship Beijing street circuit round. He returned to the cockpit in a de Villota Motorsport-run car in 2011, before the series closed after two rounds. Despite talks with IndyCar teams, that marked the end of his single-seater career.

“Then I said: ‘Look, what can I do now? Because from here, there is no chance to get a drive in F1, because all the drives are taken’,” Soucek recalls.

“When I was talking to F1 teams they were all praising me very high and speaking well about me, but they said ‘we need money’. So I said to myself, let’s try something different. I saw GT3 was growing a lot, and a lot of manufacturers were getting involved.

“I did a test with Boutsen Ginion with the McLaren at Zolder, which went really well, in the wet. And I loved it. I thought it was nice to have a roof on top of my head for the second time, because I already tested the DTM car. But it felt different, obviously. A lot more movement and so on, weight transfer. But it was nice. And that’s how I started. Two years with McLaren, and then Aston Martin, then Bentley for five years.”

Soucek reunited with ART GP, who he tested for in GP2, and in 2013 came fifth in what’s now the GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup in a McLaren MP4-12C GT3. The team offered him a deal to stay for the next year in a better line-up, and he shared a car with Kevin Korjus and Kevin Estre, which according to Soucek “was really nice, and we had a lot fun too”.

He also drove with success in a Beechdean-run Aston Martin V12 Vantage that year, before becoming a factory driver of Bentley and its development partner M-Sport – better known for its rallying success – from 2015 to 2019.

In five seasons he became one of the brand’s most prolific racers of its 102-year history, and was 11th in Intercontinental GT Challenge and second in GTWCE Endurance in 2017. He was then second in GTWC America in 2019, before Bentley ended its factory motorsport activities and Soucek joined famous Porsche team Lechner Racing in International GT Open.

He’s won two races this year and is second in the points, and caught up with Formula Scout as speculation increased about Bottas being replaced at Mercedes by a F2 champion highly rated by Williams. Ah, hang on, were we supposed to be looking for George Russell for a chat?

More on GT racing’s F1 steals
The story behind one of junior single-seaters’ greatest comebacks
The McLaren super-sub who answered a three-year long ‘what if?’
The junior driver spurned by Renault’s last F1 name change
The underfunded Techeetah beater who had to reset his career
Davide Rigon: Ferrari’s football-famous test driver
Mirko Bortolotti: The Raging Bull whose eyes-open approach has led to racing glory
The European F3 champion making the most of a Mercedes seat

The post The F2 champion who could have ended up in Bottas’s Mercedes seat appeared first on Formula Scout.