Photo: KSP

Alexandre Munoz crowned his French Formula 4 title success with victory in the last race of the season at Le Mans.

After he built his campaign on a pair of double victories in the opening two rounds of the year, this was Munoz’s first win in the four meetings since.

He took the win by just 0.294 seconds over Arthur Dorison, who pipped Jules Roussel to finish second in the championship on countback.

Dorison and Roussel shared the front row of the grid but neither would emerge from the first lap with the lead. Roussel was hit by Rintaro Sato and forced to retire, while Sato – after starting fifth – managed to take the lead in front of Munoz and Dorison as the safety car was deployed.

Munoz took the lead from Sato after the restart, and Dorison followed him through soon afterwards, prior to another safety car intervention following a clash that ended the race of Annabelle Brian.

When the race resumed once more, Munoz pulled away from Dorison, only for his rival to respond later on, setting the fastest lap in the process as he closed the gap. While Dorison couldn’t find a way past Munoz, the bonus point for his fastest lap proved crucial in beating Roussel to be championship runner-up, tied on points but with five victories to Roussel’s two.

Guillaume Bouzar completed the podium, his sixth in the last four rounds. He finishes fifth in the championship as the top rookie, behind Rayan Caretti who came fourth in the final race.

Sato took the chequered flag in fifth but was eventually penalised 31s for causing the contact with Roussel, dropping him to 22nd.

Race results (16 laps)

The post Munoz crowns French F4 season with victory in Le Mans finale appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: KSP

Alexandre Munoz clinched the French Formula 4 title on the penultimate day of the season at Le Mans.

Munoz and his championship rival Jules Roussel both lost places from their second-row starting slots in race one, and would end up finishing sixth and seventh – Munoz passing Roussel to eke out his points lead to 29 points.

Louis Iglesias had no such trouble from pole position and managed to convert it into his maiden win.

He managed to resist the pressure of Rintaro Sato, who leapt from fifth to third at then passed Rafael Perard, who had made similar progress from row three. Guillaume Bouzar was also a forward mover to finish fourth, relegating front row starter Arthur Dorison to fifth.

Malo Bolliet led the reversed-grid race two from start to finish only to receive a five-second penalty for unsporting behaviour that demoted him to fourth and promoted Matteo Giaccardi to a maiden win. Bouzar and Dorison completed the revised top three.

Munoz and Roussel started together on the fourth row. Munoz initially held sixth ahead of his rival, only to fall to ninth in the middle of the race.

Roussel however would make contact with Hugo Herrouin, which would drop him back behind Munoz and ultimately result in a hefty penalty that dropped him to 22nd in the results. For Munoz, fifth at the flag just ahead of Roussel was already enough to secure the title.

Results round-up
Race 1 (19 laps)
1 Louis Iglesias 31m18.705s
2 Rintaro Sato +1.284s
3 Rafael Perard +5.041s
4 Guillaume Bouzar +7.659s
5 Arthur Dorison +10.497s
6 Alexandre Munoz +13.259s
7 Jules Roussel +13.914s
8 Rayan Caretti +14.740s
9 Malo Bolliet +15.440s
10 Matteo Giaccardi +16.356s
Fastest lap: Dorison, 1m37.681s

Race 2 (17 laps)
1 Giaccardi 31m37.728s
2 Bouzar +2.345s
3 Dorison +4.008s
4 Bolliet +4.425s
5 Munoz +5.165s
6 Iglesias +5.949s
7 Romeo Leurs +7.249s
8 Thomas Senecloze +8.298s
9 Lisa Billard +8.886s
10 Niccolo Pirri +9.366s
FL: Munoz, 1m38.054s

Championship standings
1 Munoz 222   2 Roussel 186   3 Dorison 167  4 Caretti 141   5 Bouzar 130   6 Perard 95   7 Iglesias 105   8 Montego Maassen 78   9 Bolliet 84   10 Sato 81

The post Munoz becomes French F4 champion with a race to spare appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: KSP

Louis Iglesias and Arthur Dorison claimed a pole position each for the French Formula 4 season finale at Le Mans having ended qualifying just 0.003 seconds apart.

Malo Bolliet had set the pace in practice on Friday morning, some 0.485s ahead of the next quickest driver, the championship leader Alex Munoz. Dorison was third, with Iglesias a second off in eighth and Munoz’s title rival Jules Roussel down in 16th.

Track limits infringements would dominate qualifying on the Bugatti layout. Iglesias was one of the cleaner drivers in this respect and his fastest lap of 1m37.418s set just past the halfway mark was legal and good enough to secure pole for race one.

Dorison went quicker than Iglesias when he crossed the line a few seconds later but that time would be deleted. He then fell shy by just 0.003s on his next attempt.

He would post two quicker laps – the best being a 1m37.244s after the chequered flag – but these too would not count. He also recorded two legal laps within four hundredths of his best, ensuring he secured pole for race three based on second fastest times.

Munoz also set two laps faster than that of Iglesias in the middle of the session but both would be deleted. He went on to set a time good enough for fourth, one place behind Roussel.

Roussel, who has a 27-point deficit to close in the championship, will start second for race three ahead of Iglesias and Munoz.

Qualifying 15th on debut was French-American driver Maverick McKenna, who has tested in USF Juniors this year with his karting team Jay Howard Driver Development, and was one of 12 semi-finalists in the FEED Racing shootout.

He wasn’t among the six drivers who proceeded to the final at Magny-Cours this week, where Yuvel Rosen succeeded Bolliet as the winner of a paid-for French F4 seat for 2026.

Israeli 18-year-old Rosen beat 16-year-old Swiss karter Mathys Sarua-Pictet, former stock car racer Troy Adams’ 14-year-old son Truly, and the French trio of Clement Outran (16), Mattheo Dauvergne (14) and Sacha Bouder (17) in the final.

Outran had come into the final as the most established of the sixtet, having come fifth in the 2024 IAME Euro and Benelux series on X30 Senior karts.

Rosen had raced Rotax Senior karts in central Europe in 2024, and made international outings this year.

Qualifying round-up
Race 1 grid
1 Louis Iglesias 1m37.418s
2 Arthur Dorison +0.003s
3 Jules Roussel +0.077s
4 Alexander Munoz +0.165s
5 Rintaro Sato +0.214s
6 Rafael Perard +0.250s
7 Guillaume Bouzar +0.297s
8 Hugo Herrouin +0.462s
9 Matteo Giaccardi +0.470s
10 Malo Bolliet +0.541s

Race 3 grid
1 Dorison 1m37.453s
2 Roussel +0.098s
3 Iglesias +0.139s
4 Munoz +0.172s
5 Sato +0.278s
6 Bouzar +0.376s
7 Giaccardi +0.506s
8 Bolliet +0.573s
9 Perard +0.636s
10 Romeo Leurs +0.654s

The post Iglesias and Dorison share poles for French F4’s Le Mans finale appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: Gavin Baker Photography

Jordan Missig will make his Indy Nxt debut with Abel Motorsports in next week’s double-header round on Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s road course.

The 26-year-old American will take the place of Josh Mason, who has had to miss the event due to a lack of budget.

Mason currently sits 18th in the standings, having finished 17th and 16th in his first two races in St. Petersburg and at Barber Motorsports Park. The 22-year-old Briton is “working to secure additional funding” according to Abel Motorsports.

“I’ve worked with some top-level professional teams in my career, and Abel Motorsports is right up with those teams,” said Missig. “And I think it’s a great fit for me. We’re still in the relationship-building stage, but after my first trip to the shop for the seat fitting, I think we’ve started quite well. I appreciate all the hard work by the team.”

Abel has just taken its first Indy Nxt win with Jacob Abel, son of the team owner, while Missig is stepping up to the championship after two years in Formula Regional and then two in Indy Nxt’s immediate feeder series USF Pro 2000.

In FRegional Americas he came fifth in the 2021 standings with one win and five other podiums, and from his 37 races in USFP2000 with Pabst Racing the highlights were two third places, a fifth place and a fastest lap.

“It’s going to be a challenge for him to get up to speed quickly, but based on what he has shown jumping in and out of different cars over the years, it shouldn’t be anything he can’t handle,” said Abel’s team manager John Brunner.

“We have the team in place to support him and to help shorten the learning curve, so I’m looking forward to seeing what Jordan can accomplish with us.”

Missig has also had a parallel career in sportscar racing. He was 2019 Radical Cup North America runner-up, then raced in Lamborghini Super Trofeo North America.

One of the drivers he will be up against on the Indy Nxt grid is the joint points leader Nolan Siegel, who has recently been announced as part of United Autosport’s LMP2 line-up for the Le Mans 24 Hours. Siegel came eighth in IMSA’s LMP2 standings last year, and in France will share a car with 2022 IMSA champion Oliver Jarvis and USFP2000 graduate Bijoy Garg.

The post Jordan Missig to make Indy Nxt debut at IMS with Abel Motorsports appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: Red Bull Content Pool

The third edition of the Virtual Le Mans 24 Hours is taking place next weekend, and will feature 14 junior single-seater racers.

During the first global lockdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Le Mans 24 Hours organiser ACO approved and helped run the inaugural edition of the Esports race, which had a 50-car entry list and was won by Rebellion Williams.

The official Le Mans Virtual Series has run since, and the final round of the 2021-22 season was the 24-hour race. One of the drivers of the winning car, entered by crack Esports squad Team Redline, was Felipe Drugovich.

Since then he has won the Formula 2 title and become Aston Martin’s first ever Formula 1 junior, and he is back to defend his victory in one of Redline’s LMP2 cars.

In the sister car is GB3 champion and Aston Martin Autosport BRDC Award winner Luke Browning, who will be sharing driving duties with three other drivers including reigning F1 world champion Max Verstappen.

Vanwall, a former F1 manufacturer whose name has recently been revived by the ByKolles team to compete in sportscars, has FIA Formula 3 stars Franco Colapinto and Jonny Edgar in its two cars, while Alpine is fielding its two juniors Victor Martins and Olli Caldwell in the same entry.

Panis Racing has Formula Regional race-winner Pierre-Louis Chovet, GR eSports has signed Team USA scholar Andre Castro and Fordzilla has brought in British Formula 4 racer Georgi Dimitrov.

There are more junior stars in the GTE class, with Super Formula-bound FRegional Americas champion Raoul Hyman driving for Proton Coanda Esports in a virtual Porsche 911 RSR.

Red Bull Racing will also be using that car for its own team, and among the drivers is its junior Ayumu Iwasa who is currently racing in F2.

For the second year running, German automotive parts company Mahle is fielding its own Esports team and once again has W Series star Beitske Visser in its BMW M8, while SF Velas and Romain Grosjean’s R8G team are both using Ferrari 488s and have hired F2-bound Ferrari junior Ollie Bearman and FIA F3 race-winner Alexander Smolyar respectively.

The post Alpine, Ferrari and Red Bull enter their F1 juniors into Virtual Le Mans appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photos: Porsche AG

With outright or class wins in the major enduros both sides of the Atlantic, Nick Tandy is arguably Britain’s best, and certainly most versatile, modern endurance racer. But single-seaters are key to his story of success

His return to the factory Porsche squad after a two-year absence will see him again challenging for overall victories with the marque’s Penske-run 963 LMDh prototype. Yet he remains largely unknown to the Formula 1-obsessed motorsport fanbase in general, let alone a wider sporting audience. Tandy’s ascent to works drives with Porsche and General Motors was far from straightforward, as he had to overcome numerous setbacks: financial, sporting and personal.

Formula Scout sat down with Tandy at this year’s Spa 24 Hours race, where he put in a typically thrilling drive from the back of the 65-car grid in the Porsche 911 GT3 R of crack Porsche squad KCMG, to explore his single-seater roots and how that helped his transition to endurance racing.

Looking back 17 years to his first steps on the motorsport ladder, he explains that his entry into single-seaters was “kind of a bit by accident, really”. He started out racing Minis, first in stock cars on dirt ovals and then on asphalt race tracks.

“I got banned from the club that I was racing at. Both me and my brother [Joe] did, for really menial things, really looking back,” he confesses.

“We were kind of getting fed up with that club and the kind of the racing, the cars in general,” when he saw “an advert for a scholarship for the old BRDC single-seater series, which had been going a few years.”

“It was, I think, about £2,500 to enter this two or three-day competition but the winner got a season’s worth of racing out of it and I had no plans for the coming season, so I spent effectively three months’ wages or a season’s worth of Mini racing on entering this scholarship. It was quite a big risk at the time but I won. And that was how I got into single-seater driving.”

Single-seaters had “always fascinated”, Tandy remembers.

Photo: Roger Gascoigne

“I always wondered what it would be like to race a car where I could see what the front wheels were doing and when they were locking and this sort of thing, and what extra senses that would give you over driving a normal car. When you’re in a saloon car, you often see the smoke before you realise that the wheel has locked, because it’s difficult to feel.”

Older brother Joe, a fellow Mini tearaway, “attempted to do the Formula Palmer Audi series because he was working as one of the top mechanics at Palmer Sport at the time and often shook the cars down on track”.

Remarkably, both Tandy brothers won their respective championships on their go at open-wheel racing. Joe Tandy was FPA champion in 2005, while Nick won the BRDC Single-Seater Championship.

The older Tandy even earned a nomination for the then-McLaren-sponsored Autosport BRDC Award at the end of the year.

“The year after, he didn’t get a drive for various different reasons, one of which was the normal monetary situation but there were other things as well,” Tandy recalls. “My championship came with £30,000 prize money, which enabled me to do sort of half a season in British Formula Ford which is why I could carry on racing.

“But by halfway through the season, we weren’t happy with how the results were going and some things were suboptimal. And effectively, it was at that time that we as a group, me, my brother and also my dad, thought we could do a better job than basically most of the teams on the grid.

“So, me and my dad both took out a loan of about £10,000 each and we bought our own FFord to race in a pukka UK championship at a good level.”

At this point, Joe decided to give up on his own racing ambitions, “left his very good job at Palmer Sport, and set up Joe Tandy Racing”. Although Nicky believes that Joe had “realised that I was probably the better driver of the two of us anyway”.

Photo: Roger Gascoigne

Armed with a new Ray chassis run by JTR, Tandy and his brother’s team won first time out in British FFord at Thruxton.

“I think we won five of the last six races of the year with our own car,” remembers Tandy, slightly inaccurately – in fact, he scored two wins and two seconds in the last four races.

At first, the team travelled to races pulling the car “behind the back of my dad’s Ford Transit”. Then “over that winter Joe found some investment, bought a truck, bought a second car and it became a bonafide proper team the year after”.

“So we went again racing in British FFord in 2007 with Freddie Hunt [brother of 1976 F1 World Champion, James Hunt] as my team-mate to begin with.”

Tandy finished second in the championship in 2006, following it up with third the year after. But he did win the prestigious FFord Festival at Brands Hatch ‘twice’. “Once on the road and once in the steward’s room,” he jokes.

“The year [2006] that I won on the road, at the time I thought it was a gross misjustice. But looking back now, it was my own fault,” he acknowledges.

“I got spun around with another car just as a safety car was coming out on track. And, basically, two or three cars overtook me whilst I was coming back to rejoin the track. So, I went past them in the queue and rejoined my position where I was before the safety car came out.

“I made a decision based on the level of risk versus reward that I thought, based on how many laps and how much time of the race was left,” he explains. “I actually had a lot longer than I thought I did, so going back I wouldn’t have done what I did. I probably still had the pace to come through to the front to win.”

Photo: Roger Gascoigne

Then in 2007, Tandy started the final from pole and enjoyed a race-long tussle with that year’s British champion Callum MacLeod. In a safety car-dominated race, the pair touched as they jostled for position at one of the restarts, allowing MacLeod to break free before another incident brought the race to a premature finish.

“I finished second on the road, but again the leader made a stupid mistake and that time he got penalised and I won,” he says. MacLeod had been adjudged to have failed to maintain the gap to the safety car, earning him a two-second penalty and handing victory to Tandy.

For 2008, JTR took the decision to move up to British Formula 3 with Mygale cars [an example pictured above] rather than the ubiquitous Dallara chassis. Cost was a factor – “it was the only way we could do it effectively” – with the additional benefit of being able to enjoy a closer relationship with the French constructor.

“At the same point, we switched from running Ray cars to running Mygales in FFord, and so we were working as a semi-factory team for Mygale,” Tandy says. “We had a lot of support from a parts point of view that we could never have funded if we [had] bought an off-the-shelf Dallara. So, it was the help of Mygale that really enabled us to go into F3.

“Joe found some more investment to enable us to go and do it and it was great. It was good for me as well because you didn’t just have an off-the-shelf F3 car. We were working hand-in-hand developing this racing car. We could do whatever we liked, if we had an idea in the workshop, we could then talk to the factory in France and they could potentially come up with a solution for our idea.

“We developed that car over a year-and-a-half to be a title-contending, race-winning British F3 chassis. That is something that I am immensely proud of. And that led into our championship charge in 2009.”

Memories of Tandy’s sophomore season in F3 are, naturally, overshadowed by the loss of brother Joe in a tragic road accident in May 2009. Just over two weeks later, Tandy took a highly emotional win at Rockingham, the first for both driver and team.

Photo: Roger Gascoigne

“We couldn’t finish the season that year but off the back of my performances, I got the offer to go to have a fully paid drive in the F3 Euro Series with Volkswagen, which then led on to meeting the people within the Porsche Carrera Cup. That led to my Carrera Cup drive the year after, which is when the rest of my life began.”

But the move into the F3 Euro Series with Colin Kolles’ eponymous team proved to be a disaster.

“The Euro Series thing was terrible. The car was a bag of shit,” Tandy laughs. “But it enabled me to put myself in front of other people that were influential, so it was definitely worth doing. It was either that or stop racing.”

There are, he says, “no regrets” about giving up on his single-seater ambitions to pursue a career in sportscars.

“Yes, if things had gone differently I think I would have gone further in my single-seater career. But you don’t know when eventually the money is going to dry up or what programme you’re going to get put on. But I’m so glad, because of what’s happened to me since, that I didn’t.

“The BRDC Single-Seater stuff was good because you have the same car as everybody else, from the same pool of cars, ran out of Silverstone, so it enabled me to go out there and show what I could do as a driver and win this money that carried on for the rest of the next few years. But then to have our own cars in FFord and F3 and develop them into the best cars on track was a great foundation for what’s gone on in the next 10 years.

“Would I risk what I’ve got now and what I’ve had for the last 10 years for that small chance of IndyCar or F1? No, not in a million years. I would not change anything that’s happened because I’ve been so fortunate and still am.

Photo: Roger Gascoigne

“Do I think I could race a single-seater? Yeah, of course. I think we’ve shown by jumping from an LMP1 prototype into a GT3 car that a good driver is a good driver, whether it’s in a single-seater or a Ginetta GT5.”

When Porsche returned to prototype sportscars with its 919 Hybrid LMP1 car in 2014, the decision was taken to run a third car at the Le Mans 24 Hours in the project’s second season after a thrashing by rivals Audi and Toyota in its comeback year.

At the time, Tandy “was in my second year within Porsche motorsport, within the factory environment, when they started testing for the third car, so I didn’t expect to be invited”.

Tandy had come second in the F1-supporting Porsche Supercup in 2010 as a rookie, won the Carrera Cup Germany title in 2011, got into a GT3-spec 911 for 2012 and come second in International GT Open, then moved up again into a GTE-spec car for 2013 and come third in class in the European Le Mans Series, before landing lucrative contracts to be a Porsche factory GT driver in IMSA and the World Endurance Championship for 2014. Only a LMP1 seat with the brand needed ticking off.

“But based on my performance that I was proving in other cars, and the other guys they had put in the test for the third car, I thought I could do a good job for them,” Tandy continued.

“So I actually went and spoke to Andreas Seidl [Porsche LMP1 team principal at the time] and said: ‘I think I could do a good job for you. I’ve got this F3 experience, high-downforce formula car experience. Would you consider letting me test the car?’

“And I think he quite liked the fact that somebody had come forward and said ‘I think I can do a good job for you, if you want to let me try then I’d like to do it’.

“On the back of that he let, I think, six of us test and we were fast and did a good job for the team. And they had the foresight and the guts really to say ‘you’re gonna be the drivers for our car’.

“Once I knew that I was doing a test [with Porsche], I did a couple of days testing back in a F3 car at Pembrey with Double R Racing as well as our own FFord cars in preparation for this LMP1 test.”

Tandy is convinced that his experience with F3 machinery helped convince Porsche to provide the opportunity in the LMP1 car, and “after what happened in 2015, I mean, what a great decision they made; it was great for us to justify that risk for them and their faith in us”.

That ‘what happened’ is reference to the grandest of Tandy’s enduro wins as he won the Le Mans 24 Hours alongside Earl Bamber and Nico Hulkenberg. The year before he’d won his class in the Daytona 24 Hours, then a few months after his Le Mans success he won a rain-hit Petit Le Mans outright in a GTE car, an unheard of feat.

“When I jumped in the Porsche I was as fast as the regular drivers straight away, all that experience helped shape what was to come. So, the single-seater stuff enabled me to be in a position to show what I could do.”

In 2018 Tandy added overall Nurburgring 24 Hours victory to his CV, with the Kyalami 9 Hours and a Nurburgring Endurance Series race following in 2019 and the Spa 24H the year after. Along the way with Porsche he also won in LMP2 on just his second category start in the 2015 Nurburgring 6 Hours, topped the GTLM class in six IMSA enduros including the prestigious Sebring 12 Hours three times and went to Asia and came second in the Sepang 12 Hours.

But last year the winning alliance ended as he switched allegiance to GM to be one of its factory Corvette drivers. There’s been four IMSA class wins and a WEC success in the Monza 6 Hours since then, but he’s kept his name in Porsche’s ranks by continuing a relationship with customer team KCMG in GT World Challenge Europe and the Nurburgring 24H.

Monday’s announcement that Tandy will join the Team Penske-run works squad for Porsche’s double attack on IMSA and the WEC with with new 963 prototype brings the Briton back into the factory Porsche family just at the right time. Tandy is highly enthusiastic about the coming challenge of hypercars and LMDh, or GTP as the latter will be known in the USA.

“It looks like a hugely exciting era of the sport,” he says. “What looks to be the best racing class for the next x years? Hopefully, it’s hypercar and GTP and I think every driver wants to be involved with a great series at a great level.”

The post How junior single-seaters “helped shape” Tandy’s sportscar successes appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photos: Roger Gascoigne

Twenty years ago today, Tomas Enge scored a crushing victory at the Hungaroring to top the International F3000 points table for the first time. But a chain of events then occurred that marked a note in racing history

There was plenty of celebrations at Arden following Enge’s fourth win of the season, but unbeknown to him a random drug test he had undergone during the weekend would show traces of a “banned substance”, cannabis. He had been tested before in multiple occasions, always clean, but this time it was different. The fallout would ultimately change his season and his career fundamentally.

As the teams assembled for the championship decider at Monza on the second weekend of September, news broke of Enge’s positive drug test, prompting a level of media interest unprecedented in the category.

“Monza was crazy,” he tells Formula Scout over a coffee 20 years on.

“Of course, it was difficult because the media were pushing, and not only the media but the whole paddock – other teams, other drivers and so on. So, you feel the pressure from people, from all angles.”

For his fourth full season in F3000 in 2002, the then 25-year-old Czech had moved to Arden International, the team owned and run by Christian Horner, now, of course, Red Bull Racing’s team principal.

Displaying the same fierce protection of his driver that we have become accustomed to in Formula 1, Horner was, says Enge, “impeccable in his behaviour,” that weekend.

“He said: ‘Fine, we will stand by you, and we want to do the most for you so we can win the championship here at Monza. So, I will face the media and we just want you to concentrate on the race.’”

“But I think we managed the pressure – Bjorn [Wirdheim, Enge’s team-mate] won. All the pressure was on me personally, but we had a super car, so he managed to take maximum advantage because he was not under any pressure, and he just drove away from everybody and won the race.”

Enge himself, suffering from a nasty cold on top of everything else going on around him, appeared oblivious to the media frenzy. Third on the grid at Monza, he dropped to fifth at the start but after a late safety car restart picked his way through to second, enough to clinch the title. For now.

When a second sample also proved positive however, he was summoned to a World Motor Sport Council meeting in October for his case to be heard and to learn his sentence. Drug abuse, particularly for a recreational substance, was almost unknown in motorsport. Would the WMSC be lenient? Would it suspend Enge from racing but leave past results unaffected?

To this day, Enge continues to maintain his innocence of having knowingly taken cannabis. “We don’t know what happened,” he says. “There were lots of discussions – at a club, in some food or in some chocolate. We don’t know. In any case, because of that they disqualified me from the race at the Hungaroring which I had won, and thus I lost the title.”

Antonin Charouz says Enge “could have breathed it in at a disco”, such was the disbelief how cannabis could have been consumed.

“We were working with different outcomes,” remembers Enge. “In the end it could have been worse as they could have taken my licence away for a period and luckily that didn’t happen.”

In the end, Enge was disqualified from the Hungaroring race and as a result lost the title. That made him a genuine former champion, a phrase often used in motorsport but very rarely in its correct meaning.

Though we didn’t know it at the time, F3000 was entering its final iteration and would be replaced by GP2 in 2005. The 2002 season ebbed and flowed between principal rival Sebastien Bourdais and Enge, with a late charge from Hockenheim and Spa-Francorchamps winner Giorgio Pantano giving him an outside shot at the title going into Monza.

2002 International F3000 title battle

Looking back, Enge would have been a deserving champion. He was consistently quick, and Arden had mastered the new-for-2002 Lola B2/50 better than its rivals.

In the season opener at Interlagos he had demolished the competition. He was over 10 seconds to the good with five laps remaining of the race when a fuel pump failed. Or at least that was the story at the time.

“No, it was petrol,” he says, twenty years on. “We said, and I was told, that it had been due to a fuel pump but I think that we just ran out of fuel. Either somebody miscalculated or made a mistake in filling the tank. I think that if we sat down now with Christian Horner, he would say himself that it was fuel.”

He was out of sorts at Imola, before overcoming gearbox problems to finish second at Barcelona. Despite these first points, the championship seemed to be slipping from his hands after just three rounds and he had scored less than the year before.

But then it all came together at the A1-Ring (now the Red Bull Ring). In a weekend overshadowed by Ferrari’s team orders shenanigans in the Formula 1 race, Enge claimed a perfect lights-to-flag win and in the process took Arden’s first ever F3000 victory, to the delight of Horner.

After a surprise podium in Monaco, on a track where Enge never really clicked, Enrico Toccacelo punted him out of second place and a points finish at the Nurburgring, leaving him trailing Bourdais by 13 points at the season’s halfway mark.

Next up was Silverstone, Arden’s home track, and a circuit where Enge had flown in pre-season testing.

“Silverstone was like a home race for me and Arden,” he says. “I always liked England because of the language. I really liked British humour and also got on well with the British.

“Christian really wanted to win at Silverstone and there we ran like a Swiss watch. I won qualification by six-tenths. I knew that the first qualifying lap would be decisive so I had to give everything on the first lap and afterwards the times would go up.”

In the race, he was on a different level, taking the chequered flag 13s ahead of Bourdais after 30 laps of racing.

He was on pole again at Magny-Cours: “I remember as if it was yesterday. One warm-up lap, first lap – boom, time – and then the others would try to improve at the end, lap after lap but nobody was able to go faster.” Another victory came his way, but this time he had to fight Bourdais the full distance.

Contact at Hockenheim and Spa – where Bourdais missed his braking for La Source, hitting Enge from behind and damaging his rear wing – put him on the back foot again.

“I had so much bad luck that season, at Spa the collision with Bourdais and then Toccacelo took me out,” he recalls, before adding with a smile: “And unusually for me, they weren’t my fault! That’s how it was.”

Enge was always an open, jovial, effervescent character, ready with a laugh and a smile. “If people are relaxed, then so am I,” he tells Formula Scout. “The people in the paddock liked me, cheered me on and made it clear that they were supporting me – the other teams, the TV people – we used to joke around. I was just the person for little jokes.”

His two title rivals, Bourdais and Pantano were, he says, were “like night and day!”.

“Pantano was day – always smiling, Italian, laid back. We got out of the car and were mates.

“Bourdais was like night – very French, never smiled, a bit strange. We respected each other of course, but with Bourdais we weren’t really friends.”

Arden in 2001 Photo: Hellahulla

He has nothing but praise for team boss, Horner. “I can remember that Christian was extremely ambitious. In 2001 he ran Viktor Maslov, who had brought a big sponsor, and Darren Manning. When I came to Arden in the autumn of 2001, he immediately said: ‘We want to win the championship. You’re the only one who can do that for us, and we’ll give everything.’ Super team, engineers, as soon as I got there the ambition – ‘with you we will win the championship’.

“I didn’t feel under any pressure, rather I was really looking forward to it and it was great.”

Horner was a really “super, wonderful, very fair,” boss, says Enge. “He really made it clear that he believed in me. That really builds your self-confidence and I think he is still the same, how he fights for his team and his drivers, and against the competition. If I watch Drive to Survive he speaks just as he used to speak then.”

Enge has motor racing in his genes – father Bretislav was a top touring car driver in the late 1970s and early ’80s, competing in the European Touring Car Championship in a Skoda 130Rs and then various BMWs across Europe, despite the obstacles imposed by the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Together with co-driver Zdenek Vojtech, Enge senior finished third in the 1982 Tourist Trophy at Silverstone.

“Dad raced in the West which meant that in order to get permission from the communists to travel abroad, he had to leave his family in Czechoslovakia to ensure that he would come back to his family, that he wouldn’t emigrate.”

Keen sportsman Enge played ice hockey and did ski jumping, typical sporting activities for a boy growing up in the mountains around his home town, Liberec. “I have to say that I wasn’t close to the motor racing, even though I had a racing father at home, surrounded by lots of photos even if I watched some races on television.”

Then around the age of 12 or 13 he finally got the bug. “Dad started to race back in Czechoslovakia, and started to prepare his racing cars in our garage at home.

“Whenever there was a race in Brno, sometimes we had the chance to go there to watch. As small boys, we didn’t know these big cars and famous drivers. Everything was so far away from us, these weren’t go-karts that we could jump into. At that time it was really popular for the teams to have stickers to give to the fans, so we just ran up and down the paddock trying to collect them, shouting: ‘stickers please’.

“At that moment I really wanted to race myself. In the evenings, when my parents were watching TV, I used to take dad’s overalls, helmet, shoes, gloves and go to the garage, get changed – I was still small so they were quite big – and got into the car. It was a Skoda of some sort and I would sit in the car and make the noise of the engine and pretend to be racing it.”

He didn’t start racing karts, with a 50cc motor, until the age of 14, but when the rules changed to allow 16-year-olds to race cars, Enge quickly got his racing licence and entered the Czechoslovakian Ford Fiesta Cup. When the opportunity came to try a single-seater, Enge was immediately hooked.

“Once I’d experienced the unbelievable feeling of driving a single-seater compared with the Fiesta or a touring car, I just really wanted to drive in single-seaters.”

For 1995, Enge stepped up to Formula Ford 1800 in the German championship, competing against the likes of Nick Heidfeld and Pierre Kaffer. “I got the hang of it very quickly and I was faster than Heidfeld. I won the first three races in Zolder, Brno and Most and then I started to crash a lot. I just wanted too much and didn’t know how to calm down and take that step back below the limit as I just had to drive always on or over the limit.”

After finishing third in that first season in FFord, he went on to take the title the following year, as well as coming 13th in the FFord Festival.

The step up to Formula 3 in Germany yielded little in the way of results, as Enge struggled to come to terms with the driving style required.

Enge in 1997

“It just didn’t suit my aggressive style. The car didn’t have much power but had lots of downforce to give it huge grip.” And so the smooth entry and exit required to get the most out of it was not something that a rather wild Enge could handle. “I always really overdrove the corners and then didn’t have the exit speed,” he admits.

Despite switching to the works Opel team of Bertram Schafer Racing for his sophomore season, results didn’t improve, not helped by dropping the dominant Dallara in favour of a Martini chassis. Then the chance came to test a F3000 car at Varano.

“I really enjoyed it – wide car, big tyres, big performance and drifting,” Enge says of the test. He made his F3000 debut in July 1998 at Hockenheim with the Auto Sport Racing outfit from Italy, qualified fifth at Spa and scored in the Nurburgring finale, before joining a new team, the WRT Fina squad of Gabriele Rafanelli, who had run BMW Bigazzi in touring cars, for 1999.

The season was a major disappointment. Enge failed to qualify for the first two rounds, but he stuck at it, “and even got a podium in the wet at Magny-Cours but otherwise we didn’t have any results”.

For 2000, Enge again followed the path trodden by Heidfeld, moving to the mySAP.com team, effectively a McLaren junior team, with which Heidfeld had clinched the 1999 title with. “For some reason, it wasn’t a success,” remembers Enge.

But at Hockenheim, two years after his F3000 debut, Enge finally tasted victory. Starting from pole on a wet track, Enge pulled away from team-mate Tomas Scheckter. However, as the rain eased it became more difficult.

“I had the feeling that I’d overheated the tyres and that Scheckter was catching me up. In my mind, instinctively I calculated that I wouldn’t be able to hold on and that Scheckter would overtake me.”

He radioed the pits to prepare to change to slicks. However, due to a radio problem, though they heard him, he could not hear their response telling him to stay out. After a lengthy stop, he rejoined in the middle of the top 10 with only a few laps remaining and was shocked to discover that everybody else had stayed out on wet tyres.

Enge in 1998

As he fought to get heat into the tyres, Enge feared that he’d made the wrong decision, but after a lap-and-a-half the tyres were working and he began to hunt down those in front.

“I began to go past one after the other – bang, bang, bang. And then onto the last lap and I was taking it carefully. It was such a bizarre win because nobody knew that it had been my decision to change tyres, that the team hadn’t wanted me to go into the pits and I hadn’t heard them.”

Enge again switched teams ahead of the 2001 season, joining Justin Wilson at Nordic Racing. He took two wins at Barcelona and the Nurburgring, but with Wilson out of reach in the championship missed the final round at Monza as F1 was beckoning.

Following Luciano Burti’s frightening crash in the Belgian Grand Prix, his Prost team was looking for potential replacements and Enge was invited to test at Magny-Cours.

“The team wanted me to test and to do the mandatory 300km in order to get a superlicence so that I could step in if required,” he recalls. He learned that he would be driving on the Monday before Monza – 10 September 2001. The next day, of course, the world changed.

“I was in Monaco at the time and somebody called me from the Czech Republic and asked ‘Have you seen what’s happened? Switch on the TV.’” In those pre-internet days, he, like the rest of the world, sat glued to the television.

“Nobody really knew what had happened but there was lots of speculation that the grand prix would be cancelled, that flights would be cancelled, that the world would freeze in an instant.”

After much debate, the race went ahead, and Enge got to make his F1 debut, “the first Czech, the first Eastern European, the first ‘Communist child’ to race in F1”.

Enge in 2000

His weekend was plagued by mechanical issues from the start of practice. “Each training session there was some technical problem – engine, brakes, electronics – so I went into qualifying having not done many laps.

“On the first lap at the first chicane the engine blew up. I stopped, ran back to the pits for the spare car, which was set up for my team-mate, Heinz-Harald Frentzen. The mechanics quickly changed the seat, the pedals, the set up for me.”

On his first flying lap in the T-car “the gearbox goes from seventh to fifth on the straight. Some sort of electronic problem. Gearbox blown up, engine blown up, kaputt.”

After another technical problem in the warm-up, “we started the race and I thought ‘if I do more than 10 laps without a problem it will be a miracle’. But I did 53 laps and I finished 12th, my best result.”

Enge saw out the season with Prost, finishing 13th at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and retiring at Suzuka, although with no testing and no simulators in those days, he’d had no chance to learn the circuits.

It was clear that the writing was on the wall for Prost’s F1 team, and in November 2001 it went into liquidation. “Money was short. Prost was unable to invest in new materials, such as engines or gearboxes. They ran the parts to the end of their lives, the overhauls didn’t happen as they should, that’s why we had so many technical problems.”

Alain Prost skipped the last two races to work on a rescue package but to no avail. Enge had been sure that someone would step in and that he would continue into 2002. When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen “the seats were pretty much occupied”.

Only Minardi had seats available but “we didn’t want to go there as Minardi had been the slowest car, which turned out to be a mistake” as the team started the next F1 season with a remarkable fifth place in Melbourne with debutant Mark Webber.

Enge in 2004

With no options to move up, Enge was forced to drop back to F3000 for 2002, which is where our story started.

Enge agrees that the doping test may well have cost him further drives. “Maybe not only F1, but also Indycar. But it is difficult to say. Even before the doping there were not the sponsorship funds to go further. I don’t want to speculate.”

After a final crack at F3000 in 2004, Enge decided to try his luck in the USA. For the next year he did secure a drive with Panther Racing in the Indy Racing League, at that time predominantly an ovals-based championship.

It was “a completely different world,” he says. “The speed, the massive adrenaline but the driving technique and thinking were completely different. Each oval is different – gradients, straight lengths, type of surfaces, bumpiness, even the ways the wind blew.”

In the fourth round at Motegi he had a rib-breaking qualifying crash, which complicated his Indianapolis 500 debut.

“I couldn’t start the race which was at the end of April and ribs usually need three weeks to heal.” With the Indy 500 less than a month away, and the rookie test and qualifying in between, he had a race to get fit.

He qualified 10th and ran sensibly through the first 400 miles. As the race went green on lap 160, Enge was running second behind Danica Patrick, the first woman ever to lead the Indianapolis 500.

Enge takes up the story: “Green flag. Patrick in front of me. Full throttle. She starts to spin. I went down. She crashed into me. Crashed into [Panther team-mate, Tomas] Scheckter. We were both out of the race, me and Scheckter.”

Enge was ready to stay in the US. “I took it that 2005 was for me a learning year and then 2006 and 2007 I would start to reap the rewards of the experience. I was mentally prepared to stay in America. I liked it there, the racing was great, I had good conditions, I felt at ease. The American race fans were amazing.”

Enge in A1GP

But then at the end of the year Chevrolet, who had been supplying engines exclusively to Panther, stopped its Indycar programme. A one-off drive with Cheever Racing in 2006 felt too much like stepping unprepared into the Prost again and so Enge called quits on his American adventure.

Asked to name a career highlight, he returns to his brief time in America. “I really loved Indycar because of the high adrenaline, high speed, side-by-side racing, cars in front, beside, behind and underneath you. You know that each small correction or mistake can end up in a huge and painful accident so therefore the adrenaline was massive.

“I had quite few technical issues throughout the whole season and a few accidents as well. While some of the accidents were my fault, some weren’t but that’s racing. Unfortunately, I could not prove myself.”

Occasional races for the Czech A1GP squad, run by former mentor Antonin Charouz, yielded one victory at Shanghai, but by this time Enge had moved to sportscars, the area where he achieved probably his most prolonged run of success.

Although his best finish in the Le Mans 24 Hours came in 2009 with the Lola Aston Martin LMP1 car, the car didn’t suit his ballsy style of driving, which was more attuned to the brutish GT1 machinery

“I never really got on with the prototype, because the driver sat relatively close to the front axle and the rear wheels were a long way back, plus the rear was very heavy with the 12-cylinder Aston Martin engine. When it got into a slide it wasn’t easy to correct it.”

His speed in a GT1 car at Le Mans was never in doubt, with six class pole positions, five of them in succession, for Ferrari and Aston Martin, but only one class victory in 2003.

In such a long and varied career, does he have any regrets? “Mistakes, of course,” he replies. “If mistakes hadn’t happened things would have been different. The question is, in which direction?”

Enge today

He is trying to pass on the benefit of this experience to a new generation of drivers. He is coaching two young Czech drivers in German GT4 racing and worked for a period in 2021 with the country’s rising single-seater star Roman Stanek.

Enge says he races now “more or less for fun”, continuin to drive in national rallies with his sister Lucie as co-driver.

He is clearly at ease with his life and his career, and its highs and lows. His young family is naturally important, but he doesn’t have any plan to be a racing dad pushing his five-year-old son into karting.

“I’m trying to keep him away, but I know I won’t be able to keep him away so long,” he says. “Once the kid starts to have fun in racing, the father has to stop having fun, to fully focus on the kid.

“I don’t want to be the parent who is getting crazy. Maybe I won’t get crazy. This is something I am learning as well, about my own kids.”

Possibly Enge was simply born 20 or 30 years too late. High-downforce cars, requiring finesse and precision were probably never his thing. Racing was always fun, the more power the better. He talks of adrenalin frequently. Versatile in the mould of a Vic Elford or his contemporary, and, briefly his team-mate, Stephane Sarrazin, he drove single-seaters on both sides of the Atlantic, prototypes, GTs, touring cars and rally cars.

Indeed, he came close to rallying a Prodrive-entered Subaru in selected rounds of the World Rally Championship.

Open and likeable, he appears at ease with his own failings and mistakes. His aggressive style led to incidents, but equally often he was the victim of others’ errors. And bad luck cost him dearly on and off-track.

He may be a former champion but a champion he surely was.

The post How Tomas Enge won, then lost, the 2002 International F3000 title appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photos: Porsche AG

Earl Bamber has come a long way in his career. He may not have appeared in F1, but he raced professional single-seaters as a teen and has since become a sportscar great as he recounted to Alejandro Alonso Lopez

Formula Scout sat with Barber to discuss his career from his early days in single-seaters to his Le Mans glory and more.

“I started off in New Zealand in in go-karts and then Formula Ford. Asia was a more affordable way to be able to make the step to Europe. We didn’t have the budget to come immediately to Europe, so that was sort of an intermediate step,” he said.

“From there, I managed to win the Formula BMW Asia championship and get some recognition. Unfortunately, we also didn’t have the budget to even go to the World Finals that year, which was a bit of a shame.”

Bamber’s early years in motorsport were significantly influenced by the lack of funding. Although he chose to follow the Asian path to Formula 1 because it was cheaper, there were several moments in his career where not having enough budget prevented him from fulfilling his potential.

After coming second in Formula V6 Asia and the Toyota Racing Series in 2008, he competed part-time in GP2 Asia and the professional level A1GP series (driving for Team New Zealand) and impressively was able to score podiums in both aged 18. That year’s A1GP car was based on the Ferrari F2004 that had dominated Formula 1 in 2004 and with its clutch of lap records is a dream car for any driver. This posed Bamber a big challenge, but nothing the young Kiwi couldn’t cope with.

“It was absolutely incredible. I mean, it was one of the fastest cars on the planet at the time. I just wish I was a few years older because just being 18 years old, coming directly from nearly Formula Renault, was a big big step and, for sure, I did not have the experience to do a great job. I was fast, but I didn’t have the experience.”

However, Bamber is happy with how life developed from his early introduction to such powerful machinery. “I wouldn’t change it for anything that I went there that early because it taught me a lot in my racing and made me a much stronger driver.”

Bamber’s single-seater CV

Developing set-ups, understanding how races run, managing tyre degradation and the strategy were the main challenges of A1GP’s final season according to Bamber. Remarkably two of his three podiums came in his debut weekend at Zandvoort. After that, he had to sit out the next event in China but finished third on his return at Sepang before skipping his home round in his seat share. Bamber did the remaining three events after, but wouldn’t be able to capitalise on his good speed.

“I think getting podiums immediately was a bit of an issue. Everyone presumes that you know everything and that you are very experienced,” he explained. “At the end of the day you can have some good races where you are quick and you get a win, but in the middle of the season we struggled a bit with swapping the drivers. We lost some performance and at the end of the year we got some really good speed back, but never showed it again.”

After three podiums in his first three races, Bamber’s time in A1GP concluded with a sixth, an eighth and then five successive retirements. The year after he finally made it to Europe on a limited schedule, and lack of budget meant he couldn’t race outside of his native TRS.

In October 2010, Bamber cameoed in Superleague Formula. It was another professional level open-wheel series, and Bamber took the place of Alvaro Parente as FC Porto’s driver as the series headed to China for the first time at the new Ordos circuit. Once again Bamber adapted quickly to the car, qualifying eighth then making up four places in his first two racing laps before making more passes to finish on the podium on debut. That qualified him for the short ‘super final’ at the end of the weekend, which he won €100,000 in against the title contenders. But the weekend was far more remarkable than just that.

“Actually, it was by pure luck,” Bamber recalled of how he debuted in SLF. “I was working as a television commentator and one day [before] Alvaro Parente didn’t get a visa for China. They knew that I could drive and they needed the car on the grid, so they selected me to drive. I hadn’t really driven a car for nearly half a year and jumped straight in and qualified I think it was in the top six and raced to the podium in the first race.”

Photo: Superleague Formula

Bamber had to borrow race gear from across the paddock to be able to drive, so was lucky there was key kit in his size, and the victory he ended the weekend with came after the on-the-road winner was penalised for starting from his grid spot.

Parente got his visa sorted for the races on Beijing’s streets a few days later, and Bamber was set to commentate before being asked to race the PSV Eindhoven car run by the same crew as Porto’s. Again he claimed the jackpot, and in dramatic style, as track safety concerns led to the event losing championship status, the super final being cancelled and sixth and second places for Bamber – despite qualifying 18th after a compromised session – making him the weekend’s top performer.

Despite success in F1-level cars, Bamber still lacked budget and a reputation in Europe. He started 2011 by competing part-time in TRS, did the SLF season opener but was then in commentary again by round two. And so it was time for Bamber to shift focus from single-seaters to GT racing.

“My aim was purely to get back into racing because I was not really racing that much at the time. The biggest struggle was always to get the seat and find the funding. I went into GT racing, as I got a chance to go into Carrera Cup Asia in 2013.

“I had one goal which was to become a Porsche junior. My first year, my goal was not actually to win the championship, but to get the scholarship to go to Europe. We managed to win the championship along the way and then in 2014 I did every Carrera Cup I could with Asia, Europe and Supercup. It was great. [Porsche factory driver and team owner] Timo Bernhard gave me the chance and we were leading all championships at one time, so this was really good.

“The opportunity to test Porsche’s LMP1 car came on the back of the good results of the Carrera Cup, but also came on the results of what I had done in single-seaters before, showing the speed, because they knew that I knew how to drive a high-downforce car. When I got back into it, it was immediately natural and at home, so it was quite nice.”

This tuned out to be the beginning of a long and very successful relationship between Porsche Motorsport and Bamber, which continues today. The highlight is his 2015 and ’17 Le Mans 24 Hours wins, the first of which occurred seven years ago today.

Photo: Superleague Formula

“The biggest challenge was winning Le Mans, and especially the first time in 2015. This was the biggest pressure because Porsche was coming back and we all wanted to do it.

“A lot of people ask me what it is like to win Le Mans. I always say Le Mans wouldn’t be special if you don’t do everything leading up to it.

“When you work with such a big team of people whose goal is to win Le Mans for one year in advance, and that’s their only goal, when you finally achieve it, it feels special, not just for the drivers, but for every single individual in the team.

“I think that’s what makes Le Mans special. Some people hunt it for their entire career as a driver, as a team owner, as an engineer, and some never achieve it. So, when you manage to achieve just one victory there, it’s something special. And I think the first is always the most special, but it’s also the elusiveness of Le Mans that makes it also a big challenge. You cannot test there. It’s only one weekend a year that we can all go there and try to master it.”

Bamber shared his winning Porsche 919 Hybrid in 2015 with Nick Tandy and then-Force India F1 driver Nico Hulkenberg, and then in 2017 he conquered the biggest race in the world for the second time on his way to become World Endurance champion with Bernhard and fellow Kiwi Brendon Hartley as team-mates.

Formula Scout asked Bamber whether he felt that he should have had the chance to go to F1 as happened with Hartley, who was signed by Toro Rosso to do the final four grand prix of 2017 as then the whole 2018 season. From his answer, it is pretty clear that having the chance of winning is everything for Bamber.

“In all honesty, I did not really have the desire to go to F1 at the time, especially if I couldn’t go in a good team. If you’ve won everything, I don’t think you want to go to F1 just to be on the grid.

“I don’t think it’s something that really interests me. It’s only interesting if you can drive one of the good cars, a Mercedes, a Ferrari, a Red Bull. Something like that would be interesting or if there was a real way to go from a mid-pack car into this direction going, but just to go for being at the back is not really something of interest.

“With my age, it was not really possible to have the time to do two or three years in a mid-pack car and then go up. So, to be honest, I did not really look at it. The most enjoyable racing for me was GTLM. It was still factory racing, and there was development with the manufacturer.”

After his first Le Mans win, Bamber didn’t actually get another chance in LMP1 for almost two years. Instead, Porsche placed him its works-supported teams in GTs and he competed in WEC and IMSA before his full-time LMP1 call-up. That programme came to a close after 2017, and they returned their focus to GTs again. Bamber was IMSA’s GTLM champion in 2019.

Apart from racing himself, which he now does as a factory Cadillac driver in IMSA’s top prototype class with Chip Ganassi Racing, Bamber and his brother Will – also a racing driver – run their own Earl Bamber Motorsport team which primarily competes in spec Porsche series. The aim of this project is to support young drivers, particularly those from New Zealand.

“I struggled for funding at that early part of my career, so we are trying to create a scholarship so there’s a platform and a pathway where young kids, who don’t have the funding or the millions of dollars that it costs to go to F1, can look to aspire to go into this Carrera Cup,” Bamber explained.

“We have an open seat where we don’t look for politics, we don’t look for anything, we just look for the best drivers that we can find to give them a chance to have a racing career, and to find the best drivers and give them this chance and mentor them.

“Then, once they have this opportunity, they can find their way in GT racing or maybe go back to single-seater racing. That’s the pathway for us. It’s nice to have a small impact on their careers by giving them that opportunity.”

Bamber’s sportscars CV (additional class wins in brackets)

The post Earl Bamber’s epic racing journey: From A1GP teen to Le Mans great appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: LAT Images

The second edition of the Virtual Le Mans 24 Hours is taking place next weekend, and will feature 17 junior single-seater racers.

During the first global lockdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Le Mans 24 Hours organiser ACO approved and helped run the inaugural edition of the Esports race, which had a 50-car entry list and was won by Rebellion Williams.

The official Le Mans Virtual Series has run since, with the final round of the 2021-22 season being the 24-hour race and taking place on January 15/16.

There will be a class for a virtual version of the Oreca 07 LMP2 car, and then a GTE class open to several different cars. Each car will be raced by two real-world drivers and two Esports pros. In LMP2 are eight of the junior stars.

World Endurance Championship team ByKolles has Formula 2 racer Bent Viscaal to partner its usual driver Tom Dillmann, who is a driver coach in F2 and Euroformula, and Viscaal’s long-term rival Felipe Drugovich is representing the crack Redline Esports team in a car shared with Formula E’s Oliver Rowland. Redline initially had Alpine junior Caio Collet in its second LMP2 car, before swapping him out for reigning Formula 1 world champion Max Verstappen.

W Racing Team is running Formula Regional European Championship star Franco Colapinto as it tries to poach him for its real-world LMP2 programme, and fellow FREC driver Gabriele Mini is driving for Panis Racing.

French simulator racing brand Raceclutch is the official Esports partner of the Alpine F1 team and so is running its junior Victor Martins, while British Formula 4 champion Luke Browning teams up with IndyCar champion Alex Palou at Fordzilla.

German automotive parts company Mahle has created its own Esports team and has picked W Series star Beitske Visser and Phillippe Denes as two of its drivers, and a special guest car has been entered for Indianapolis 500 winner Juan Pablo Montoya who will share a simulator with his F4-driving son Sebastian.

W Series has entered its own team into the GTE class, with Ayla Agren and Fabienne Wohlwend piloting a virtual BMW M8 for the series. Redline and Romain Grosjean’s R8G team have also chosen that car in their pursuit of GT honours.

R8G has French F4 race-winner Elliott Vayron (who replaces Pierre-Louis Chovet in the car) and FIA Formula 3 Championship frontrunner Alexander Smolyar, while Redline has picked Smolyar’s rival Lorenzo Colombo.

Three teams fielding junior series drivers will run the Porsche 911 RSR: Absolute Racing (Johnathan Hoggard), the Wolverhampton Wanderers football club (Bart Horsten) and former F1 driver Alex Yoong’s Axle Sports operation (with his son Alister at the wheel).

Aston Martin’s long-time sportscar partner Prodrive has a ‘factory’ presence on the Virtual Le Mans grid with its Vantage GTE, and its line-up includes Formula Ford 1600 racer Logan Hannah.

Red Bull initially had Liam Lawson down for the event, but the F2 star has since dropped off the entry list.

The post W Series team and FF1600 star among junior entries for Virtual Le Mans appeared first on Formula Scout.

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

For 2021 there were some honourable mentions who landed either professional drives or reached a top level outside of single-seaters, but then continued their junior single-seater careers at the same time.

Jack Aitken was supposed to spend this year allying his Williams Formula 1 reserve driver duties with a GT World Challenge Europe drive in a Emil Frey Racing-run Lamborghini Huracan GT3 Evo, but a decision by Matteo Nannini to focus on his FIA Formula 3 Championship campaign meant Aitken ended up replacing him in HWA Racelab’s Formula 2 line-up.

It was a fruitless stint stopped when he broke his back in a crash in the Spa 24 Hours, with a best finish of fourth in his Lambo shared with Formula Regional European Championship graduate Konsta Lappalainen prior to that.

Racing against him in F2 was Liam Lawson, who in a Red Bull-branded AF Corse-run Ferrari 488 GT3 Evo rocked the DTM. He won on his debut, becoming the series’ yongest ever winner aged 19, and was on course for the title until a highly controversial Norisring finale. Also racing in the DTM were Toyota Racing Series race-winner Esteban Muth and former F3 racer Sophia Floersch who also impressed in LMP2 machinery in the World Endurance Championship.

The standout rookie of endurance racing this year was Franco Colapinto, now effectively a protege of G-Drive Racing, and the Argentinian was arguably the fastest driver on one-lap pace in both the Asian and European Le Mans Series in the top LMP2 class. He impressed so much that W Racing Team then called him up to race for it in the Spa 24H, despite having no GT racing experience, and came 22th in an Audi R8 LMS GT3. Later that month he came seventh in the Le Mans 24 Hours’ LMP2 class in a car shared with G-Drive team boss Roman Rusinov and Nyck de Vries, and then his form in FREC went up.

Photo: Jakob Ebrey Photography

He ended a disappointing sixth in FREC, and is expected to move up to F3 next year alongside more endurance racing.

Over in Japan there were double programmes in Super Formula and the supporting SF Lights for Giuliano Alesi and Kazuto Kotaka, with SF Lights title runner-up Alesi taking a surprise win from pole at a wet Autopolis while standing in for Kazuki Nakajima at TOM’S. He will now take over the former F1 driver’s seat full-time for 2022.

Ramus Lindh was a frontrunner in LMP3 before landing an Indy Lights drive in the final quarter of the season, and Jorge Barrio was Argentinian Formula Renault 2.0 champion for the second year in a row while also winning Argentina’s second-tier TC2000 tin-top championship.

But none of these names could make the cut, so here is Formula Scout’s Class of 2020… Key Wins (W), poles (P), fastest laps (FL)

10. Charles Milesi FRANCE 20y/o
LM24H LMP2 winner, LMP2 Endurance Trophy winner (3 W), 10th in IMSA Endurance Cup LMP2, 17th in ELMS (2P, 2 FL)   2020: 21st in Super Formula, Ret in LM24H   2019: 9th in SF Lights   2018: 7th in FR Eurocup (2 W, 2 P, 1 FL)

Injury in 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 delayed Milesi’s progression into the professional echelons, but three SF starts last year warmed him up well after his 2019 season was curtailed by a broken wrist that required intrusive surgery.

Rather than stick with SF for 2021, Milesi forewent the difficult travel restrictions and he landed a seat in WEC with the debuting WRT in a LMP2 car shared with Ferdinand Habsburg and Robin Frijns.

Despite the line-up’s near-total lack of LMP2 experience, they gelled perfectly and after inheriting victory from their team-mates in heartbreaking style at Le Mans (more on that later) they won both races in Bahrain to claim the class title.

That was a result based on teamwork, but there was also individual magnificence from Milesi who did the last two ELMS rounds with Cool Racing in a Pro-Am car. He took pole and fastest lap for both events, but with a Bronze-graded driver in the car it meant race results were hard to come by. However Milesi still lifted the team to its best results of the year.

9. Kiern Jewiss BRITAIN 19y/o
3rd in Porsche Carrera Cup GB (4 W)   2020: 13th in BRDC British F3 (1 W)   2019: 4th in BRDC British F3 (1 W, 2 P, 2 FL)

Photo: Porsche GB

Photo: Porsche GB

One of the most exciting young drivers to watch over the last few years has been Jewiss. He pulled off incredibly bold overtakes on his way to the British Formula 4 title in 2018, sometimes going too far in his rivalry with Ayrton Simmons, but it pushed the envelope for the category in terms of racecraft in the same way Max Verstappen is finding the limits of F1’s sporting rules today.

There was a Ferrari Driver Academy invite for an evaluation camp, and the Autosport BRDC Award even lowered its age limit to encompass the Mark Blundell protege, but the budget simply wasn’t there for a prolonged single-seater career.

He managed to return to his old Ginetta Junior team Douglas Motorsport to step up to what was then called BRDC British F3, but the combination struggled for pace in the first half of the season and meant Jewiss eventually came fourth in the series.

He returned for a second season, or at least the first half of it, and his career was practically revived when he signed with Team Parker Racing for this year’s Porsche Carrera Cup GB and as team-mate to the reigning champion Harry King who had won the title as an official Porsche GB junior.

The series runs on the same bill as British F4, meaning it has live UK television coverage of every round, and that exposure was important for Jewiss. He made the most of it and his team-mate too, winning on just his second start and taking three more victories across the season to come third – not too far off highly-rated champion Dan Cammish – and ahead of King.

8. Ritomo Miyata JAPAN 22y/o
10th in SF, 11th in Super GT   2020: SF Lights champion (12 W, 6 P, 15 FL), 17th in SF, 17th in Super GT

Photo: Super Formula

Photo: Super GT

Miyata qualified second on his SF debut last year, as a stand-in driver due to pandemic-enforced absences, and scored points in both of the races he was given the chance to race in by TOM’S. He was clearly something special.

So to get a full-time seat this year with the title-winning team put a fair bit of pressure on the 2020 SF Lights dominator.

He mostly did what was expected of him, scoring in his first eight races before that run came to an end in the season finale with a lowly 14th place finish after a spin and meant he finished two points up on rookie part-time team-mate Alesi.

Miyata’s best finish was fourth and he only qualified in the top three once, but he was consistent. His qualifying average was 6.14, and average race finish was 7.86, with only one outlying result for each. He also had to lead the team on set-up with Nakajima mostly absent, and was usually quicker to make the most of it in qualifying against his team-mates. There just wasn’t the pace to be further forward though.

In Super GT he helmed WedsSport Bandoh’s resurgence, having actually completed his rookie season in the top GT500 class last year. The 2021 season featured two poles and two second places, highlighting Miyata’s one-lap pace, and he chased Naoki Yamamoto hard at Twin Ring Motegi in a performance that really impressed. In both series the results weren’t quite there with his machinery, but TOM’S and Toyota have their faith in Miyata and he’s now landing a top sportscar seat for 2022.

7. Yuki Tsunoda JAPAN 21y/o
14th in F1   2020: 3rd in F2 (3 W, 4 P, 1 FL), 4th in Toyota Racing Series (1 W)   2019: 4th in Euroformula (1 W, 3 FL)

Photo: Red Bull Content Pool

Photo: Scuderia AlphaTauri

In both the first and final races of the 2021 F1 season, Tsunoda was looking like the real deal. Quick, aggressive, bold, feisty and crafty, he smashed in a couple of outstanding results. Unfortunately, for much of the rest of the campaign, his car was often left smashed up after an unnecessary incident.

Those troubles, and the expected onslaught of criticism that followed, massively knocked the Red Bull junior’s confidence. So bad was it, that he was surprised when he kept his seat for 2022, despite there not really being another F2 graduate on the verge of a step up.

It took him a very long time to rebound, eventually culminating in a fine fourth place in Abu Dhabi (with a mega lunge on Mercedes-AMG’s Valtteri Bottas to boot). The qualifying gap, race pace gap and points gap to flying Frenchman Pierre Gasly in the same car was astronomic across the year as a whole, but there were underlying glimpses that Tsunoda is the same brilliant driver we saw in the past three years in the junior ranks.

But his team on occasion did have one of the fastest cars in F1 this year, and he couldn’t make the most of it.

6. Mick Schumacher GERMANY 22y/o
19th in F1   2019: F2 champion (2 W, 2 FL)   2019: 12th in F2 (1 W, 2 FL)   2018: FIA European F3 champion (8 W, 7 P, 4 FL)

Photo: LAT/Haas

Photo: LAT/Haas

Schumacher looked by far the most comfortable and most consistent of the drivers to graduate to F1.

The Haas VF-21 he wrestled was, frankly, a rather disastrous car but there were glimpses of Schumacher producing a bit of a spark to place it in positions it didn’t deserve to be in a race or two. However, despite looking the most comfortable, he also had some hefty shunts, which goes against him.

Obvious highlights included scraping into Q2 at Istanbul Park and a defensive masterclass at a jumbled up (and damp) Hungaroring, showcasing his ability to pounce when there’s a chance of something. It resembled a bit of his F2 career in a way, just with far better adaptability (one of his key junior weaknesses), and some very fine qualifying performances.

This is a somewhat reserved placement given the up-and-down year, as well as the rubbish machinery at his disposal, but he’s showcasing the ability to build and adapt the team around him as he did with Prema for so many years coming up the ranks and which was noted by others in the F1 paddock.

His fellow rookie team-mate, who does not make this list, was regularly thrashed in qualifying and races.

5. Louis Deletraz SWITZERLAND 24y/o
ELMS champion (3 W), 20th in WEC LMP2, NC in LM24H   2020: 4th in LM24H, 8th in F2 (2 FL)   2019: 8th in F2 (2 FL)

It became a bit of a light-hearted joke during Deletraz’s F2 career that he couldn’t win, with 94 races returning six second places and one front-row start. Before that he took a far more efficient two wins and three poles from 20 Formula V8 3.5 races.

From the previous five years the only instance where Deletraz looked truly spectacular was when he was called up by Rebellion Racing to contest the 2020 Le Mans 24 Hours, looking immediately comfortable in free practice and then running in contention for second place in the race when a worn clutch during his final stint led to several issues and an eventual finish of fourth.

That debut put Deletraz on the endurance racing map, and with no F1 doors opening for 2021 he joined crack GT racing outfit WRT as it started its first venture into prototype sportscars. He ended up sharing a car with Robert Kubica and Yifei Ye.

Deletraz won on his LMP2 debut at Barcelona, and the trio followed it up with a second ELMS win at the Red Bull Ring. Inter Europol Competition then took on Deletraz for a WEC round, and he finished fifth in class, before WRT attacked Le Mans.

He was nominated to qualify the car, and ended up as the second-fastest LMP2. He was in that position after 12 hours of the race, behind the Milesi entry, and the car twice moved into the lead in the morning while Ye was at the wheel. It looked like Deletraz would be a Le Mans winner when on the final lap of the race Ye encountered a throttle sensor issue and the car stopped. Their race was over.

It was heartbreak for the crew, but they then went on to win another ELMS round and the title, guaranteeing themselves another shot at Le Mans next year.

4. Niklas Krutten GERMANY 19y/o
2nd in ELMS LMP3 (2 W), 5th/2nd in Road to Le Mans, 12th in IMSA LMP3 (1 P), NLS BM240i (1 P, 1 FL)   2020: 5th in Euroformula

LMP3 is the F3 of prototype sportscars, and so it wouldn’t usually be considered for drivers ‘graduating’ from junior single-seaters. But like LMP2, sometimes a driver is signed to do a job, which at the same time is a breakthrough opportunity, and from there they establish themselves to make appearances with others in the category.

Krutten landed in LMP3 this year just as an opportunity to continue his racing career, having initially been set to stay in single-seaters after coming fifth in Euroformula, but soon became the star of the category and was a de facto pro by year’s end.

He won his first two races in Europe and only missed out on the ELMS title by a single point, and also contested the Road to Le Mans support races at the 24-hour race, coming fifth and second in the sprint races, then got called up by Zak Brown’s United Autosports team for two IMSA rounds.

Krutten rounded out his season by taking Petit Le Mans class pole, but a crash and a fuel pump failure ruined his race. He also put in two appearances in the NLS series on the Nurburgring Nordschleife, where he shared a BMW with fellow ADD Management client Jake Dennis and finished second in class on debut.

ADD also got Krutten into the Jaguar garage in Formula E’s Berlin finale, and will surely find the 19-year-old even more endurance racing opportunities for 2022. The feedback from the team bosses he’s had so far has also been excellent.

3. Callum Ilott BRITAIN 23y/o
3rd in LM24H GTEAm, 11th in GTWCE Endurance Cup, 38th in IndyCar, NC in Intercontinental GT Challenge   2020: 2nd in F2 (3 W, 5 P)

Photo: Juncos Racing

Photo: IndyCar / Joe Skiblinski

There was a very embarrassing incident at Indianapolis in the Intercontinental GT Challenge that cost AF Corse victory, but otherwise Ilott looked totally at home in a GT car this year after Ferrari overlooked him for a F1 drive.

Ilott had taken the Indianapolis 8 Hours lead in a dicey battle, going from third to first in one move at a restart, with just over 90 minutes to go. He then looked comfortable out front until with 52 minutes to go he misjudged lapping a GT4 car and squeezed himself against the outside wall. The result was a collision, crash and immediate retirement.

Away from that, Ilott was mostly fast, faultless and formidable. In the GTE version of the 488 he made the Le Mans podium in the GTEAm class, then in the GT3 car he picked up some strong GTWCE Endurance Cup results early on but there was just misfortune after that as team-mate Antonio Fuoco crashed the car at Barcelona.

Alongside his F1 reserve and test driver duties, Ilott was also able to head to the USA to kickstart his IndyCar career. He contested the final three rounds with the returning Juncos Hollinger Racing team, which he will drive for full-time next year.

Ilott qualified a respectable 19th for his debut at Portland, but failed to finish, ended up on row 13 of the grid at Laguna Seca and spun into the barriers during the warm-up session before coming a lapped 22nd, but looked more on the pace in Long Beach before a spin that combining his and team’s inexperience meant his year ended very flatly.

It didn’t look impressive on the surface, but given drivers at bigger teams didn’t go trouble-free either but had more races to show their worth, it was a respectable arrival by Ilott and sets him up for 2022.

2. Sena Sakaguchi JAPAN 22y/o
7th in SF, 14th in Super GT (1 P, 1 FL), 16th in Super GT300   2020: 2nd in SF Lights (4 W, 5 P, 2 FL), FRegional Japan champion (11 W, 8 P, 8 FL), 18th in Super GT, 16th in Super GT300

Photo: Super GT

Photo: Super Formula

Despite dominating the Formula Regional Japanese Championship last year and coming second in SF Lights, you would be forgiven for not expecting much of Sakaguchi as he replaced the retiring Hiroaki Ishiura in INGING’s SF line-up.

But he spent 2021 exceeding all expectations. In SF he beat team-mate Sho Tsuboi convincingly, finishing second twice in changing weather and ending up as the second-best rookie in the points thanks to a strong partnership with his engineer Kotaro Tanaka.

He made the top three in qualifying twice, and in a season where the Honda-powered teams tended to have the advantage on one-lap pace it was still an impressive return and he had an average starting position of 7.29 and average finish of 7.14.

Due to travel restrictions he also ended up standing in for Sacha Fenestraz at TOM’S for the first five Super GT rounds. There, once again, he exceeded expectations.

He took pole, led the early running and took fastest lap on the way to third in the very first race of the season, then made the podium again next time out. Once Fenestraz could make it to Japan, Sakaguchi moved down to a Super GT3000 drive but again immediately landed on the podium. Of all the drivers on this list, the one who had the biggest breakout year.

1. Yifei Ye CHINA 23y/o
ELMS champion (3 W, 1 FL), ALMS champion (2 W), NC in LM24H   2020: Euroformula champion (11 W, 12 P, 12 FL)

Photo: Alex Goure / ACO

Thinking better of a post-season SF test, but not having the budget for F2, Ye’s single-seater career came to an unintended standstill after his sublime Euroformula title, but once he got an LMP2 chance he grabbed it with both hands.

He became the first ever driver to win the ALMS and ELMS titles in the same year, should have won Le Mans, and then used his rising stock to orchestrate a move into Porsche Asia Pacific’s line-up and a 2022 GT racing programme.

There was no pre-season testing for Ye before he jumped in one of G-Drive Racing’s Algarve Pro Racing-run LMP2 cars, but he mastered not only the car but the format of endurance racing in the top class and during his stints was outclassing far more experienced drivers.

Ye was signed to Williams Esports and crack sportscar Rebellion Racing to contest last summer’s Virtual LM24H during the first global lockdown period.

The simulated car he used in the rFactor 2-based Esports event was the same Oreca 07 he raced in ALMS, and other appearances in major Esports competitions brought him into contact with people in the real-world sportscar paddock.

That helped him then go from ALMS, where he won his first two races in sportscars, to WRT’s ELMS line-up and the combination of himself, Deletraz and Kubica (both teaching Ye a lot) did the exact same thing with two wins on the trot. Two further wins were arguably lost to ill-timed safety car periods.

Ye was not considered the pro driver in the line-up and so was often looked over for qualifying and the more lucrative race stints, which had some influence on his 2022 contract negotiations and ultimately led to him leaving the outfit once manager Neel Jani used his Porsche connections to push Ye in that direction. Importantly though, every time Ye was in the Oreca 07 he was a driver the other teams had to look out for because of how potent he was proving to be.

At Le Mans he passed Milesi in the night for the LMP2 lead, and he did actually end up at the wheel for the all-important final stint. And so most of the pain was felt by the Chinese when the car turned off on the final lap.

His Porsche move is with one goal in mind: an LMDh seat in 2023 and overall Le Mans victory.

Written by Ida Wood and Craig Woollard

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