Photos: Jenzer Motorsport & Roger Gascoigne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Jenzers taking podium pics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jenzer driving in the 1992 FFord Festival

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jenzer driving at Zandvoort in 1993

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jenzer’s history in wins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jenzer Motorsport celebrating F4 CEZ success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Roger Gascoigne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Dom Romney / FIA F3 Championship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Jenzer Motorsport

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jenzer and Spengler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: Matias Zagazeta

Teams from the FIA Formula 3 Championship, Euroformula, Formula Regional European Championship and Formula 4 tested at Barcelona at the start of this week.

The entry list for the two-day test gave some pretty big clues as to the 2022 line-ups of several teams, several of which Formula Scout understands are already all but confirmed.

There were two groups of cars for the test, with the old GP3 cars being run by F3 teams being partnered with Euroformula runners while FREC teams were sharing the track with Formula 4 cars.

On Monday there were five sessions for each, but fog cut out the morning running on Tuesday and limited that day to three sessions each.

Red Bull junior Jak Crawford kicked off day one on top for Prema, where he is believed to be moving to in F3 in 2022, while Carlin joined for session two and its GB3 champion Zak O’Sullivan set the pace. Crawford was back ahead in session three, while Jenzer Motorsport ran Kaylen Frederick to the top spot in the final two Monday sessions.

Brad Benavides, being coached by Facu Regalia, was fastest in Tuesday’s first session to run, and it was Frederick on top again thereon.

Hadrien David was in the third of Prema’s GP3 cars, although he is expected to remain in FREC and is in talks to become a Formula 1 junior.

There were several different drivers topping the Euroformula classifications in the test, with Motopark running six cars on day two when Matthias Luethen joined.

Paul Aron headed the way in the first FREC session, and is expected to sign with Prema for a third year in FRegional.

It was Van Amersfoort Racing duo Joshua Dufek and Kas Haverkort who were the combination to beat though, although Maceo Capietto did top a session.

SMP Racing organised for Kirill Smal and Irina Sidorkova to test with KIC Motorsport, and VAR’s old F4 chassis were also in action.

Test results

The post Barcelona test reveals clues about 2022 F3 and Euroformula line-ups 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.

Photo: Macau GP Organising Committee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nicholas Latifi F2 2019 Sochi sprint race
Distance: 87.521km

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Formula E

Photo: Formula E

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Leclerc F2 2017 Monaco sprint race
Distance: 100.11km

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

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

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

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

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

Antonio Giovinazzi GP2 2016 Monaco sprint race
Distance: 100.11km

Photo: GP2 Media Service

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Max Verstappen F3 2014 Macau Grand Prix
Distance: 91.800km

Photo: MGPC

Photo: MGPC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: MGPC

Photo: MGPC

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

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

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

Daniel Ricciardo FR3.5 2011 Monaco
Distance: 100.200km

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

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

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

Sergio Perez GP2 2010 Monaco sprint race
Distance: 100.200km

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

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

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

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

Sebastian Vettel FR3.5 2007 Monaco
Distance: 83.500km

Photo: Renault Sport

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

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

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

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

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

Lewis Hamilton GP2 2006 Hungaroring sprint race
Distance: 100.756km

Photo: GP2 Media Service

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Renault Sport

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: LAT Images

On Tuesday, Williams named two Formula 2 talents for Formula 1’s official young driver test at Abu Dhabi. A decade ago it did the same, with a driver who was hit by tragedy after seriously impressing the team

From 2009 to 2012, the Williams F1 team was actively involved in Formula Two. Unlike the F1-supporting series today, which is undeniably the top rung of the junior single-seater ladder, this was a series that was centrally run like W Series and was organised by current BRDC British F3 promoter MotorSport Vision.

The cars, built by Williams and powered by Audi-sourced, Mountune-tuned engines capable of 425bhp, were quick and in its earlier years the series attracted drivers that would otherwise be looking to race in the level immediately below F1. One of its greatest attractions was the champion would receive a prize F1 test with Williams.

After an entertaining title battle with future Renault F1 driver Jolyon Palmer that included winning on the Marrakech street circuit now used by Formula E, at the Algarve circuit that recently hosted the Portuguese Grand Prix, and on Brands Hatch’s Grand Prix layout, it was 20-year-old Dean Stoneman who earned this prestigious honour in 2010.

His prize drive came in the Abu Dhabi young driver test on November 16, and he was fifth fastest on his day in the Williams FW32. Ahead of him was Daniel Ricciardo in the title-winning Red Bull RB6, future FE star Oliver Turvey in the race-winning McLaren MP4-25, 2019-20 FE champion Antonio Felix da Costa in Force India’s car, and Sauber’s reserve driver Esteban Gutierrez. All of the above were either in vastly quicker cars or were considerably more experienced, and senior personnel at Williams remarked on how impressed they were with Stoneman’s approach and performance.

“One of the main reasons for doing F2 was the F1 test at the end,” Stoneman tells Formula Scout 10 years later.

“But throughout that season, it was a correct choice in my career to go that route, to be seen by the right people. It was a Williams-built car at the time, a Williams F1 test, and that’s one of the main reasons I went that route. A great championship as well. Beating Jolyon Palmer to the title as well, which was another great achievement.

“I had been in single-seaters from 2007, Formula Renault previous to that, worked my way up to F2 and then on from there.”

Except there was no ‘on from there’ for Stoneman, as two months later he was diagnosed with a rare and deadly form of testicular cancer.

Throughout his title-winning F2 season he had been reporting worrying symptoms, but nothing that had merited note from doctors to be serious, especially as Stoneman was an athlete still in adolescence. But then in January 2011 he noticed a lump that, had it not been spotted, scanned and operated on that day, could have left him without legs or even life within a week. It turned out his body was riddled with tumours.

“I think after winning the championship in F2, testing for Williams in F1 [I was on a high], and that was in November 2010. Then January 2011, I got diagnosed with testicular cancer. The racing got put on stop. I had intense chemotherapy for six months, four operations. I don’t think anyone realised how bad, or how ill I was.

“People think I went in, had an operation and I was back out. But I wasn’t. I was in hospital for three-week cycles of chemotherapy and throughout the stages I had four operations to remove tumours, had tubes in my body, a lot of stuff that even until today I still have side-effects that I have to deal with from the drugs. But it’s one of the things you get on with in life.

“And that’s one of the reasons back after I finished my chemotherapy I went into powerboat racing in 2012. More just to get my feet back on the ground and enjoy just the normality of life really and to just try to feel a bit normal.”

Stoneman’s father Colin was a world champion in powerboat racing – hence his view of an outlandish sport as ‘normality’ – and while he too was a talent on the water, he decided to forge a path to F1 on asphalt instead.

After several years in karting, Stoneman had debuted in single-seaters in Formula Renault 2.0 in 2006. His first full season came in 2007, when he finished second in the United Kingdom’s club-level BARC championship, and he then came fourth twice in the country’s main FR2.0 series.

He wasn’t a title favourite when he stepped up to F2, but with all the cars being run by one operation it meant he wasn’t disadvantaged by being at a smaller team and was a winner by his third race. There were a further five wins, and after landing the title he then debuted in the high-downforce Formula Renault 3.5 series, where he signed up to race in 2011 alongside Red Bull junior Ricciardo at ISR Racing.

Instead he went through the horrifying experience of almost losing his life and intense chemotherapy, but his motorsport return via powerboats – which can be as physically demanding as single-seaters – a full year after that was a success.

Stoneman enjoyed his time back behind the wheel, going on an incredible winning run in an international series “but overall, it was [circuit] motorsport where I wanted to get back to”.

“In 2013, I did Porsche Carrera Cup GB. First two races back, I won. Qualified pole [for the first], and won. That was an up-and-down season in the Porsches. But at the end of that season I wanted to go back into single-seaters to see if I still had the ability to win.”

There were five victories for Stoneman that year, and he finished fifth in the points after being made to miss a round having quickly earned a reputation on the grid as one of the diciest for wheel-to-wheel action. Then, at the same venue as where he had been testing in F1 three years prior, Stoneman found a seat on the grid for the GP3 season finale.

Photo: Sam Bloxham/GP3 Series Media Service

“I went back with Koiranen GP at the end of 2013, and came second in my second race. And then I knew that I needed to go back into single-seaters again. So my career was getting to the top, put on hold, down to the bottom again then coming back.”

Stoneman remained in GP3 for 2014, signing with the Marrusia F1-branded Manor Motorsport team. The squad struggled for pace at times, and then struggled for cash, but Stoneman made the most of the equipment he had. He won in the season-opening round, then kept team morale up with victories at Spa-Francorchamps and Monza before the team bowed out of the series for “commercial reasons” just as Marussia was pulling out of F1.

“2014 was a good year in GP3,” admits Stoneman. “We had some ups-and-downs with the team I was with, and then I had to do a team swap towards the end of the year. I had many wins throughout the season, come second in GP3, and then obviously from that I got picked up by Helmut Marko with Red Bull in 2015.”

For the final two GP3 rounds, Stoneman took the place of Carmen Jorda at Koiranen. The car had a best finish of 17th up to that point, but Stoneman was able to put it on pole on his first attempt in Sochi and then convert it into a win with fastest lap.

He jumped from eighth to third in the points in the process, then from eighth on the reversed grid he came just 0.368 seconds short of a double win in the sprint race. That, against the odds, made him the only driver capable of preventing Red Bull junior Alex Lynn from winning the title going into the Abu Dhabi season finale. No wonder Dr Marko was taking note.

Stoneman needed to take pole to keep the title race going into the penultimate race, and he missed out by one position on the grid. He made up for that by winning that race instead, and ended up a massively impressive second in the points.

As Lynn left Red Bull for Williams and a seat in GP2 for 2015, this opened up a window for Stoneman – who had been close to death four years prior – to land the most lucrative seat on the FR3.5 grid for 2015 and as Red Bull’s top junior.

Photo: GEPA pictures/Dutch Photo Agency

“To be sponsored by Red Bull is a great achievement to have on your CV. It was another tough season in Formula Renault 3.5 in 2015. Amazing car, amazing team. But same again, we had a up-and-down year, it wasn’t what I wanted and in terms of points, eh… It was a one-year deal with Red Bull. So that’s where that season went.”

Four podiums and sixth in the points in FR3.5, and one point from five races at a struggling Carlin in GP2, wasn’t enough to retain Red Bull’s support for 2016. It was also a year that didn’t start on a great note as Stoneman had a monster shunt in pre-season testing. But the career comeback didn’t lose its momentum at the same time…

“And then I was off to America for 2016 with Andretti Autosport over there in Indy Lights,” continues Stoneman. “Winning the Freedom 100 on the [Indianapolis] oval was another great highlight of my career.

“I had side-effects of the drugs [for the cancer recovery], but I just drove around them. It was just finding the right deal, the right team, and making it all come together.”

In a talent-packed Indy Lights field, Stoneman adapted well to the demands of American racing and he claimed wins on the fabled Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s road course and oval. The latter, his Freedom 100 success, came by just 0.0024s in a thrilling finish where he outdragged Carlin’s Ed Jones to the chequered flag.

“You never stop learning. I’ve just turned 30 now. I started go-karting when I was eight or nine years old, I’ve been at it a long time now, but you never stop learning. With Andretti, that was another great step in my career. It was probably one of the best things I’ve done.

“I did learn a lot from back in 2016. I’d like to go back over to America. And after that, ever since Indy Lights, my career has sort of slowed down quite dramatically and now it’s more GT sportscars that I’ve been racing rather than single-seaters.”

Photo: Indianapolis Motor Speedway

McLaren actually signed Stoneman as a factory driver for its GT programmes in 2017, but his campaign in one of the marque’s cars in the Blancpain GT Series went so badly that he called time on it mid-season. Stoneman wasn’t seen again until last year, after a planned move into prototypes with Manor in 2018 was called off by commercial woe once more, as he returned to Blancpain (now GT World Challenge Europe) with Lamborghini customer team Ombra Racing.

That opened doors with the manufacturer that brought him into its Super Trofeo Europe series this year with Binaldi Motorsport, and a long overdue return to success.

In the hot Misano season opener he took an astonishing solo win (as most cars are crewed by two drivers) in race two, which he described as “one of the toughest races of my life”.

“It wasn’t physically tough, it was just so hot that the drain on your body over that time was unreal. From the first race to the second race I thought I was going to struggle more in the second race in the daytime, when it was 36-38°C outside temperature and in the car it’s probably the best part of 90°C.

“That second race was easier than the night race. I don’t know why. Maybe I just paced myself a bit better, and it was a really enjoyable race – and to be back on the podium. I was saying the other day, it feels like you’ve lost the ability to win. I know I can win, but it’s just when you don’t have a podium and you don’t win for a few years, you start doubting it in your mind.

“But when you’ve got a team behind you that delivers a good car and you know you can win – like at Misano – it just gives you that extra boost and drive.”

That motivational boost worked wonders, as he got his second victory in a row at the Nurburgring – this time with a team-mate – then made the top step again at Spa-Francorchamps and at Paul Ricard last weekend to win his first title in a decade.

It’s probably too late for a second heroic comeback to single-seater racing, so what’s next for the Briton?

“Endurance racing is where I want to be, the atmosphere is amazing. That’s where I want to be in a Lamborghini.”

Interview by Stephen Brunsdon

Further reading
The Yugoslavian who’s left his mark on motorsport history
The McLaren super-sub who answered a three-year long ‘what if?’
The junior driver spurned by Renault’s last F1 name change
The most surprising junior single-seater returns

The post The story behind one of junior single-seaters’ greatest comebacks appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: Zak Mauger/GP3 Series Media Service

When Lotus was rebadged as Renault for 2016, its young driver support was totally overhauled. Two of its juniors in F3 were left in the cold. Both made it to F2 after starring in GP3, but only one returned to F1’s radar

Alex Albon’s journey to Formula 1 is well-documented, and his tale of Red Bull rejection to AlphaTauri driver after a title-fighting season in Formula 2 is what contributed to him being such a popular addition to the 2019 F1 grid. His spell in Lotus’s junior ranks if often forgotten though, possibly because the man guiding it – Gravity Sports Management’s Gwen Lagrue – continued to support his career afterwards despite following protege Esteban Ocon to Mercedes-Benz’s junior team.

Lagrue was in the FIA European Formula 3 paddock in 2015 with Lotus-backed Signature drivers Albon and Dorian Boccolacci, and was seriously impressed by the performances of George Russell – which led to the Briton joining Mercedes.

Signature was a returning team with a point to prove, having dominated with full Volkswagen support when racing in the preceding F3 Euro Series, but its planned return to the category with Renault engines in 2014 had fallen apart and it ended up putting a team together for 2015 instead with VW power and a relatively inexperienced crew as its top personnel were responsible for running the Venturi Formula E team and Alpine’s World Endurance Championship efforts.

Both Albon and Boccolacci had a tricky year in F3, but still impressed, and Albon’s three years in Formula Renault 2.0 unsurprisingly prepared him better for the move than Boccolacci, who had a single season in French Formula 4 to his name.

Boccolacci had finished second in the points in F4, as well as Junior champion for being the best driver under 16 years old, and like most drivers there he was part of the FFSA Academy programme. He’d also been part of the Gravity-run Lotus junior line-up since karting, where a surprise win in the KZ2 Super Cup on debut led him to graduate to cars earlier than originally planned.

But going straight from a centrally-run entry-level series to the most competitive junior single-seater series in the world at the time is something Boccolacci now regrets.

“I stepped up to Formula 3 but this I think was not a good decision for me, because at this time, I was not prepared for the high level of Formula 3,” Boccolacci tells Formula Scout.

“[There] were like 46 drivers and I think it was one of the most difficult categories at that time. Before GP2 and GP3, you could go to F1 from F3 without doing the others. So a lot of the academy drivers were not doing GP2 because it was much more expensive for the academies, like Ferrari or Renault, so they were doing F3 or DTM or directly GP3 and F1.”

Boccolacci’s point is, as a money-saving operation for F1 teams and personal backers, the 2015 European F3 grid had been packed with talent. And he was not prepared for it.

“At this time the championship was very strong. Charles Leclerc was in F3, Russell, Antonio Giovinazzi, Felix Rosenqvist, all these guys and I didn’t know any tracks except for one during the season. The step up was too big. I was driving with some drivers who already had three, four, five years of single-seaters, this was only my second one. The academy is good but you don’t learn any of the tracks of the championship. I probably needed to go into Formula Renault before F3 I think.

“This was a big mistake in my career, but I didn’t make this mistake. I was part of Gravity Management and they had some problems to continue with the academy and they did this choice because it was better for them to find sponsors. So it’s only about budget and they couldn’t do anything except for F3 at this time. In the end, it was a mistake but we couldn’t do too much.”

Five points finishes in 33 races left Boccolacci 19th in the points, but the list of names ahead of him is mouth-watering. In addition to the drivers Boccolacci mentioned himself, there was also future single-seater pros Lance Stroll, Maximilian Gunther, Santino Ferrucci and Nick Cassidy, and F1 testers Callum Ilott, Sergio Sette Camara and Pietro Fittipaldi.

“I think this year was really hard for me mentally, and that the only thing I really learned was that I was strong in the head. But otherwise, no, because you are always fighting for the top positions in go karting early in your career. I was fighting with Charles, Max [Verstappen], with George Russell, all these drivers who are in F1 and when you are not prepared enough for this step, you don’t understand why you’re not performing. There are so many questions in the head, so it was not quite a good year for me, for sure.”

It was made all the worse at the end of the year when ‘Team Enstone’ was bought back out by Renault and Gravity’s services were no longer required for its young driver programme, and neither were the young drivers on it.

This is a tale of caution to Renault’s juniors now, as the F1 team they intend to progress to is being renamed as Alpine for 2021 and has already filled its two seats. While this is more of a Toro Rosso to AlphaTauri rebrand than a change in ownership, a new name above the door is still an excuse to restructure, including the Renault Sport Academy. Since its 2016 inception it hasn’t produced a single F1 driver, with FE race-winner Oliver Rowland its most successful graduate.

Alpine still has its WEC LMP2 programme, and it may be inclined to reward its 22-year-old sportscar star Thomas Laurent with an F1 test or more if it retains the highly-rated Frenchman’s services into 2021 and wants to create some synergy between the two projects.

There was a strong chance Boccolacci and Albon would have remained with Lotus had it stayed in F1, and moved on together to GP3 or even GP2. But its departure left both with a major budget deficit. Lagrue secured Albon a top GP3 seat with ART Grand Prix and he challenged Leclerc for the 2016, while Boccolacci stepped down to Formula Renault before echoing Albon’s GP3 heroics and follow-up underfunded F2 performances.

“Last year I did only a half season in Formula 2. It was quite a big difference to Formula 3 and GP3,” Boccolacci says.

“I had two chances, the first one I missed was when I was with Lotus, the junior team. They stopped so of course to find the budget was complicated so this, I had a bit of bad lack. Then I went into Formula Renault, was vice-champion behind Lando Norris, we were fighting all the season together and yeah, it was something that was… now we know that Lando was not a bad driver, so I think it was a good season.

“Then I stepped into GP3 and I think I did a good job. I was the second [driver] behind the top four who were all from ART.”

ART’s quartet of drivers dominated the season, with Boccolacci’s Trident team-mate Giuliano Alesi often picking up sprint race spoils. Those wins meant he bettered Boccolacci, who got his own win in the season finale, for fifth in the points.

“I think that was a good season overall and I had a chance to go with ART for the next year. But the problem was the budget again, we finally found the budget late in the season and ART, they are of course one of the best teams, they had already their four drivers. There was no space for me so that was quite a big chance missed there.

“We know that with ART, they give you a chance to fight for the title. Teams like ART, Prema, DAMS, they are really good teams and they also had many, many good drivers and a lot of good information. They know what is working and what is not working, so it’s easier for a driver to have all the questions answered and you are clearer in your idea in how to drive the car.

Photo: Sam Bloxham/GP3 Series Media Service

“This is probably what makes the difference, more than just the set-up. So, I think we missed two chances to arrive to the top, to F1 and then yeah, as soon as you lose two chances, it’s almost impossible.”

A DAMS seat wasn’t free either for 2018 as the team had left GP3, and Boccolacci landed a drive at MP Motorsport, which had taken its place in the series. He won twice (although one was lost to a disqualification for failing to supply an adequate fuel sample), and after round five of nine he was called up by MP to fill in a place in its F2 line-up where with little preparation he scored three points in eight races. Not great, but in the first year of the current F2 2018 car and when the competitive order was set very much on which teams got over the technical gremlins quickest, it was no embarrassment. And while he ended the GP3 season 10th in the points, his scoring rate probably would have put him in sixth again.

“I did F2 after but again I had no budget to do a full season so it was a bit disappointing to know that I wouldn’t be able to drive all year, I would only do five rounds. We had some good results like in Monaco, I was P4 and the first rookie. So in the end there were some good results, but in single-seaters, you need money or be part of a junior programme.”

Boccolacci’s five-round spell with Campos Racing in 2019 earned him a decent haul of points, and while bettered by team-mate Jack Aitken his qualifying and race pace was still impressive at a team on the rise. But aside from a one-off call-up by Trident at Silverstone, that was Boccolacci’s last single-seater opportunity. Even being signed up alongside Arthur Leclerc as a Venturi junior at the start of 2018 has led to nothing.

While Boccolacci undeniably deserves a full season in F2 (which incidentally the developers of the official F1 game series seem to agree on after giving him one of the highest values on the F2 grid for the pace attribute in F1 2020), the Frenchman’s opportunities now lie elsewhere. Which includes going up against Valtteri Bottas in rallying.

“[That] was my first experience in rallying and it was really enjoyable. It wasn’t really a ‘rally’ rally, it was circuit rally, so it was kind of halfway there,” Boccolacci clarifies.

Photo: Sebastiaan Rozendaal / Dutch Photo Agency

Based at French Grand Prix venue Paul Ricard and the surrounding roads, Rallycircuit Côte d’Azur ran last December and attracted a diverse entry list. Bottas predictably won in a more powerful World Rally Car, but Boccolacci was a clear second place in the class for the second-tier R5 cars before he received a 20-second penalty.

“Honestly, it was really interesting to drive with this kind of car, it was nice to drive not on the track, because we had some portions which were not on the circuit. I drove the Paul Ricard circuit so many times, and honestly, nothing is better than a F3 or F2 car but all the interior of the circuit, around the track there are some really tight parts, some junctions, some jumps, you need to use the handbrake and all of these sections which this car was really interesting.

“And in the end I was quite quick as well which was nice. Having the co-driver too was also difficult because you need to focus on what he is saying and you need to know what notes to put in order to anticipate the corners. But after the first day, we did a lot of repeat stages so I got to know the corners quite well actually, so it was fine. I knew almost 95% of the stage.

“But at the end of the first day, I had to focus on what he was saying, and also what is different between rallying and circuit is that if you do a mistake, it has a big consequence and you keep it for the rest of the rally. And from the first kilometre, if you crash, that’s it and your rally is finished. So, this was a bit different. It’s not like you have a race two, or qualifying two to do things again. If you crash, you crash and that’s it finished.”

Boccolacci was arguably more prepared for the off-road element of his first rally than he was for F2, having already starred in the Andros Trophy. Little known outside of France – but massively appreciated within it – the ice racing series has been around since 1990, raced in Paris and held regular rounds abroad in Andorra (which is south of France in the Pyrenees) and Canada. Champions in the top class include Alain Prost and touring car legend Yvan Muller, whose rivals included Romain Grosjean, Olivier Panis and Jacques Villeneuve, and the series was an early adopter of electric power.

After a victorious cameo in the electric category in 2018, he moved up to the secondary Elite category for the 2018-19 season and claimed a convincing title win. His performances in the rear-wheel-drive BMW M2 impressed ice paddock rival Sainteloc Racing, and when Boccolacci’s money ran out for F2 he was granted an “emotional” opportunity to drive in GT World Challenge Europe in one of the team’s Audi R8 LMS Evo GT3 cars as team-mate to Stephane Ortelli.

Suffice to say, Boccolacci – who turns 22 today (September 9) – had impressed one of sportscars’ best in the same car and for the first time since he entered cars gone into the next year feeling confident of a full racing season in a decent car.

Little did he know that he’d end up with three times what he was asking for.

The first of these is a drive with Oregon Racing – which was the launching pad for Albert Costa and Mirko Bortolotti‘s professional careers after they dropped off the single-seater ladder at the final step – in Lamborghini Super Trofeo Europe as an official young driver of the manufacturer.

“When you look at GT racing, there is a lot of manufacturer involvement across many teams, and Lamborghini is one of them which has a lot of opportunity to progress.

“And with the Super Trofeo, it is all Lamborghinis so you know that they are watching everyone. This is a good opportunity for me to become a factory driver and my overall ambition to be a professional driver and be paid to race.

“Lamborghini is known to have a good system and the chance for young drivers like me to build a career in motorsport. Quite a lot will change for me moving from single-seaters to GT this year. First, we have the traction control, everyone has ABS and then there is the driver change during the race. So, it will take some getting used to of course, but you need to adapt your driving style because the car is so heavy and you don’t really use the lateral of the car like in single-seaters.

“But I am looking forward to it of course. The aim is always to do as well as we can, to win races and challenge for the title, so we will see what happens when the season starts.

“There are some differences but also some things are quite similar from F2 to GT. Like managing the tyres, that is something we used to have to do a lot of in F2 and it’s the same in the GT car.

“I don’t have a lot of experience in the GTs but for sure, controlling the tyres and being good with them helps a lot so that is maybe something I can bring from F2 into GTs.”

Boccolacci is targeting wins in Super Trofeo, and maybe even the title, and scored his first podium with co-driver Kevin Gilardoni (winner of the 2012 FR2.0 Italy title) last weekend at the Nurburgring.

He could pick up further success in Germany this year, as he’s also racing for ex-Formula 1 team Zakspeed in ADAC GT Masters.

In that championship he’s racing a Mercedes-Mercedes-AMG GT3, and is 10th in the points after two rounds. The names ahead of him could genuinely be described as a list of the greatest GT racers in the world right now, and it is a series where he could also earn a living as a factory driver for F1’s current dominant force.

There’s a third name in the frame, as he has been retained by Audi customer Sainteloc for the GTWCE Endurance Cup. He finished fifth in the season opener, and once again the names ahead are the current class acts of GT racing.

The question now is not if Boccolacci has a car racing future, but with which manufacturer it will lie.

Interview by Stephen Brunsdon

Further reading
When Leclerc, Russell and Albon stood out in F3
Giacomo Ricci: The GP2 underdog leading F2’s dark horse
The underfunded Techeetah beater who had to reset his career

The post The junior driver spurned by Renault’s last F1 name change appeared first on Formula Scout.

ACI Sport

After five years on the sidelines in driver coaching and broadcasting, Facu Regalia – who rivalled Daniil Kvyat for the 2013 GP3 title – made a shock single-seater racing return last weekend. This is how it happened

Over a decade in age separated Van Amersfoort Racing’s two drivers in Formula Regional European Championship at Paul Ricard. One was 18-year-old Pierre-Louis Chovet, and the other was his 28-year-old driver coach Facu Regalia, whose most recent single-seater race appearance had been in the final ever Auto GP event at Silverstone in May 2015.

Regalia was something of a breakout star in an unpredictable 2013 GP3 season, which was arguably the most open in the series’ nine-year history, with six drivers still in contention for the title ahead of the Abu Dhabi season finale. Back-to-back feature race wins for current AlphaTauri F1 driver Kvyat had propelled him to second in the standings and seven points adrift of Regalia prior to Abu Dhabi, and effectively set up a showdown between the pair, with other drivers only outside title bets.

Misfortune at Spa-Francorchamps and Monza had effectively ended the hopes of long-time points leader Tio Ellinas, while Regalia had the measure of his ART Grand Prix team-mates Conor Daly and Jack Harvey, both now starring in IndyCar.

“To be honest, at the beginning of that season, nobody was expecting anything from me,” Regalia tells Formula Scout. “I think I was one of the surprises of that season. I was really confident in myself and really confident of what I could achieve during that season with ART.

“The team did a great job, they gave me a really good car; really consistent the whole time, so I could always be in the top five.

“But at some point, I started to believe that I could really win the championship. I would say after my win at the Nurburgring, after that victory, it gave me so much confidence that I could feel it already, that this championship can be ours.”

Photo: GP3 Media Service

Regalia’s seven-point advantage was reduced to three when Arden’s Kvyat stormed to Abu Dhabi pole, with Regalia himself only 10th on the grid. He’d risen to seventh in race one before a 30-second penalty for passing then-Red Bull junior Carlos Sainz Jr off the track dropped him to 15th place.

In the season-ending sprint race he fared even worse in 16th, completing his first pointless weekend since a woeful season-opener. Kvyat romped to the title with a win and a fifth, and a 30-point margin that did not reflect how close the season had been.

“It was a shame that we lost it by nothing [much] with Kvyat in Abu Dhabi,” Regalia reflected. “We arrived leading the championship, but unfortunately it was a difficult weekend for us and it was a really good weekend for him. The final result was what it was.

“It was my first time [at the track]… but in the end that wasn’t an issue, we were fighting for pole with the first set of tyres in qualifying, but then the second part with the second set of tyres, my front-left brake disc broke, out of nowhere, so I couldn’t take advantage of the second set [of tyres].

“From P3 with the first set, I moved to P10 [by the end of qualifying], and Kvyat on pole. It was kind of a disaster already from then on, because being P3, I could have still easily without any problems then [been] in the fight. But unfortunately the situation got really complicated for me, from that moment onwards.”

Kvyat graduated to F1 with Toro Rosso the following season while Regalia targeted a full-time drive in GP2 with a top team. He ended up signing for Force India-supported Hilmer Motorsport, which only had one year of GP2 experience under its belt. The team was not Regalia’s original choice of destination.

Photo: Alvaro Rivero/DPPI

“The intention was to continue with ART in GP2, the team wanted it as well. But unfortunately we didn’t have the budget to step up with them. The only alternative was Hilmer Motorsport, because Hilmer was also supported by Force India.

“I became a reserve driver for Force India at the beginning of 2014. [Hilmer] was a decision also coming from them. And in the end because of budget reasons, performance issues with the car, we were struggling so much – also my team-mate Daniel Abt was facing his second year in GP2 – and we were nowhere.”

Following the conclusion of the 2013 GP3 season, Regalia had even conducted a simulator day with McLaren and tested for Caterham’s GP2 outfit in the post-season GP2 test in Abu Dhabi, before joining the Force India/Hilmer alliance.

“The pre-season was really good, we were looking quite good. But when the first race weekend arrived, we were struggling so much. Having too many issues, I did four rounds and the team wanted me to continue, but I didn’t want to for two reasons.

“One: the budget, and the other because I was not reaching the goal. The goal was to be there in top six, fighting with [Stoffel] Vandoorne, the best rookie at that point. But it was impossible, and a shame because the initial plan was to be with Vandoorne in ART, both together in the same team, it could have been great.

“There were too honestly many issues going on, between balance, electronic issues, sometimes technical issues. That’s the reason why I decided to stop and look for a proper budget the year after.”

Regalia walked away from after a disastrous season start, where his best qualifying position was 19th and his best race finish was 17th. Rather than land a return to the series in 2015, he instead ended up racing in Auto GP.

Photo: Auto GP

“The intention was to go for a full season in GP2 in 2015 with a competitive team, but unfortunately the budget and the support didn’t arrive. We did our best, I moved to Argentina for the second part of the season in 2014, to find the budget everywhere, from my government, from private companies, but it was impossible.

“My country is a very difficult one. Very complicated to get support for these kind of things. Although the passion for motorsport is mega, and they really want the F1 back. But they want everything without [paying].

“In 2015, I did Auto GP because they invited me to do the whole season for free with them. It was a really nice chance to fight for another championship, to keep getting victories, to keep me active as well, but unfortunately, the category entered bankruptcy after the second round at Silverstone, and we had to stop.

“By then, I was P2 in the championship and fighting for the title with [ex-F1 driver] Antonio Pizzonia, so it was a shame honestly because the car is great.”

Regalia’s driver coaching began that same year in Euroformula and Spanish Formula 4, and he joined Argentina’s F1 television broadcasting team. His goal of returning to the second-tier was not over, however, as he came close to securing a place on the 2018 Formula 2 grid with MP Motorsport, a team which would eventually run ex-F1 driver Roberto Merhi and Ralph Boschung at the start of the season after a Los Angeles-based investor funding Regalia’s attempted entry had to pull his support.

“When I lost that opportunity, it was right at that moment that I decided myself to officially start running the [Road to Success] company. I let everyone know in the paddock, in the environment, about the intention, my work philosophy, people working in the programme, and so on.

Photo: ACI Sport

“There was straight away a really big interest from many people around the paddock. One of them was Van Amersfoort straight away. I start from then on working fully and investing my whole time in the programme, Road To Success.” 

The Road To Success driver development programme set up by Regalia features a number of past-and-present racing drivers including Mercedes-Benz’s Formula E reserve driver Dani Juncadella, DTM race-winner Lucas Auer, 2009 Euroformula champion Burno Mendez and Formula Renault 3.5 race winners Albert Costa and Borja Garcia.

Regalia’s shock single-seater return this past weekend came as a result of his association with VAR. This year he’s served as its official driver coach, as well as specifically mentoring its FREC driver Chovet. Alessandro Famularo was supposed to be his team-mate, but has put his intentions to race on halt for both coronavirus and performance-related seasons.

This left a vacant seat alongside Chovet, which Regalia was asked to fill in both the in-season test at the Red Bull Ring and the second round of the season at Paul Ricard. Regalia qualified eighth for all three races and recorded a best finish of seventh in the first and second races at a circuit he hasn’t raced on since his own Euroformula campaign in 2012.

“Well it was something that was a big surprise to everyone, even for myself,” he admitted. “Before the collective test at the Red Bull Ring, the team asked me to be the tester, to be helping the team, keep evolving the car and also helping Pierre-Louis as well, because for that test there was nobody in the second car.

“Normally there would be another driver from the next race onwards, but at that point there wasn’t anybody, so they asked me to jump in and try to help them test some things to keep evolving this car and also to keep helping Pierre-Louis.

Photo: ACI Sport

“The last single-seaters that I drove, the GP2, the GP3, the Auto GP, those cars were really powerful cars and really [high] downforce cars and are completely different to these single-seaters, to this F3, that has a completely different way to drive, because of how heavy it is.

“It’s not so powerful in the end, because of the weight of the car. So at some point you need to drive it differently compared to what I was used to. I had to adapt myself. Red Bull Ring was of course a good opportunity to know the car, experiment with the car on track.

“I was really used to watching it from outside, and also analysing the onboards, the data and everything. I obviously had information [at hand]. For that reason, it didn’t take too long for me. It was actually pretty quick, my adaption to the car.” 

The initial deal was for Paul Ricard, although the next round of the season will take place at the Red Bull Ring, where Regalia got behind the wheel of the car for the first time in the in-season test and set the second-fastest time behind team-mate Chovet on the final day.

Future race weekend outings may well depend on if VAR can fill its second seat, but regardless of whether Regalia ever gets back behind the wheel of the car again, this past weekend stands as a well-deserved single-seater return for a driver whose career could have turned out very different had he lined up alongside future F1 and FE star Vandoorne in GP2 in 2014.

You can listen to the full interview with Ida Wood on the latest episode of the Formula Scout podcast. Click below to listen, or head to Breaker, Google Podcasts, Overcast, RadioPublic, Pocket Casts, Castbox, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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Photos: GP2 Media Service / LAT Images

Giacomo Ricci has been a presence in GP2 since 2008, and he racked up two wins in 46 starts across four years of racing. He’s been behind the pitwall in the seasons since, and added wins in GP3 and FIA F3 too

Just over a decade ago, there was an air of confidence in Italy about its Formula 1 prospects. Ferrari had signed Fernando Alonso, Toro Rosso was on the up as a constructor team, Vitantonio Liuzzi was at an improving Force India and Jarno Trulli had joined returning legendary name of Lotus and was sure to score.

A few of those hopes were debunked in the season opening Bahrain Grand Prix, but there was encouragement in the support paddock as an Italian trio completed their domination of the GP2 Asia season.

Davide Valsecchi won a comfortable title ahead of compatriots Luca Filippi and Giacomo Ricci. It proved a false dawn as none of them made it to F1, but instead became three of the biggest names in GP2 and its successor F2 over the next decade.

Valsecchi won the main series title in 2012 and went on to become the series’ television commentator, Filippi was 2011 runner-up and then became its development driver through Pirelli (tasked most recently with the new 18-inch wheels), while Ricci won one race before also working with the Pirelli and being hired as Trident’s team manager.

Ricci started karting in Italy in the 1990s, and his name first cropped up when he was beaten by Lewis Hamilton to the historic Torneo Industrie title in 1999. Ricci, now 35, remembers being ‘inconsistent’ in karts.

In 2001 he turned 16 and immediately moved to single-seaters, having an underwhelming year in Formula BMW ADAC until a late-season change to a frontrunning team propelled him to podiums and then wins.

There was no follow-up season, as Ricci’s 2002 budget only covered the first three rounds before he switched his efforts to disappointing part-time Formula Renault 2.0 Eurocup and Germany campaigns without testing. The next year was even further under the radar, as he stepped down to FR1.6 Spain. Surprisingly, this ultimately saved his career.

“Because I was winning in FR1.6 Spain, I also did some races in the French series,” Ricci recalls to Formula Scout.

“The person behind it was Andre Herck. He was the boss of the [Becker] team his son Michael was racing for. I was hired by him in order to set up the car and in order to help Michael perform. It was a great opportunity because I got a free drive.”

This money-saving opportunity enabled Ricci to then race part-time in FR3.5 (while it was still backed by Nissan) in 2004 without testing and start a long association with Auto GP.

“My only chance was to arrive on track and drive and show my best, and that was what I was trying to do. I joined Vergani Racing and I felt immediately comfortable within the team and the [FR3.5] car, and I was able to do quite a good job.”

Ricci entered four rounds and took a best finish of seventh, with identical form in his four Auto GP races with Power Tech. At season’s end, Ricci almost quit racing before a sponsor arrived that funded him in Auto GP for the next two seasons. With International Formula 3000 being replaced by GP2 for 2005, the 470bhp Lola B02/50 was inherited by the Italy-based series and Ricci joined Astromega.

Four podiums in eight races put him third in the points, and enabled him to then move to Giancarlo Fisichella-branded top team Scuderia Coloni for the pan-European 2006 season.

“2006 was a fantastic season. I have many nice memories. Of course first of all being with a top team, that helped me massively because they had a very good understanding about the car. Plus I had a very strong team-mate in Marco Bonanonomi, we?re still very good friends today. It was a great fight between me and him.

“He was faster in qualifying, but then during the races – especially with the reversed grid – I was able most of the time to recover positions. And I?ve always been really strong in the races, especially in the wet. This meant I won the title in the last round at Misano, where I remember it was super tricky because we started with the slick tyres and it was a damp track.

“I?d been very aggressive with the set-up and the tyre pressure, which allowed me to make a massive advantage at the start of the race. But then the track dried up and in the last seven laps I was panicking because I was losing six tenths per lap. The car was going everywhere, but I was able to manage it and win that race.”

In the years after, Ricci’s services were called upon again and again in Auto GP due to his experience. Two wins in six races he was paid to do by ELK Motorsport in 2007 puts him fifth in the points, and he also cameoed in 2010, ’12 and ’13.

“The car was extremely heavy to drive [sans power steering]. It?s not like today where we have paddle shift, we had a sequential lever to use on the bottom of the monocoque. It was very tricky to drive.

“After I won the 2006 title the budget to step up to GP2 was crazy high, and even F1 opportunities were limited. So I gambled on moving to the USA in Atlantics. With the help of Max Papis, I did a shootout with Team Forsythe, one of the best teams.

“There was eight drivers for four seats. I did a good job so got the fourth seat for 2007. But at the last moment the team became Red Bull, and they kept only the two Red Bull juniors. The team had sent me a draft contract, and I was very excited to drive for Forsythe but unfortunately there was no place. [Afterwards] we chose to go to Conquest Racing.

“I was very disappointed I lost the opportunity to compete in one of the best teams. I took an opportunity that for me was not the greatest [instead]. I was able to finish the championship in sixth and third in the rookie standings so it was still a positive season, but I didn?t score any podiums. On a couple of occasions I was on the podium but then for a mechanical failure I was not able to reach this kind of result. The best I got was two fourth places.

“America was a great experience for me. Generally speaking, the level of driver there was very high. They were used to the street circuits and the airport circuits, whereas a driver coming over from Europe is not – so it was not easy.

“I remember the emotion, the experience, the drivers parade before every race which was fantastic. The contact you have with the fans, sponsors, with everyone was great. There was still Champ Car and the Indy Racing League at the time. At the end of the year Champ Car went bankrupt, and my goal was to move there. I had already signed [a deal], but unfortunately due to this problem the only chance was to start from zero again in Indy Lights and then try to move to IndyCar. The budget was not there any more for me, so that was my last chance in single-seaters basically with budget.

“In 2008 I returned to Europe and raced almost everywhere. I did some sportscar races, and then I was also driving in single-seaters in [Italian Formula 3, International Formula Master and] Auto GP with ELK. It was not the greatest way to spend a year, but for me it was important to keep racing in order to keep myself at a good level. And I was able to – even in the sportscars – show my potential and ability.”

Ricci’s first encounter with GP2 came at the start of the year with David Price Racing, a title-winning outfit in British F3 but a struggler in GP2, the team principal of which was the same Andre Herck who had helped him half a decade prior.

“Thanks to this relationship that started in 2002, Mr Herck again gave me this chance to do some races, two in 2008, then the [2008-09] Asia series, and then some 2009 races in the main series. At the time the team wasn?t great. We were struggling to go forward with the car, and it was difficult to understand the situation because there was already a bit of a fight inside the team. Even for me it was tough, and most of the time were at the back of the field.”

In both years, Ricci’s services were halted once Michael Herck was up to speed and DPR had found a paying driver. For the GP2 Asia season opener at Shanghai he actually drove for Trident, and he seemingly remained long in the team’s memory.

“At the end of 2009, DPR moved from England to Italy. It kept its name but the organisation was completely different. The car then became a rocket. It started being extremely competitive, and this enabled me to finish third in GP2 Asia. Unbelievable considering I did not compete in the first races because of mechanical issues. In total I did nine laps over the weekend. But in all the other races I was always able to finish top five in race one, and on the podium in race two. I have great memories because all of the top drivers were there: Sergio Perez, Sam Bird, Jules Bianchi, Valsecchi and so on. For me, with such a small team, it was unbelievable to reach that kind of result.?

“Then I was hired by the team at the last moment for 2010, and every race I didn?t know if I was competing in the next one, as nothing was related to my performance. The goal for me was to provide the best result, and at the same time respect team orders and the agreement I had with the team boss.

“I was also the test driver of the team, that?s why results were up and down, because I was testing different things in order to discover some positive things about the set-up. As you can imagine, most of the time when you try something it doesn?t work.”

The results really were up and down, as Ricci’s 14-race stint was bookended by a second place and win.

“I started 2010 very well, again I didn?t have the chance to do any private testing. But at the same time I’m grateful forever to Mr Herck because he was the only one who gave me a chance to prove myself. I have nothing to regret and I’m very happy about what I achieved in those two seasons, because when I had the opportunity I used it in the best way possible.”

Ricci was 12th on the grid for the Barcelona season opener, and a crash at the start enabled him to leap up the order.

“I saw everybody get a little bit confused, so I took the opportunity. I was in third after the first corner, and I thought: this is my one opportunity, it?s now or never. I did all the race behind Charles Pic, and I was able to get close to him in the last sector, but never really had the chance to overtake him so I finished second.”

At the Hungaroring he finished eighth in race one, his next points finish, and from reversed grid pole in race two he took DPR’s first main series win since 2005. That result made his car attractive to paying drivers, and his drive ended there.

By this point Ricci had been working as a development driver, driver coach or instructor for eight years, and any cost of racing beyond the running of the car itself at DPR had been covered by these jobs. These financial skills were put to further use when he joined MLR71 in Auto GP at the end of 2012 as a test driver and coach to team owner/team-mate Michele la Rosa.

Ricci wanted to revive his single-seater career, but by the time of the 2013 season opener he was already organising and hiring mechanics and he only raced for two rounds before becoming manager and searching for a driver to replace himself.

After a season of that, continuing work as a coach and with Pirelli in its two-seater F1 car, and a Nurburgring 24 Hours win as a factory Peugeot driver, Ricci received a surprise call from Trident founder Maurizio Salvadori in early 2014.

“It was a very very last-minute call. I remembered that when I signed the contract, the day after they sent me to Abu Dhabi [pre-season testing] to manage the GP2 team, with not so much experience.”

Ricci was now managing former on-track rival Johnny Cecotto Jr, and his experience was also useful for the struggling team.

“The GP3 team was absolutely not performing, and the GP2 team had better potential in comparison. So if you look at 2014 with Cecotto in GP2, and also with Sergio Canamasas, we were able to get some very good results immediately. Johnny had been fighting most of the season to finish top three in the points and ended up fifth.

“One of the best results as a team manager was the first race that I won, with Cecotto at Barcelona. We gambled a little bit with the strategy and we did a mega job with a great pitstop. It was a great drive for him, he started 16th and finished P1.

“I was lucky in that position, having the opportunity to work with Cecotto who was a super experienced driver. It was making my job easier because he knew exactly how to drive the car. After that we made some changes in the team, especially in GP3, and the year after with Luca Ghiotto we almost won the title. From that moment, we are the Trident of today. We are considered one of the best teams in the FIA F3 Championship.”

The biggest change in Ricci’s mind was his driver recruitment strategy, which he describes as a compromise between what a driver brings in performance versus what they bring in budget that then allows the team to improve the package it provides.

“Sometimes it?s difficult to find the best compromise, because sometimes for a team you have to lead on the budget,” concedes Ricci, whose F2 hires have yet to win races.

The first example of his preferred strategy was Ghiotto, who Ricci “pushed like crazy” to sign for the GP3 in 2015 and then GP2 in 2016. The Italian took pole on his GP3 debut at Spa-Francorchamps in 2014, but a team strategy error undid his race.

An engineer with previous working experience with Ghiotto was hired to convince him to join for 2015, and the team went from last in the standings with one points finish to six wins and second in both classifications. From then on, Trident was the only team other than ART Grand Prix able to fill all four of its GP3 cars.

“One of the best satisfactions in GP3 was when David Beckmann swapped from Jenzer Motorsport to Trident in 2018 [and won three races]. From that moment on we?ve been able to prove that our car package was as strong as ART too.”

Ricci also worked with the Ferrari Driver Academy to sign Raffaele Marciello to its GP2 team for ’15, and Trident’s relationship with the F1 manufacturer continued all the way through to last year.

Tyre degradation issues hampered Marciello’s year with the team, and he was dropped by Ferrari at the end of it. Ghiotto took the team’s next, and most recent, GP2/F2 win in 2016.

After its rebrand, F2 introduced a new car in 2018, which Ricci considers a “huge technological jump” from its predecessor. Its increased weight made the issue of tyre degradation even greater, and there’s even more to learn in 2020 with the larger 18-inch wheels being brought in. It’s a challenge for Ricci, but is increasing his love of the series as it gets “more interesting” and the standard of competition gets “higher and higher” as F2 adds complexities and drivers come ever more prepared with “personal trainers, mental coaches, driver coaches, their own karting sessions and sim sessions with the team”. Ricci says it bares no relation to the GP2 of just a decade ago.

He also says this is necessary, given one of his hardest tasks is educating drivers – especially stand-ins – about the Pirelli tyres’ unique characteristics that allow for one push lap and can drop off a cliff many laps before a scheduled pitstop when a driver pushes too hard early on. “The driver needs to adapt their driving style in each moment of the race,” he summarises.

The other big headache Ricci has had as team manager was in 2018, when a fall-out between his F2 drivers Santino Ferrucci and Arjun Maini resulted in Ferrucci deliberately colliding into his team-mate and having a public spact, then receiving a two-round ban, being dropped by Trident and getting taken to court by the team for ?502,000.

“It was a very difficult situation to manage inside the team. Two different drivers with two completely different characters were the result and the whinging about what happened at Silverstone was brought on by himself. When Santino Ferrucci left and Alessio Lorandi replaced him, the ambience changed completely in the team and it was more relaxed. There was more collaboration between both team-mates – as it should be.”

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Photo: Sam Bloxham/GP3 Series Media Service

Wales, once seen only as a country of rugby, has diversified its sporting success in recent years and is now home to some of the world’s best footballers, cyclists, hurdlers, martial artists and motorcycle racers 

Its single-seater pedigree has been small but sound, and to celebrate St. David’s Day (the patron saint of Wales), Formula Scout has looked back at the greatest drivers to have raced under the country’s flag in single-seaters. Expect any flames to be down to unburnt fuel in exhaust outlets though rather than any rogue motorsport-spectating dragons.

Tom Pryce
1975 Race of Champions winner, 10th in ’75 F1 – 9th in ’74 European F2, 10th in ’73 European F2, 5th in ’73 British Atlantic

Wales’ most famous and successful racing driver, Pryce is still remembered for his sideways driving style.

He’s the only Welshman to win in F1 and lead a world championship race, and won his way up the motorsport ladder at first in the era where scholarships and cars as prizes were common.

In 1972 he made his Formula 3 debut, but it was Formula Atlantic cars that suited him and a part-season in Britain’s championship resulted in three poles and a win. At the same time, he competed in European Formula 2 (a precursor to the F2 of today), finishing top 10 in the standings two seasons running.

Pryce joined backmarker Token for his F1 debut in 1974, but had switched to Shadow by his third race. It should’ve been his fourth, but he was barred from entering the Monaco Grand Prix. In protest to that decision, Pryce’s team boss put him in the F3 support race, which he dominated.

A third place start was achieved by Pryce’s second Shadow start, and in nearly three seasons the partnership got two podiums and 20 top 10 finishes.

Pryce’s career came to an untimely end in a horrific accident during the 1977 South African GP, but his name feverishly lives on.

Jann Mardenborough
9th in 2013 & ’14 Le Mans 24 Hours, 15th in ’17 Super Formula – 2nd in 2016 Japanese F3, 2nd in ’14 TRS, 9th in ’14 & ’15 GP3

Esports may be on everyone’s lips now, but it was Nissan and the GT Academy that laid the trail for game-to-track talent, and plucky Mardenborough – son of footballer Steve – starred in single-seaters.

He won a British GT race in his first season of racing in 2013, and if that wasn’t being thrown in at the deep end, he then spent his second in F3. He got one podium in the British championship, and started the year with 10th in the Toyota Racing Series.

For 2014 he was placed in GP3 by backer Nissan, gaining the support of Red Bull at the same time. Remarkably he finished ninth in the standings, and won a race at Hockenheim. Again he began the year in TRS, this time missing the title by the tiniest margin.

A bit-part second GP3 season meant there was no repeat of that success, but he did earn a factory LMP1 seat and debuted in GP2, a remarkable achievement for a driver who’d honed his skills on a games console.

F1 sadly never looked possible, and so Mardenborough was beckoned to Japan where he was 2016 Japanese F3 runner-up and has raced in Super Formula and Super GT since.

Jackie Lewis
13th in 1961 F1 – 1960 British F2 champion, ’60 Frontieres GP winner, Lombank Trophy & Coupe du Salon winner

A self-made success, Lewis started in F3 then excelled in F2, winning several international races and the 1960 British title before he stepped up to F1.

Rather than wait for a team to sign him, he bought his own Cooper T53 car and went racing as an independent. He ran solidly in the top 10, with two top 10 finishes before a breakthrough fourth place in the 1961 Italian Grand Prix. Stirling Moss aside, Lewis was the only independent driver to score points that season.

For 1962 he started his own Ecurie Galloise (Welsh Racing Team) outfit, fielding a substandard BRM before returning to his trusted Cooper. He only finished twice, eighth in the Netherlands and 10th in Britain, but was prevented from starting in Monaco in controversial circumstances. Lewis had been fast enough to qualify, but the organisers decided it was more important to have bigger name drivers on the grid even if they were slower, and one of them took Lewis’s spot.

Sadly his all-Welsh effort didn’t attract sponsorship, the politics of motorsport was not giving him a fair hand, and so he didn’t return to F1 for 1963. Instead, he chose to run a farm back in his home country.

Matt Parry
7th in 2018 Spa 24 Hours – 8th in 2015 GP3, 9th in ’16 GP3, ’13 FR NEC champion, 5th in ’13 Pau GP, ’12 Intersteps champion

Another Welshman who has raced GT cars for Nissan and won in GP3, Parry came through the traditional route of karting and the lower single-seater formulae.

He made his car racing debut aged 17 in British Formula Ford in 2011, finishing eighth and becoming a Caterham F1 junior in the process. That faith was repaid the next year when he dominated the Formula BMW-spec Intersteps championship, putting the likes of Jack Aitken in the shade.

Having won that title with Fortec Motorsports, Parry remained with the team for 2013, in which he added the Formula Renault Northern European Cup title and the (then McLaren-linked) Autosport BRDC Award.

A tricky 2014 in the FR Eurocup, where he only visited the podium once, didn’t halt his career progress but Caterham’s F1 departure did land a blow. For the next two years he raced in GP3 with Koiranen GP, but with just one win it meant his single-seater career went no further.

Admittedly that win did cap a great sporting summer for Wales in which it made it to the semi-finals of UEFA Euro 2016, Chaz Davies starred in World Superbikes, and Mardenborough and Seb Morris won in Japanese F3 and British GT respectively.

He has since raced in GT World Challenge Europe and is a key part of the Peak Performance Management company that looks after Olli Caldwell, Paul Aron, Casper Stevenson and Joshua Dufek.

Alan Rees
25th in 1967 F1- 1967 Autocar British F2 champion, 3rd in ’64 & 66 French F2, 4th in ’67 Finnish GP, 5th in 1967 European F2

Like many Welshmen who raced in the the 1960s, British F2 was the platform where Rees made his name.

He was the 1967 Autocar-sponsored British champion (two series co-existed at the time), and he proved his triumphs weren’t limited to home by being a consistent threat in the French and European championships.

His 1967 European campaign started with two points-scoring wins on the trot, but he couldn’t replicate that form thereon and slipped to fifth in the standings.

Roy Winkelmann Racing, who ran him in F2, entered him into two F1 world championship races during this time, and he finished seventh overall in the 1967 German Grand Prix in his Brabham F2 car. At the British Grand Prix he was handed a factory Cooper F1 seat, but only finished ninth. He returned to European F2 for 1968, but by then RWR’s Brabham was no match for the opposition.

Little over a year later, Rees co-founded March Engineering. The team won two races in memorable style, while Rees’ former F2 rival Jackie Stewart piloted another March car to victory for Tyrell. Rees left in 1971 to lead Shadow, which included running countryman Pryce, before departing again to form Arrows in 1977.

Photo: Jakob Ebrey Photography / British Formula 3 International Series

Although many could point to Felix Rosenqvist as F3’s longest serving driver of recent times, it’s actually Lloyd who’s stayed in the driving seat for the longest.

The 33-year-old was a champion karter before entering FR2.0 UK and BARC in 2006 with the Lloyd family team CF Racing. He finished fifth in the secondary BARC series, then dominated it and its accompanying winter championship the next year.

Both team and driver graduated to F3 in 2008, and have remained there ever since. LLoyd finished third in British F3’s National class in his first year, but was mired in the midfield when he graduated to the primary class. With experience came improvements though, and a tie-up with East Asia meant the Lloyd family team was rebranded Sino Vision Racing.

Highlights, aside from a Superleague Formula cameo, included a top 10 finish in the 2010 Masters of F3 event and 16th in 2011’s Macau Grand Prix. After winning in British F3’s National Class again, Lloyd focusing on running CF Racing in the MSV F3 Cup, but stills drops in occasionally to show his driving talent.

With several F3 Cup titles under its belt, Lloyd took the team to Euroformula in 2019 to race at Spa-Francorchamps and Silverstone.

Located at the south end of an active airport, Pembrey circuit has possibly played a more important role in junior single-seater history this century than anywhere else.

The 2.348km layout is used regularly by teams in Britain to shakedown new cars or drivers, and test components varying from new aerodynamic appendages, engines and of course the human element that sits in the car.

Carlin and Double R Racing are the primary users of the track, with the former having started most of its seasons in the BARC/BRDC British F3 championship with tests there before the championship’s demise in 2014, and the latter doing work on behalf of Dallara through the non-racing side of its business.

In 2014 Carlin launched its own academy at the circuit, offering track time in a FR2.0 and FR1.6 car.

Pembrey’s popularity as a testing venue was nearly instant after it was opened in 1989, with the McLaren F1 team famously visiting with Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost. Other teams followed suit, including Benetton, Jordan and Williams. Its variety of corners and less stringent noise restrictions made it the perfect location, despite literally being on the very edge of Wales.

During the 1990s it also held high-profile race meetings, with British F3 visiting on several occasions. Current McLaren Racing boss Gil de Ferran won the first of those races in 1993, with the likes of Jan Magnussen, Nicolas Minassian, Luciano Burti and Jenson Button also standing on top of the podium between then and the last meeting in 1999.

The official lap record for the circuit, a 50.079s, was set by Fortec driver Brian Smith in 1997.

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