Photo: FRECA

Returning to ART Grand Prix after a successful two rounds in Formula Regional Oceania in February, Laurens van Hoepen was expecting more from his second FRegional European Championship season.

In his six-race FRegional Oceania spell, he claimed five podiums, two poles and won the New Zealand Grand Prix. But after 12 races in FREC this year he has a best result of fifth and only four points finishes.

“We are making progress, which is good,” he explained to Formula Scout. “Still a step to make, but we are going in the right direction. We are struggling to get the maximum out of the new tyres, so qualifying is our main weakness.”

“Imola was very tough. Barcelona was a bit better, Budapest was even better but then Spa-Francorchamps and Mugello were quite bad for me.”

Although he had shown pace this year, van Hoepen only once qualified in the top 10 before Paul Ricard. With two top-five results in his qualifying group in France, he and the team had reason to be optimistic they had turned a corner.

“We are trying quite a lot of things and some stuff works and some doesn’t. It’s not fully clear yet but I think we’ve now found a way which is going in the right direction,” van Hoepen believes.

ART GP has struggled to match its past results, having taken Gregoire Saucy to the 2021 title and Gabriele Mini to second in the 2022 standings, and even drafted in Hadrien David at Spa to provide some experienced input.

Aside from that weekend, third-year FRegional racer van Hoepen has been thrust into the position of ‘team leader’ alongside two rookie team-mates.

“With the two rookies, it is interesting to see what they say about the car and what they do,” said van Hoepen, although he does concede that “it would maybe be nice to have an experienced team-mate to see what he does”.

He did at least benefit from the support of recently axed Formula 1 driver Nyck de Vries over the Paul Ricard weekend, as he provided valuable advice and encouragement while keeping himself firmly in the background.

“It is very nice to have Nyck here. He’s so experienced, so you can really learn a lot from his input. He doesn’t say anything [on the radio] but he can hear what we say, and he can comment on how we work.”

While de Vries doesn’t get involved in debriefs, for example, he can provide “a different perspective, and some interesting points of views for me to take into the meetings with engineers, but also to look at the run plan and things like that”.

Van Hoepen hopes that “we can definitely find something in the summer break and have a good last four rounds,” one of which will be on home territory at Zandvoort, a race he is particularly looking forward to.

“It’s a nice track and it’s good to stay at home and not a hotel, which is weird.”

The post Van Hoepen “going in right direction” with de Vries’ trackside support appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: Roger Gascoigne

His middle name is Romeo, and his twin’s brother’s is Alfa, so it’s clear racing is quite literally in the blood for Tom Coronel. He joined the Formula Scout Podcast to discuss his career, the cost of F4 and more

“It was mega. Formula Ford was the best series for learning drivers. Mechanical grip, slipstreaming, that was good,” Tom Coronel says enthusiastically. “It’s a pity, it’s not [big] in Holland. It doesn’t exist anymore.”

The wingless category was the starting point of Coronel’s single-seater career, which went on to include Formula Opel, Formula 3 and then Super Formula. He won the title in Japan’s answer to Formula 1, but no door was open in the world championship and so he switched to sportscars and then to touring cars where his name has become synonymous after two decades racing with success in global and European series.

He’s also a bit of a television celebrity in the F1-mad Netherlands, working as an analyst on a panel show during race weekends that actually required Coronel to drive all the way to the studio just a few hours either side of recording our podcast – and racing in TCR Europe – at Spa-Francorchamps earlier this month.

Listen to it here, find it on Breaker, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, RadioPublic, Castbox, Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and read an abridged transcript below too!

“I went [to Japan] the same time as Ralf Schumacher and Norberto Fontana. It was just at one stage you don’t have the budget anymore for going to Formula 2 [then International Formula 3000] and there you were going to be a professional driver so they pay you, and they ask you if you want to race for them. Well that was something unique, something different. So finally we had no choice to go there. I make two years with TOM’S Toyota, good times, and once you are scoring there really well, you win races, they treat you really well, they treat you like a professional driver. But there was a different approach than Europe.”

Coronel followed up a junior single-seater career in Europe that included the Dutch FF1600 title, the Formula Opel Lotus Nations Cup and second place in the FOpel Lotus Euroseries, and second place in the Monaco Grand Prix’s Formula 3 support race with four years spent in Japan where he won the national F3 title in 1997 (and the Masters of F3 race back at home), picked up victories in Super GT and then became SF (then known as Formula Nippon) champion in 1999.

“It was special because the funny thing was if you were P2, they ask you:

‘What’s the problem? The engine or the chassis?’
‘No, no. Don’t worry, I didn’t push enough. I think tomorrow if I push a little bit more I will be there.’
‘But Tom please explain. Was it the engine, or the chassis?’

‘We took you, so that’s not the problem’. So what’s then the problem? And that was a different mindset. Because in Europe it’s different.

“Once you won the championship there, the adventure was over. And that’s how I saw it. A lot of drivers stayed there: Benoit Treluyer, Andre Lotterer, I took care of him [when he first went to Japan]. They are still there, to drive, to pick up professional money. But I said once I won the FNippon championship ‘I go back to Europe, I also have a social life here’. Because otherwise I was going to stay there, so I stopped. They still called every year for five years ‘Tom, please come back, please come race with us’. ‘Nope’. And it was quite funny in 2003, I think they tripled the [Super GT] salary so I said ‘OK, I go’.”

Photo: Super Formula

Japan can be a big culture shock for some European drivers, and Coronel helped others navigate the switch.

“Get in the Japan lifestyle. Andre Lotterer, Sebastien Philippe, I took care of those boys in Tokyo.”

Did that include the night life?

“Well you know, if you need relaxation after tension. Let’s say I took care of them. Ask them, for sure they will say if you are out with Coronel you don’t come home before sunlight.”

He still helps out other drivers today, although in a rather different capacity to cultural guide.

“I’m staying here in Spa because I’m coaching some drivers. Just this morning I was WhatsApping with a driver, maybe to come over, because I want him to see the F4 championship. And I will drive with him in about three weeks’ time I think.”

Other drivers that Coronel has supported at the start of their car racing careers includes Jaap van Lagen, Pieter Schothorst and the considerably older Bas Schothorst. “All the guys who won,” as Coronel describes them. “I always make winners.”

And what is his approach to aiding young drivers?

“Honesty, no bullshit and talk with results. Second place is the first loser. I’m very strict, I’m very open, I don’t like ‘oh but this and this and the team’. No, no, no, no, no, no. First you [look at yourself].”

After taking his FNippon crown, Coronel raced sportscars in America and Europe before establishing himself as a touring car star, a rare move for drivers who get to such a high level in single-seater racing. So why the tin-top switch?

Photo: Super Formula

“The problem was with sportscars you share. And somehow I didn’t like it. Of course I did GT, I did sportscars with Jan Lammers etc, but in the end a person like me has a little bit too much energy. But you know, I’m known of this. And I know it. Because my friends always say ‘you were born in a ball of cocaine, so please don’t take any drugs’. And I’ve never taken any drugs in my life, honestly. Because I have so much energy already for myself, the problem is I’m 50 but I feel 24.

“This morning I drove here from Holland. Last night I drove back. Because of the F1 [TV] show. Yesterday morning I drove here at 4:45am. People say ‘you’re fucking crazy, how is this possible?’. That’s me. I cannot stop. And the car doesn’t know how old you are. So what’s the problem? Some guys ‘but Tommy you’re old’ Ah, ah, ah, it’s experience. You’re using the wrong word.

“You saw the [TCR Europe] race today. Wait, wait, patient, wait, wait, wait. If I would have been aggressive, because he was angry… I treat people how people treat me. If you fuck me, I fuck you twice in the ass without lubrication. You understand?”

That’s touring cars.

“But all around the paddock, you can walk around, everybody loves me. They are all my friends, because they know I know I’m an honest fighter. For Tommy, I’d rather be second with a big fight to have fun afterwards than I win the race with 10-second lead. And that’s where the difference is between me and other people.

“They don’t understand me, they’re too frustrated, too difficult. I’m not difficult, I’m easy. Because if you understand my system, it’s about enjoying life, it’s about results. Don’t party and have a bad result, no, no, no, no, no. The result is P1, that’s what counts, then after party like crazy. I don’t care if evening, tomorrow morning you wake up in the puke, I don’t care. But Sunday, when you have to do the job, you cannot be the weakest list, you have to be the strongest link. If you have a chain, where does it break when you pull it? You have to be the strongest link. And that’s always how I approach myself, how I approach racing, and also there are a lot of people that are frustrated.

Photo: TCR Europe

“And then I’m like ‘you’re a privileged motherfucker that you can race’. All those guys who sitting [on TV] they’re looking at you and you’re driving, and you’re complaining? You’re stupid. It’s the attitude. I don’t like the spoiled kids. I’m very strict.”

Coronel’s strictness extends to costs when it comes to racing, and he feels that Formula 4 is a failure for the FIA. It was originally pitched and launched in 2014 as a €100,000 category. Now the budgets are three times that…

“In my opinion it’s getting out of proportion. F4 is €300,000. It’s completely ridiculous. I made FFord for €30,000. I drove with my car, with the trailer behind it, then when I arrived on the circuits people were helping me with the set-up, I didn’t even know, I didn’t even have jerrycans, I borrowed the jerrycans. Nowadays you have to be with Prema, Van Amersfoort Racing etc. It’s out of proportion. My opinion is racing is only for rich people. There is no opening anymore for people who have the talent. And this is difficult.

“Why is there no FFord anymore? Why is the start category F4? Why? And if I have a F4, that’s my campervan, I arrive with my trailer with my F4. Hello, here I am, I would like to do the race. I’m not allowed?! You’re not allowed? What is this?

“It’s bullshit what they [the FIA] say. The FIA is not – they don’t do what they say. They say we go low price and all these kinds of things, it’s not true, it’s not true. What they do is dictatorship, it’s control. If I have a F4, I buy now a F4, I want to enter the race, I’m not allowed to enter the race. This is not right. I have a talented driver, I would like to start this morning. If you can, you can open the gate, I can show you his laptime. It’s not possible. No I have to enter with a team who I have to pay €350,000. Where can I find the 350k?  But this is the difficulty. This is why in my opinion the FIA is complete, complete off their minds. They lie.”

F4 has just about held on to its father-and-son teams, with Sauter Engineering+Design competing in ADAC F4, and there’s nothing actually stopping a licensed driver with an eligible car entering an F4 series, but series organisers may encourage mid-season arrivals who may only be set for one round to enter as guests if they are not joining the line-up of a team already running in a series.

Photo: TCR Europe

“The problem is [racing] is an addiction, and the difficulty is only rich people can race nowadays. And this is what I don’t like, this is what I don’t like in motorsport.”

It’s not just simply favouring ‘the rich’ by having the most expensive entry route into single-seaters be the best supported, but also that wealth tends to be carried by a group of people lacking in diversity.

“[The FIA] say we make it accessible. They say it’s for women. They talk bullshit. They’re not honest, it’s not true what they do. Because if it’s true what they do, then they have to support the cheap series and they don’t. They only support the series and they make them more expensive, and then they make money out if it.”

The rise of spec series was in part instigated by the explosive success of Formula Opel, in its national championship, continental championship and cup contest forms, in the 1990s. It was a “fucking good series that was cheap, honest racing” and helped propel Coronel’s own single-seater career, but he thinks “100%” its success led to the standardisation of junior single-seaters in the decades since.

“There is no start anymore. My boy is now 11 and I’m really pushing him to see if there are any possibilities, but I cannot even start with F4. It’s too expensive.”

FFord does still exist, in good health in the United Kingdom too, “but if you win the Festival, who are you?” reckons Coronel. “It’s not being supported [by the FIA].”

Coronel’s old friend Jan Magnussen contested last year’s Festival, 29 years after winning it as a young racer, and his nephew Dennis Lind did it too. Both got thoroughly stuck in, with Lind staying late to polish his car.

The 2021 FFord Festival

“This is what I mean, this is what I miss in motorsport. But this is what I like from the TCR Europe series. Very basic, the European series like this one. I walk in every team, I don’t care. I’m very open. Every team i walk inside, I sit, I open their fridge, I start eating, nobody complains to me. Because this is the style, what I miss.

“We are all laptime addicted. You have clinics for cocaine-addicted people, we have clinics for alcoholics, clinics for sex addiction, but there is no clinic for motorsport addiction. So I’m in the shit, I’m in the shit for the rest of my life.

“I need it, otherwise I start to kill people,” he jokes.

Coronel’s TV analyst role means he has to keep an eye on F1’s support series and the competitiveness of the entry-level options, and he has strong thoughts about that.

“You know when you have talent? When you keep growing. There are a lot of people who have talent, but at one stage it stops. And for me, it’s weird that Oscar Piastri wins all the championships and this year he’s not racing. He’s one year on the sidelines. The guy has not been in a racing car for the last eight months, how stupid is this?”

It was actually Coronel who broke the news that reigning F2 champion Piastri may be set for a Williams F1 seat in 2023, but he’s not the only F2 champion he thinks is in need of an F1 drive.

“I have to be careful what I say. It’s weird that young, talented drivers, they don’t get opportunities. And of course I’m 50, and I race against those young shits and I still give them a hard time and I don’t give them presents during the race. And I like to see it, and I like to see them fight because nowadays they get it all so easy. Nyck de Vries is [2019 F2 champion and Formula E world champion]. De Vries is doing all the time good things, never failed, and what I don’t understand is he doesn’t get any chance. Because of political reasons, because of budget reasons, and this is not right, this is not right.”

Photo: Formula E

Alongside his title-winning FE exploits with Mercedes, de Vries has held a reserve driver position with the brand’s F1 team.

“He is the insurance policy of Toto Wolff,” says Coronel. “Because Toto keeps him next to him, I understand. Because if one of his drivers has difficulty, who else to put in? Nyck has the experience, Nyck is clever, Nyck is fast, he knows him. So it’s easy. And Nyck will deliver, 100% sure. He will deliver. So he needs Nyck. He’s a business case. He is the insurance policy for Mercedes.”

But Mercedes faces losing de Vries in 2023 as its FE exit means he’s looking for a seat elsewhere in that paddock and in top-level sportscars. An F1 seat with a customer team would be a good way of keeping him on board, but no such F1 opportunity is actually arising. “This is what I mean. It’s politics and money.”

As Coronel says himself, there’s no bullshit when he’s around and he’s forthright with his views and his insight on the racing world. He’s also a very entertaining man to chat to. You should give him a follow on social media.

The post Tom Coronel on his racing addiction, Merc’s “insurance” driver and more appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: Haas F1 Team

It’s 30 years to the day since Michael Schumacher took F1 by storm on his debut. Could any young driver grasp a similar opportunity today? 

There has inevitably been much interest in the 30th anniversary of Michael Schumacher’s amazing debut weekend for Jordan in the 1991 Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps. Beyond the significance of the anniversary itself, this weekend, of course, will be son Mick’s first Formula 1 start at the demanding Ardennes circuit – and he’s even been driving his father’s Jordan 191 (pictured) to mark the occasion.

Schumacher senior was famously called up by Jordan at short notice in the aftermath of regular driver Bertrand Gachot’s incarceration in a British jail following an altercation with a London cabbie.

From today’s perspective, the decision to give the drive to Schumacher seems like an inspired judgement, cementing Eddie Jordan’s reputation as a talent-spotter in the junior single-seater ranks. In truth, Schumacher was effectively a pay-driver for the weekend and Jordan’s decision was driven by financial more than sporting considerations. Jordan himself has subsequently admitted to having little idea about Schumacher or his record up to that point.

However, as the reigning German F3 champion and winner of both legs of the 1990 F3 Euro-Macau-Fuji Challenge, Schumacher was one of the top names in the junior single-seater ranks at the end of that year. By the time of Spa, his F3 rival Mika Hakkinen was already established within F1 with Lotus. Schumacher’s only single-seater appearance so far that season had been second place in a Japanese F3000 round at Sugo.

As a member of the Mercedes Junior Team, Schumacher had been gaining experience and attention with the marque’s Group C sportscars over the previous two seasons. Mercedes were keen to give him his Grand Prix debut and provided the financial support to place their man in the cockpit of the highly-competitive Jordan 191 for Spa.

Schumacher’s performance has been well-documented; eighth fastest in qualifying, beating experienced team-mate Andrea de Cesaris’s time by almost 0.8 seconds. Despite, or maybe because of the Jordan’s clutch failing within a few hundred metres of the start, a legend had been created.

Photo: Williams Racing

In 2021, it is COVID-19 self-isolation rather than enforced imprisonment that is more likely to rule a driver out of action and necessitate a one-off replacement. During 2020, Sergio Perez, Lance Stroll and Lewis Hamilton were all forced to sit out races for that reason. Racing Point called up Nico Hulkenberg on both occasions whereas Hamilton’s absence opened the door indirectly for Jack Aitken (pictured above) to make his debut with Williams. In addition, Pietro Fittipaldi started the final two grands prix of the year following Romain Grosjean’s horrific accident in Bahrain.

In modern F1, teams’ choice of a potential emergency replacement would, in practice, be motivated by existing reserve driver arrangements, academy affiliations, availability and, most significantly, eligibility for a superlicence.

The current points-based system for a driver to qualify for a superlicence makes it close to impossible for an up-and-coming star to jump straight from F3 to F1 in the way that Schumacher himself did (and, of course, more recently, Max Verstappen). Indeed, under the current rules, Schumacher’s results in F3 and sportscars would not have qualified him for a superlicence, although it should be noted that a national F3 championship in 1990 had a very different status than such a series does in 2021.

But if a hypothetical scenario arose in 2021, with a team needing to fill a vacant seat for this weekend’s Belgian GP and no automatic reserve driver available, who from the junior single-seater ranks might a team-owner with a point-scoring and potentially race-winning car turn to?

For the purposes of this “what-if” scenario let’s assume that the team owner has decided to give a chance to a driver with no previous F1 race experience…

Nyck de Vries

Photo: Formula E

Having just clinched the Formula E world championship title, Nyck de Vries is currently on a high. In some respects, he is in a similar position to Schumacher 30 years ago – a works Mercedes driver competing in a series outside F1.

Before first practice at Spa, Schumacher had no experience of driving at Spa. De Vries, on the other hand, brings a strong record from his F2 days: pole position and a dominant feature race win in 2018 (ahead of two of the stars of the 2021 F1 season, Lando Norris and George Russell) followed by another pole in the tragic F2 weekend in 2019.

Of course, de Vries has not necessarily been groomed by Mercedes for a F1 berth and at 26 is four years older than Schumacher was in 1991. But rumours persist linking de Vries to a Williams seat for 2022 and it’s not difficult to see Mercedes chief Toto Wolff using his clout to push for a well-deserved chance in F1. At the same time, de Vries’ FE team-mate Stoffel Vandoorne – a veteran of 41 F1 starts – might be preferred for any one-off outing at his home circuit.

Mercedes does have a further junior on its books with the necessary superlicence: Frederik Vesti. Vesti is currently in his second season of FIA F3, having won the inaugural Formula Regional European Championship in 2019. However, the step up from F3 is a demanding one and Spa 2021 may simply be too early without any previous taste of F1 machinery.

Callum Ilott

Photo: Alfa Romeo Racing

Any team looking to maximise chances of a strong points finish by taking a top 10 result in qualifying would do well to consider Ferrari Academy driver Callum Ilott. Ilott’s ultimate speed was never in doubt in F2, taking more poles than any other driver in 2020, but mistakes and bad luck allowed Mick Schumacher to take the title.

As the reserve driver for Alfa Romeo he has experience of the current generation of F1 machinery during a GP weekend. He also has a parallel with Michael Schumacher in that he’s now racing sportscars – albeit GT cars rather than prototypes – and last weekend claimed a class podium at the Le Mans 24 Hours.

Another driver with recent mileage for Alfa Romeo is Theo Pourchaire, but the F2 rookie star is a few points short of his superlicence.

Oscar Piastri

Photo: Alpine F1 Team

Current F2 championship leader Oscar Piastri has made a stellar rise through the junior categories and, if he goes on to win the 2021 F2 title, faces some difficult career choices. As a member of the Alpine Academy, Piastri is strongly supported although opportunities with that team appear limited in the next couple of seasons.

As such, Alpine may be keen to play the Mercedes role of 1991 and secure the drive for one of their next generation of stars. He has shown himself to be a quick learner and brings sim experience of the current generation of F1 cars, as well as recent tests with older cars.

Juri Vips or Liam Lawson

Photo: Red Bull Content Pool

Red Bull junior drivers, Juri Vips and Liam Lawson, have both scored wins in the 2021 F2 championship. Indeed, Lawson took victory in the first round of the season, admittedly from a reversed grid, and was unlucky to lose a win in the second round at Monaco due to a technical infringement. Juri Vips took two wins in Baku after a more difficult start to the season.

Helmut Marko has never been afraid to throw a rookie into a mid-season F1 debut, even if it’s with another team, and is unlikely to pass up the opportunity to evaluate either Vips or Lawson as he works out where their futures lie.

In the light of his later achievements, Schumacher’s incredible performance seems almost inevitable. Undoubtedly, the Jordan was an ideal chassis to make his debut, and was perfectly suited to Spa. By all accounts at the time, Schumacher was not overawed by his surroundings. The rest, of course is history…

Given a competitive car, is it fanciful to believe that any of those named above would be able to qualify strongly, even reaching Q3, and to score points on their debut?

The post Thirty years on, who could replicate Schumacher’s stunning F1 debut? appeared first on Formula Scout.

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

Here is Formula Scout’s Class of 2019… Key Wins (W), poles (P), fastest laps (FL)

9. Ukyo Sasahara JAPAN 24y/o
15th in Super GT, 18th in Super Formula, NC in Asian F3 (3 W, 4 P, 1 FL)   2019: Asian F3 champion (8 W, 7 P, 7 FL)

Photo: Red Bull Content Pool

Photo: Red Bull Content Pool

The former Formula Renault star has essentially gone through his single-seater career twice now, with his first taking him up to FIA European Formula 3, and the second starting off in Japanese Formula 4 and concluding in a Super Formula seat.

Admittedly the Red Bull athlete only got his SF chance after travel restrictions prevented Red Bull’s Formula 1 junior Juri Vips from racing, but he was chosen by Team Mugen as the replacement because he was highly rated by team manager Shinji Nakano.

Sasahara had only done three Super GT races with Mugen at this point, with a best finish of 10th, but Nakano had already said his signing was good enough to race in F1 in the future. This came after a 2019 in which as well as winning the Asian F3 title with Hitech GP, Sasahara also became the first winner of the Motorsport Games GT Cup and was Porsche Carrera Cup Japan champion.

That momentum continued into 2020 at first as he returned to Asian F3 as a guest, consistently beating the likes of future Haas F1 drivers Pietro Fittipaldi and Nikita Mazepin.

In Super GT he made the top five in qualifying once, at Suzuka, but wasn’t able to make anything of it after his car lost a wheel just a few laps in. There was redemption next time out at Twin Ring Motegi though as he claimed his first and only podium of the season alongside Hideki Mutoh.

The SF season was far less rewarding, having not tested the Dallara SF19 car before, and in the early rounds he struggled with the series’ soft compound tyre supplied by Yokohama. He progressed a lot over the seven-round season, particularly in qualifying where he ended up with a higher average starting spot than title contenders Ryo Hirakawa and Nick Cassidy, and in the final race at Fuji Speedway he was fighting both of those drivers on track on the way to his first points finish in seventh.

8. Oliver Askew USA 23y/o
19th in IndyCar   2019: Indy Lights champion (7 W, 7 P, 5 FL)   2018: 3rd in IP2000 (1 W, 3 P, 2 FL)

Photo: IndyCar

Photo: IndyCar

So much was expected from reigning Indy Lights champion Oliver Askew as he stepped up to IndyCar this year with the returning McLaren, a team co-run with Schmidt Petersen Motorsports, but he ultimately failed to deliver.

The Floridian looked at his strongest on the ovals, but he admitted himself that he lacked the consistency needed to make progress race-by-race over such a compressed season with limited practice time due to the pandemic.

Besides qualifying fifth at the Indianapolis Grand Prix, his second IndyCar start, which he then crashed out of, he was usually struggling on one-lap pace and only made the top 10 on the grid again on his end-of-season return in St. Petersburg.

• Feature: The youthful dynamic that’s already moved McLaren to the front

His absence from the previous double-header, also on Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s road course, was a result of concussion he picked up in a nasty crash during the Indianapolis 500 – a race he led for a few laps – two months prior.

Besides the Indy 500, the only other round where he looked capable of fighting at the front like team-mate Patricio O’Ward was the Iowa double-header. In the first race of that weekend he picked up his first IndyCar podium in third place, then in race two he led for 10 laps on the way to sixth place.

His season had begun encouragingly with a ninth place on the Texas oval, ahead of O’Ward, but before season’s end it had already been announced he wouldn’t be retained for 2021 and finishing 16th from 10th on the grid in St. Pete didn’t turn too many heads.

It was a trying season with a few instances of contact with other drivers, but overall nothing to say that Askew doesn’t deserve a second year in IndyCar. It’s a shame then that he is unlikely to be returning to the grid soon.

7. Sergio Sette Camara BRAZIL 22y/o
20th in Super Formula (1 P), 27th in FE   2019: 4th in F2 (2 W, 2 P, 2 FL)   2018: 6th in F2 (1 P, 3 FL)  2017: 12th in F2 (1 W, 1 FL)

Photo: FIA Formula E

Photo: FIA Formula E

Once a Red Bull junior and then a McLaren one too, Sette Camara was snapped up by Red Bull once again as its F1 reserve driver for this year. This came after after signing as Dragon Racing’s reserve in Formula E and courting IndyCar interest, and not long before he took a place in B-MAX Racing by Motopark’s SF line-up. He was going to be in a lot of places in 2020.

Obviously the pandemic stripped back many of those commitments, and his first summoning came in FE’s six-race week-long Berlin season finale in August. He replaced Brendon Hartley in the team’s line-up, and Sette Camara knew he would have to be on top of his game to even match two-time World Endurance champion Hartley’s haul of two points in the first five races.

He was last in qualifying for his debut on the circuit’s reverse layout, and was set to finish 21st before exceeding the maximum limit of 45kWh on electrical energy used in the race and was disqualified as a result.

The next day brought an improved 20th place on the grid, and he came 17th after another driver got disqualified for the same reason as he did.

Reverting to the circuit’s standard layout for the next two races suited Sette Camara far more, having navigated this route on the team simulator before, and he earned the team’s highest starting spot of the 2019-20 season by qualifying 11th for the first of those. His race ended in a multi-car crash though, and he would start from last place the next day.

There was no redemption in the race, but on the very green alternative layout used for the final two races of the season a few days later he made the most of being in the later – and grippier – qualifying groups to qualify ninth twice. He faded down to 15th and 19th in the races, but beat team-mate Nico Muller in both.

Two months later he finally made his SF debut at Sportsland SUGO, after missing the opening two rounds, but it began in embarrassing style for the Formula 2 graduate with a red flag-causing spin in free practice. Sette Camara got lucky to scrape through the first two stages of qualifying, but then stunned the paddock by earning B-MAX its first series pole on his debut.

Having never made a practice start in the car it was no surprise that he lost the lead off the line, but ran in a comfortable second place until the pitstop phase of the race. After his stop, he went just four corners before crashing out on cold tyres. It was a painful end to a very encouraging debut, and his only start in Japan before returning to F1 and FE duties in Europe.

6. Toshiki Oyu JAPAN 22y/o
4th in Super GT300, 6th in Super Formula (1 win)   2019: 4th in SF Lights (1 W), 14th in Euroformula (2 W, 2 P)

If it wasn’t for crashing into his Nakajima Racing team-mate Tadasuke Makino, among others, and often making a mess of race starts in his rookie SF season then Oyu would be far higher up this list. But by professional standards, he was really putting his job at risk with the race-ruining collisions he started his professional career with.

What puts him at number six though is the way he turned it around, with an end of season qualifying average that was third best of the season regulars and a win and a podium that left him sitting handsomely as top rookie in the points by some way.

• Feature: How “worried” Nakajima had his faith in Oyu rewarded

His breakthrough win from second on the grid at Suzuka, the penultimate race of the season, was inherited after Nick Cassidy had an engine failure but it came after a mistake-free performance for the first time. He then followed that up with a charge from seventh to second at Fuji, proving he could actually race wheel-to-wheel too.

He certainly had the opportunity to beat Sho Tsuboi to victory too, and did attempt a move on the eventual race winner, but to not take further risks in going for the win showed the development Oyu had made over his up-and-down first year in SF.

The Honda junior, who was a winner in Euroformula and Super Formula Lights in 2019, also got parachuted into a seat in Super GT300 – the secondary class of Super GT – with Team Aguri and came fourth in his first campaign in a car with a roof.

Only one other car scored in seven of the eight races, although Oyu’s non-score came through a problem of his own making again. He was fighting for second place with just a few laps to go, and ended up punting the rear of the car ahead. That ripped off his bonnet and led to a fluid leak, as well as a loss of positions, before he brought the car to a stop on the next lap.

5. Sacha Fenestraz ARGENTINA/FRANCE 21y/o
4th in Super GT, 13th in Super Formula   2019: SF Lights champion (8 W, 5 P, 9 FL), 6th in Super GT300 (1 P)

Photo: Super GT

Photo: TGR Media Service

Like Oyu, Fenestraz starred in qualifying as a SF rookie but then had crashes mostly undo his hard work, although often these were Oyu’s fault. In the season opener the reigning SF Lights champion made the front row and after being passed by his team-mate Kenta Yamashita finished third, becoming one of a rare few to make the podium on their debut.

He completed five racing laps in three rounds as he was often hit out, but he had the highest qualifying average of anyone. As his Kondo Racing team’s form started to dip he then finally got a chance to finish some races, although was out after one lap again in the first race of Suzuka’s double-header, and he rose up the order to finish an impressive eighth in the season finale.

• Feature: Why 2020 could have propelled Sacha Fenestraz back into F1’s view (February)

The Franco-Argentinian Toyota protege had a better time of it in Super GT, where he was promoted to the top class with TOM’S after starring in GT300 in 2019.

His first three races all resulted in podiums, leaving him and team-mate Yuhi Sekiguchi as points leaders. The success ballast that came from that made his job a whole lot harder in the two rounds after, where he was a pointless 11th and 12th.

Fenestraz fought his way to seventh in round five at Suzuka, bringing him back to within two points of the title lead. A balance issue then left him down in 13th at Motegi, and as one of the title outsiders once more. Third place in the Fuji finale lifted Fenestraz and Sekiguchi up to fourth in the points, but they had the potential to be champions.

Early in the year he also took part in the FE rookie test in Marrakech for Jaguar, and was 10th fastest.

4. Dorian Boccolacci FRANCE 22y/o
5th in Lamborghini ST Europe (2 W, 1 P), 12th in ADAC GT Masters (1 W), 15th in GTWCE Endurance   2019: 14th in F2

Being picked up by three manufacturers in a single year, as well as winning at the Nurburgring 24 Hours, is quite the first season in professional motorsport, and it’s only because F2 graduate Dorian Boccolacci was making his mark in GT3 – which have driver aids and are often set-up to be friendly for gentleman drivers rather than for outright speed – rather than the highest echelon of sportscars which holds back his placing.

You could argue that Boccolacci was up against as tough as opposition as anyone on this list, as he took in programmes in the Intercontinental GT Challenge, GT World Challenge Europe, Lamborghini Super Trofeo Europe and ADAC GT Masters.

His main success came as an official Lamborghini young driver in its one-make series, where he was partnered up with 2012 Italian Formula Renault 2.0 champion Kevin Gilardoni. The pairing won twice together at Barcelona and were fifth in the points.

• Feature: The junior driver spurned by Renault’s last F1 name change

Audi customer team Sainteloc Racing called upon Boccolacci’s services for GTWC Endurance, which rivals WEC’s GTE Pro class as the top GT racing series in the world, and he did a solid job to come fifth on his debut in the Imola 3 Hours.

He was 10th in the Nurburgring 6 Hours, but returned to the circuit – and its full Nordschleife layout – for its 24-hour race a few weeks later in a Porsche. Boccolacci entered as a warm-up for the Spa 24 Hours, which is a GTWCE round, and he made it through some of the wettest conditions imaginable to win his class in 41st place.

That boosted his confidence for Spa, where he and his Sainteloc team-mates were one of the victory contenders throughout. With two hours to go it was Boccolacci who led the field on a soaking wet track, and a splash-and-dash pitstop a few minutes later only dropped him one spot. His final stop an hour later under the safety car cost him his victory shot though, and he came third best in a four-way fight for fourth that went to the chequered flag.

The 22-year-old’s other campaign was in a Zakspeed-run Mercedes-AMG in Germany, where he was also a winner. Which manufacturer could the Frenchman be on the payroll of next year?

3. Nicholas Latifi CANADA 25y/o
21st in F1   2019: 2nd in F2 (4 W, 3 FL)   2018: 9th in F2 (1 W, 3 FL)   2017: 5th in F2 (1 W, 2 FL)   2016: 16th in GP2

Photo: Williams Racing

Photo: Williams Racing

From the outside, it looked like Latifi did everything Williams asked of him in his first year in F1, and team-mate George Russell’s brief promotion to Mercedes showed just how high quality the bar was being set for Latifi to try to match.

He was outqualified for all 17 races, although that was to be expected after Russell did the same to Robert Kubica in 2019 and came close to beating Valtteri Bottas when partnered with him at Mercedes for the Sakhir Grand Prix.

• Feature: Why Nicholas Latifi’s rise to F1 is more remarkable than you think

It was a fairly clean season for Latifi, although it wasn’t like he was often in wheel-to-wheel battle due to Williams’ backmarker car, and it was only at the Turkish Grand Prix where he was particularly error prone as he spun off in qualifying and had a race-ending collision.

His only other two retirements weren’t even his fault, with him being one of many caught out by the safety car restart chaos at Mugello’s Tuscan Grand Prix, and then an oil leak ending his Sakhir GP.

He often raced competitively and on three occasions he finished 11th, putting him ahead of Russell in the standings until his Mercedes call-up, but he really needs to get closer to his team-mate on pace if he wants to stay with the team for a third season after 2021. At the same time, in a season as tricky as this one to become a rookie in – while Williams was changing management too – he did a good job in what were the fastest cars in F1 history.

2. Rinus VeeKay NETHERLANDS 20y/o
14th in IndyCar (1 P, 1 FL)   2019: 2nd in Indy Lights (6 W, 7 P, 6 FL), Asian F3 Winter Series champion (4 W, 2 P, 4 FL)

Photo: IndyCar

Photo: IndyCar

One race into VeeKay’s IndyCar career and the Dutch teenager was already under a lot of scrutiny. In free practice at Texas he crashed heavily and clumsily, ruling him out of qualifying later that day as repairs were done to his car to ensure he could race. His day didn’t improve, as in the race he lost it on the high line and wiped himself and Alex Palou out on the spot.

The 2019 Indy Lights runner-up was able to rebound whenever he faced a low though, and despite qualifying down the field for round two at Indianapolis, he was able to charge his way up the order and finish fifth through some clinical overtaking and defensive work on a circuit his Ed Carpenter Racing team usually wasn’t strong at in its road course form.

• Feature: Rinus VeeKay: IndyCar’s answer to Max Verstappen? (2019)

He was back in the headlines for crashing at Iowa, although this time it was because Colton Herta rode over his car on a restart and it highlighted how the new-for-2020 aeroscreen cockpit protection device had ensured both drivers emerged alive and unscathed.

Once again he rebounded in fine style. He was the only Chevrolet-powered driver to make the Fast Nine in Indy 500 qualifying, and put himself fourth on the grid as well setting the fastest ‘no tow’ lap on Carb Day. The race didn’t go to plan, as he earned a penalty after sliding into one of his crew members during a pitstop, but his pace with oval specialist ECR had been encouraging and at the Gateway double-header a week later he claimed a sixth and a fourth.

At Mid-Ohio he was a top 10 contender again, then on the return to the IMS road course he took his first pole by a massive 0.7803 seconds. During the first half of the race he fought for the lead with Herta lap after lap, then in the last stint he hunted down his rival and passed him to claim his first podium. VeeKay ended 2020 as IndyCar’s Rookie of the Year and with his seat at ECR already secured for 2021.

1. Nyck de Vries NETHERLANDS 25y/o
5th in ELMS (1 W, 1 FL), 11th in FE, 13th in WEC (1 LMP2 win)   2019: F2 champion (4 W, 5 P, 3 FL)   2018-19: 25th in WEC

Photo: FIA Formula E

Photo: FIA Formula E

Nyck de Vries was headed towards the ultimate journeyman career in junior single-seaters even as he marched towards the 2019 F2 title, but Mercedes-Benz then came calling after using him as its simulator driver and signed him for its foray into FE.

The professionalism that made de Vries stand out at the very start of his time in car racing meant he fitted seamlessly into the F1-esque Mercedes operation and as team-mate to Stoffel Vandoorne there was a shared experience of falling foul of F1 – and especially McLaren’s – politics.

On his debut at the tricky Riyadh street circuit in Saudi Arabia he topped his qualifying group and put himself third on the grid, then drove a strong race to sixth. Besides the top six drivers in FE’s first ever race in 2014, only one other driver has matched or eclipsed sixth place on their series debut, and that was ex-F1 driver Scott Speed way back in season one.

• Opinion: What being a world championship means to Formula E (January)

De Vries went from hero to zero in race two of that weekend, qualifying last and then charging up to eighth only to be docked 29s and thrown back to 16th for overtaking behind the safety car and a technical infringement on his car.

In Santiago he again excelled in the race, showing off his racecraft to make it onto the podium – which was then taken away from him by a five-second penalty for using battery coolant that was too cool.

He qualified third in Mexico City, and was running in fifth before a race-ending clash with Virgin Racing’s Robin Frijns that came about after his front wheels locked while using fanboost. A similar software issue led to another driver crashing too.

De Vries just kept at it despite the setbacks, and qualified fourth in Marrakech – the final race before the COVID-19 pandemic. He was running third when he was issued with a drive-through penalty for using too much power during regeneration, and rose back up to 11th place after that.

In Berlin the penalties and crashes kept on coming, overshadowing how brilliantly he had adapted to the series’ unique challenges, but it ended on a high as he completed a Mercedes one-two behind Vandoorne in the final race and gave Mercedes little choice but to sign both drivers for a second season. Expect wins in 2021.

De Vries also excelled in sportscars this year, winning in WEC and the European Le Mans Series in LMP2 machinery. He is now a mainstay in the prototype sportscar paddock, and may well be in contention for a future Le Mans Hypercar seat.

The post Formula Scout’s Class of 2019 appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: Jerry Andre / LAT Images / FIA F2 Championship

With junior single-seater racers missing out on the chance to compete in Monaco in 2020, we look back at some of the highlights and lowlights of their exploits on the famous streets from previous years

The Monaco Grand Prix weekend is special not only in Formula 1 but also in junior single-seater racing. It presents an incredible opportunity for young drivers to prove their skills one of the toughest circuits around, but there’s also plenty of chances to get it wrong.

In lieu of any racing in Monaco this year, we look back at some of the sublime and the ridiculous from the modern era of junior single-seater racing in Monaco.

Sublime: Heidfeld?s era-bridging double

For over three decades, Formula 3 featured as the marquee support race for the Monaco Grand Prix, until it was replaced by Formula 3000.

Fittingly, the same driver won the final race of the F3 era and the first of the F3000 era, and it was one who seemed destined for F1. Backed by McLaren and Mercedes, Nick Heidfeld took the F3 win in 1997, in a year in which he claimed the German F3 title.

A year later, Heidfeld used his experience to run at the front on F3000?s Monaco debut, but it looked like he would have to settle for second until Jason Watt crashed out in Casino Square, gifting him the win.

Championship rival Juan Pablo Montoya finished sixth after a scrappy race, somehow dragging a punctured tyre around the final lap. But he bounced back a week later with a crushing win in the Pau Grand Prix when he lapped the entire field ? helped by a collision involving Heidfeld that blocked the track.

Montoya went on to win the title, with Heidfeld returning to claim the championship in 1999. He took pole in Monaco that year, but finished the race in seventh after a penalty for failing to slow for yellow flags.

Ridiculous: Wirdheim?s premature celebration

Bjorn Wirdheim was near unstoppable in F3000 in 2003, delivering a first drivers? title to Christian Horner?s Arden team. But if one moment sticks out from the Swede?s season, it was his embarrassing end to the Monaco race.

Wirdheim dominated the race from pole, helped by his rivals colliding behind him. Enrico Toccacello and Vitantonio Liuzzi had a sizeable coming together at Massenet over third place, before a lapped Ricardo Sperafico took out second-placed Giorgio Pantano. A safety car for the first incident did reduce Wirdheim?s advantage, but he led Nicolas Kiesa by nearly five seconds on the final lap.

At the finish, Wirdheim slowed to celebrate with his team, but did so too soon and too abruptly, perhaps not aware that he hadn?t yet taken the chequered flag, and Kiesa blasted past him to steal the win.

That would be Kiesa?s only F3000 win before he joined Minardi for the final five races of the F1 season. The error did little damage to Wirdheim?s title hopes, but he never got the chance to step up to F1. He did however return to Monaco in 2018 in a March 711 at the historic grand prix, and this time managed to visit the top step of the podium.

Sublime: Hamilton does a Heidfeld

Photo: Charles Coates/GP2 Series Media Service

1997 looked like the end of the road for F3 in Monaco, but the category did make a one-off return in 2005 as a round of the F3 Euro Series. This was the season that a young Lewis Hamilton dominated, winning 15 of the 20 races, and he swept both races in Monaco ? two weeks after doing similar on the streets of Pau.

One year later, Hamilton returned to Monaco in GP2 and took a dominant win from pole ahead of French duo Franck Perera and Alexandre Premat ? a result that put him into a championship lead he would never surrender.

Hamilton has since added three more Monaco wins in F1 ? perhaps not quite as many as you might expect for a six-time champion who looked so at home in his earliest races there.

Ridiculous: Maldonado earns a ban

Photo: Andrew Ferraro/GP2 Series Media Service

Pastor Maldonado would later become something of a Monaco master, but not before he was disgraced on his debut in 2005, when he crashed under yellow flags during Formula Renault 3.5 practice, hitting and injuring a marshal.

As a result, he was excluded from the meeting and suspended from the following four events of the championship. The stewards also threw three others out for yellow flag indiscretions in the same practice sessions.

Furthermore, Maldonado is said to have received a lifetime ban from ever competing in Monaco again in any series. However, thanks allegedly to some pressure from back home in Venezuela, Maldonado would return just a year later?

Sublime: Maldonado also does the double

Photo: Andrew Ferraro/GP2 Series Media Service

Maldonado could hardly have bounced back better from his 2005 indiscretion. In 2006, he took the Formula Renault 3.5 victory after leader Christian Montanari made contact with the barriers. He went on to finish third in the standings.

On his arrival in GP2 in 2007 he impressively picked up where Hamilton had left off the year before to dominate from pole, pulling away from Giorgio Pantano on two safety car restarts.

He took pole again in 2008, only to concede the lead to Bruno Senna at the start. In 2009 he won the sprint race, and in 2010 came second to Sergio Perez in the feature race ? his run of victories on the way to the title would only begin from the following round in Turkey.

Sublime: Ricciardo?s first Monaco wins

Photo: Red Bull

Hamilton aside, it?s difficult to find anyone on the current F1 grid who enjoyed a particularly strong record in Monaco in the junior categories. The only other stand-out is Daniel Ricciardo, who won both Formula Renault 3.5 races he contested in the principality in 2010 and 2011.

Just a few hours before Mark Webber took the first of two Monaco wins in 2010, another Australian took the chequered flag in Red Bull colours as Ricciardo claimed his maiden FR3.5 win ahead of his title rival Mikhail Aleshin.

In 2011, Ricciardo dovetailed more racing in FR3.5 with test and reserve duties for Toro Rosso (and later a race seat with HRT). In Monaco, he did both in one weekend, driving in F1 practice on Thursday morning before taking another win from pole in FR3.5, this time holding eventual champion Robert Wickens at bay.

Ricciardo has since shown his Monaco mastery wasn?t limited only to FR3.5, cruelly denied an F1 win in 2016 before making amends in 2018.

Ridiculous: Qualifying carnage in GP2

Photo: Alastair Staley/GP2 Media Service

In Monaco, the Formula 2 field is split into two groups for qualifying – a decision that followed a particularly chaotic session in 2011.

That year?s champion Romain Grosjean was involved in much of it, and finished up last in the times after encountering traffic at the end of every flying lap and launching himself over team-mate Pal Varhaug?s car in a desperate attempt to get past at Rascasse.

It wasn?t just the DAMS drivers at it though, with Marcus Ericsson running into the back of iSport team-mate Sam Bird when he arrived at speed into the Swimming Pool section.

Sublime: Bird and Bianchi battle

For many years, Monaco provided the unique chance to see GP2 and FR3.5 racing together on the same weekend. At the peak of the rivalry between the two series in 2012, it was the two big-name drivers that defected from GP2 to FR3.5 over the winter that put on a thrilling show as Sam Bird held off Jules Bianchi.

The pair were grouped together in qualifying, but Bianchi got the jump on Alexander Rossi at the start to get up to second, and then pursued Bird to the chequered flag as the duo pulled half a minute clear of the rest.

In a last-lap attempt to make something happen, Bianchi braked as late as he could at the chicane, only narrowly missing his rival. Bird?s victory gave him the championship lead after Robin Frijns collided with Kevin Magnussen at the first corner.

Ridiculous: Daly gets launched

Photo: Daniel Kalisz/GP3 Media Service

In 2012, GP3 joined the Monaco support package for the first time. Finding physical space for the paddock had been as much a barrier as finding room in the weekend schedule. But it would be driving standards as much as anything that contributed to this being a one-off appearance.

Fighting through the midfield from the rear of the field, Conor Daly came together with Dmitry Suranovich, initially at the hairpin, removing the Russian?s rear wing. Suranovich carried on despite the damage, with a back of cars forming behind him.

Daly got the run on Suranovich through the tunnel, but the Marussia Manor driver seemed determined not to let him past, and moved right and then left in his extreme defence. Daly was left with nowhere to go and was launched skywards and into the top of the catch-fencing.

Ridiculous: Cecotto causes a pile-up

Photo: Alastair Staley/GP2 Series Media Service

Johnny Cecotto Jr took after his compatriot Maldonado by being remarkably quick in Monaco ? which was something of a home race for the second-generation racer. In 2012, he won the GP2 feature race for Addax, and claimed pole again a year later for Arden.

But at the start of the race he got a heap of wheelspin off the line, immediately losing the lead to his rookie team-mate Mitch Evans. Desperate not to lose second too to Fabio Leimer, Cecotto braked far too late for Sainte Devote and went straight into the barriers, taking Leimer with him. That narrowed the track for everyone else following, triggering a pile-up and a red flag.

Cecotto?s driving was already under the microscope at the time after he?d barged Bird off track in qualifying in Sepang and done similar racing Sergio Canamasas in Barcelona. This time, the stewards took real action and banned him from taking part in the sprint race.

Sublime: Rowland?s audacious charge

Photo: Florent Gooden / DPPI

In 2009, Racing Steps Foundation driver Oliver Turvey claimed his only FR3.5 victory on his first visit to Monaco, proving the street circuit prowess that is serving him well in Formula E today.

Six years later, his namesake and fellow RSF ace Oliver Rowland shone in Monaco in a very different fashion. He was fastest in practice and his qualifying group, but lined up behind polesitting team-mate Jazeman Jaafar ? something of an unlikely Monaco expert.

Rowland made a better start to the race and edged ahead on the outside. Jaafar almost did a Cecotto as he locked up and went deep, but somehow made the corner. Rowland was slowed and then hit by rival Matthieu Vaxiviere, and forced to pit with a puncture.

On rejoining he produced a remarkable fight back to sixth place. OK, this was hardly the deepest FR3.5 field (now in its final year of Renault backing), and those he overtook were far from illustrious names, but what made it special were the places in which was pulling the moves, including Mirabeau and the Swimming Pool.

With just one race that weekend, Monaco was the only circuit Rowland didn?t claim a victory at on his way to the title. But he would get to win there in F2 in 2017?

Sublime: Leclerc?s home pole

Photo: Zak Mauger/FIA Formula 2

Charles Leclerc’s debut on his home streets during his one and only F2 campaign?was long-awaited, and he didn?t disappoint with his speed from his first flying laps.

He duly claimed pole, despite being in the usually-slower first group, where he outpaced Rowland by two tenths of a second. Just as impressive was another Monaco debutant Alex Albon, who topped group two and was just 0.012s short of Leclerc’s time.

Leclerc controlled the feature race until his pit stop, after which he was foiled by a safety car that delayed him and allowed others to make their stops and rejoin ahead. A suspension issue then ultimately forced him to retire.

His luck in Monaco hasn?t got any better in F1, with his brake failure in 2018 and the botched Ferrari qualifying strategy in 2019. In 2020, he doesn?t even get to race on his home streets ? at least not in real life.

Ridiculous: Albon and De Vries tangle at pit entry

Photo: Zak Mauger / FIA Formula 2

Albon was rapid again in Monaco one year later, and edged out Nyck de Vries for pole position by just 0.01s after running in the first group.

The pair ran one-two through the early part of the race, until the safety car came out on lap 14. That?s where disaster struck, when they collided trying to get into the pits at the same time.

De Vries had committed to pitting on the exit of Rascasse and pulled alongside Albon, who he assumed was carrying on. Albon dived right relatively late, not knowing his rival was there, and was spun around. Both resumed after a delay, but later retired, with Artem Markelov picking up the win.

With no pit entry line on the Monaco track, both drivers said they took their normal lines. Albon was declared at fault for the collision and penalised for the sprint race, but it was a missed opportunity for both drivers in the title race, with George Russell struggling after a lack of practice running on his Monaco debut and Lando Norris in the wars.

Ridiculous: Red flag confusion

Photo: Jerry Andre / LAT Images / FIA F2 Championship

Red flags are incredibly common in junior racing in Monaco, but that didn’t stop race control from messing up the procedure in last year’s Formula 2 feature race.

The track was blocked when Mick Schumacher collided with Tatiana Calderon at Rascasse, and the race was resumed with the field in race order – with the leaders at the front and those held up by the incident at the rear, having completed one lap fewer.

The regulations state that lapped drivers should be released before the restart, but this wasn’t done, leaving half the field a lap down. Afterwards, stewards found an error had been made, but left the result as it was, to the frustration of those affected.

It did little to take away though from a deserved victory for eventual champion de Vries to make up for 2018.

The post Junior series in Monaco: From the sublime to the ridiculous appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photos: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Over the past 15 years, Formula 1’s main support series Formula 2 (previously GP2) has become the essential junior category for any driver hoping to graduate to the top class. We rate some of the champions

Red Bull aside, most F1 teams send their junior drivers to F2 to learn the nuisances of the highly-challenging Pirelli tyres and to assess how they deal with the frenetic racing.

Seven of the 10 GP2/F2 champions since 2010 have gone on to race in F1, and three of them remain in the 2020 field.

Those who have left F1 have stepped over to lead Mercedes’ Formula E venture or forged a successful career in the commentary box.

To celebrate 15 years since GP2 began, Formula Scout’s Josh Suttill ranks the previous 10 champions’ title-winning seasons, taking into account factors such as their prior experience and the strength of the field that they triumphed in.

10. Davide Valsecchi ITALY 2012 GP2 champion
Wins: 4 (2 feature, 2 sprint)   Poles: 2   Fastest laps: 5   Podiums: 10   Starts before title campaign: 105

Davide Valsecchi entered the 2012 GP2 season with four years in the category under his belt, and the 2009-10 Asian title.

He joined DAMS, which had taken Romain Grosjean to the 2011 title, and much was expected of the 25-year-old. His rivals were also vastly experienced, with the top four in the points at the end of the year having 21 full seasons between them.

Arden’s Luiz Razia proved to be Valsecchi’s main competition, winning the first race at Sepang. Valsecchi hit back in style against his 2011 team-mate with a stunning double win in Bahrain, only the fifth driver at the time to achieve that in GP2.

He made it three wins in a row when the series re-visited a week later but took just one more win thereafter in the sprint race on home ground at Monza. His two pole positions had come in the first two rounds.

The Italian was simply solid rather than speculator, and did exactly what he needed to do to win the title at his fifth attempt. It’s fair to say that the GP2 field at that time was far from the quality of its rival Formula Renault 3.5’s grid.

Valsecchi’s F1 call-up never came while serving as Lotus’s reserve driver in 2013. When Kimi Raikkonen was unable to partake in the final two races, the team gave Heikki Kovalainen the nod over Valsecchi, and the Italian’s F1 dreams were finished.

Since then, he’s participated in a couple of GT races and embarked on a highly-popular career in broadcasting.

9. Fabio Leimer SWITZERLAND 2013 GP2 champion
Wins: 3 (3 feature)   Poles: 1   Fastest laps: 1   Podiums: 7   Starts before title campaign: 74

The 2013 GP2 title race was only surpassed by 2016 in its unpredictability. ART Grand Prix’s James Calado was the pre-season title favourite, as the highest-returning driver from the 2012 season, but endured a sluggish start to the season.

Much was also expected of Marcus Ericsson who took over from champions Grosjean and Valsecchi at DAMS, but he managed just nine points (only one of them was scored in a race) during the first five rounds.

This cleared the way for Rapax’s Stefano Coletti to take an early points lead with six podiums – including three wins – in the first eight races. He took one further podium at the sixth round at Silverstone, then inexplicably failed to score again.

All of this meant Racing Engineering’s Fabio Leimer was suddenly in pole position for the title. He’d won back-to-back feature races at the start of the season in Malaysia and Bahrain, but then crashed in each of the following two feature races.

Leimer recovered well from this misfortune to fire in a consistently solid remainder of the season. He won once more at Monza, but his eventual title rival Sam Bird of new team Russian Timer enjoyed much greater peaks.

Bird picked up five race wins to Leimer’s three. Leimer also took just one pole all year, the joint-second fewest of any GP2 champion. His points tally was representative of 38% of the maximum points available, the lowest of any GP2 champion.

The difference proved to be the better consistency of Leimer and his team, which had won the 2008 title with Giorgio Pantano.

A much anticipated season finale proved to be anticlimactic as Leimer took a third and fourth to take the title, while Bird stalled from second place on the grid in the feature race.

Leimer deserves great credit for his consistency and title management but owed a lot to his faltering rivals. Although perhaps not fast enough for F1, he’s deserved more than the limited post-GP2 chances he’s had at top-level motorsport.

8. Jolyon Palmer ENGLAND 2014 GP2 champion
Wins: 4 (2 feature, 2 sprint)   Poles: 3   Fastest laps: 7   Podiums: 12   Starts before title campaign: 68

After impressing in his family-run feeder series, Jolyon Palmer made the switch to GP2 in 2011. He ended up 28th in the drivers’ championship with zero points.

His rate of development thereafter was steadily impressive. He rose to a respectable 11th in his second year, with iSport, and took his maiden win. In 2014 he faced off off against Felipe Nasr at Carlin, and came up short. Nasr was an outside title challenger and ended up fourth – Palmer could only manage seventh place.

A switch to DAMS paid dividends in 2014 for Palmer. The French outfit’s drivers’ streak ended after a topsy-turvy ’13 season for Marcus Ericsson, but Palmer helped get the team back on track.

Series rookie Stoffel Vandoorne upstaged the entire field in the Bahrain season opener, but fortunately for Palmer, this proved to be an infrequent occurrence for Vandoorne in the first half of the year.

Palmer hit back with a two second place finishes at Barcelona and won the Monaco feature race from pole. This fifth podium in a row established Palmer as the driver to beat, with his old team-mate Nasr providing the main competition having broken his GP2 win duck at the 50th time of asking in Barcelona.

Nasr and Palmer were evenly matched during the year’s first half, and Palmer’s early podium run earned him a sizeable lead.

Palmer stamped his authority on the championship with two robust moves on Nasr at the Hungaroring. The Briton, who served as Force India’s test driver at the time, had developed a reputation over his years in GP2 as one of the toughest racers.

His robustness had quashed any hopes Nasr had of a title comeback, and it was Vandoorne who was the strongest driver in the second half of the season, but out of the title picture due to his earlier inconsistencies.

Palmer made very few mistakes during 2014, only missing out on the points in two of the 22 races. He proved the more complete package compared to the perhaps more highly-fancied Nasr and highly-rated Vandoorne. He owed a lot to his experience, but his supreme racecraft and management of the Pirelli rubber made him a deserving champion of a strong field.

7. Pastor Maldonado VENEZUELA 2010 GP2 champion
Wins: 6 (6 feature)   Poles: 0   Fastest laps: 5   Podiums: 8   Starts before title campaign: 57

Pastor Maldonado’s 2010 GP2 title-winning campaign was the perfect microcosm of his time in F1. On the one hand, he was supremely quick, winning six back-to-back feature races, something no driver in the series has ever achieved. While on the other hand, he was sloppy and erratic and slumped once the title was in his grasp.

His competition completely fell apart. Addax’s leading man Sergio Perez was his closest rival but suffered a myriad of bad luck; pitstop problems and an engine failure at Barcelona, and disqualification out of fourth place in the Istanbul feature race due to a technical infringement. He was the helpless victim of a crash with Valsecchi in Valencia after starting from pole.

The title-clinching weekend summarised the messiness of the 2010 title fight. In the sprint race, Maldonado made his third trip into the barriers of the weekend just moments after Perez had run through the gravel at the Parabolica. The duo had both crashed out of the feature race the day before. Maldonado was crowned champion while watching in the pits, as Perez struggled to 13th place in the sprint race.

With the title sewn up, Rapax’s Maldonado was barely present during the final round at Abu Dhabi and failed to score.

His race speed during this campaign was never in doubt. At Silverstone, he delivered a stunning demolition of the field in the feature race, leaving poleman Jules Bianchi far behind. His record of six straight feature race wins is unlikely to be beaten anytime soon.

However, he failed to score a single pole position all year and was perhaps the best driver at avoiding the chaos rather than the fastest driver in the 2010 GP2 field.

Regardless he graduated to F1 the following year with Williams and took their last grand prix win in 2012 before switching to Lotus for 2014-15.

6. Nyck de Vries NETHERLANDS 2019 F2 champion
Wins: 4 (3 feature, 1 sprint)   Poles: 5   Fastest laps: 3   Podiums: 12   Starts before title campaign: 45

The most recent F2 champion takes the number six spot on this list but easily had the most mediocre start to his title-winning campaign of any driver on this list. Despite having three years of experience on Pirelli rubber, pre-season title favourite de Vries stumbled to a sixth and a seventh-place finish in Bahrain.

One round later de Vries was upstaged by Jack Aitken in a frenetic Baku feature race, and it took him until the Barcelona sprint race to record his first win of the year.

Thereafter, de Vries was unstoppable, taking back-to-back feature race victories at Monaco and Paul Ricard. He added eight further podiums including a win in the Sochi feature race to clinch the title one round early. Similar to Maldonado at the start of the decade, de Vries failed to score a point in the final weekend in Abu Dhabi with the title wrapped up.

De Vries’ competition was far from the most competitive on this list, and he seemed to be playing the numbers game at times, rather than the all-or-nothing approach that had characterised his less successful but more spectacular 2018 season with Prema.

Heroics were not required for de Vries in 2019, whodelivered the title he needed to earn a Mercedes seat in Formula E at the end of the year.

5. Pierre Gasly FRANCE 2016 GP2 champion
Wins: 4 (4 feature)   Poles: 5   Fastest laps: 4   Podiums: 9   Starts before title campaign: 27

Straightforward is not a word you would ever use to describe Pierre Gasly’s 2016 title-winning year. His rookie season in 2015 with DAMS was rocky, with a multitude of collisions and bad luck piling the pressure on for 2016, this time with the debuting junior single-seater powerhouse Prema.

He’d shown plenty of speed alongside Williams F1 junior Alex Lynn in 2015 but needed to prove he could put together a title campaign against a strong field to secure F1 promotion. Amongst the strong field was his Prema team-mate Antonio Giovinazzi, a rookie in GP2 but with three years of European Formula 3 experience.

Giovinazzi, after numerous different points leaders, would form Gasly’s main title competitor. But in truth, Gasly’s biggest obstacle was himself.

He went into the 2016 season with a winless streak stretching back to his title-winning Formula Renault 2.0 season in 2013. Gasly should have ended the streak at the very first race, but he burnt out his hard tyres and fell from pole to third place.

In Monaco he crashed multiple times, and was upstaged by Giovinazzi’s a stunning weekend in Baku where the Italian won twice. At the Red Bull Ring, Gasly spun out of a likely win in the wet and it began to feel like he wouldn’t win again.

Fortunately for the Red Bull junior, he was able to make that Austrian round the low-point in his season, as he finally got the win he so desperately deserved at Silverstone and then was able to build-up the title momentum (although not without further misfortunate).

The intra-team title fight climaxed with the most convincing display from Gasly in the season finale in Abu Dhabi. He took his fifth pole of the season by over three-tenths and dominated the feature race to make his job on Sunday much easier. He stumbled to ninth in the sprint race but Giovinazzi was also relatively uncompetitive meaning the title was Gasly’s.

It’s easily the most dramatic title victory on this list, and while it was highly entertaining to watch with its many twists and turns, it left questions marks for Red Bull. This was especially the case given Prema’s strong entry into the series and Gasly’s one-and-a-half years of GP2 experience. Retrospectively, it pails in comparison to his successor at the team.

Rather than an F1 promotion for 2017, Gasly was sent to Japan’s Super Formula to iron out those remaining rough edges ahead of his full F1 debut, which unexpectedly came later that year. The hallmarks of his mixed F1 career thus far can be firmly seen in his GP2 title year.

4. Romain Grosjean FRANCE 2011 GP2 champion
Wins: 5 (3 feature, 2 sprint)   Poles: 1   Fastest laps: 6   Podiums: 10   Starts before title campaign: 54

A new car and tyre supplier meant Romain Grosjean’s prior GP2 experience was no guarantee of success in 2011. He’d made a strong series debut in 2008, finishing fourth with ART Grand Prix in the main series as well as winning the GP2 Asia Series prior to the start of the main season.

A switch to Addax for 2009 may have delivered him the title had he not stepped up to F1 with Renault for a fruitless half-season. Grosjean regrouped in 2010, winning the Auto GP title, and DAMS called upon him to make his GP2 return mid-season to boost the French outfit’s form.

DAMS handed Grosjean a full-time drive for 2011, and the Frenchman immediately vindicated that decision by taking his second GP2 Asia title and winning the main series season opener at Istanbul from pole. He claimed a podium in all of the remaining rounds bar Barcelona, where he lost fourth in the feature race to a technical infringement. Considering he rose from last to ninth place in the sprint, it’s safe to assume he would have been in the hunt for a top three finish on Sunday.

The field was hardly the strongest of the decade but still contained a handful of future stars. GP2 veteran Luca Filippi reaped the rewards of a mid-season switch to Scuderia Coloni to win in three of the last four rounds to claim title runner-up spot.

Addax duo Charles Pic and Giedo van der Garde demonstrated Grosjean-beating pace, but neither developed a season-long challenge. Meanwhile Jules Bianchi’s second year in GP2 failed to improve on the first, and he switched to FR3.5 for 2012.

Grosjean’s Barcelona weekend proved to be a minor blip in an otherwise imperious season. One pole was all he needed to wrack up five wins, three of them in feature races, and 10 podiums. He was crowned with three races to go and earned a well-deserved second chance in F1.

3. George Russell ENGLAND 2018 F2 champion
Wins: 7 (4 feature, 3 sprint)   Poles: 8   Fastest laps: 6   Podiums: 11   Starts before title campaign: 0

2018 marked the first proper year of F2, with a brand-new car, lots of F1 juniors and much-deserved increased media coverage.

Unfortunately, that brand new car brought lottery-like unreliability; it was commonplace for the early races to be littered with stalled cars and the aborted race starts. This could have nullified the praise on the eventual winner of a series blighted by technical issues, but fortunately, nobody could argue that George Russell wasn’t a worthy winner of the 2018 crown.

He had an incredibly hard task in following Charles Leclerc’s supreme 2017 F2 season, but somehow Russell brought himself firmly into the conversation for the greatest title campaign in the series’ history. He took seven wins, and it could have been more without an over-ambitious de Vries at Baku, engine woes in Monaco, sensor issues at Paul Ricard, pitstop problems at Silverstone or clutch failure at the Hungaroring.

His qualifying record was just as impressive with seven front-row starts, five of which were poles, against one of the most competitive second-tier fields in some time. Russell’s consistency also went unmatched, even when struck by reliability woes.

Russell wasn’t just playing the numbers game though, taking an extraordinary win from 12th on the grid in a frenetic Baku sprint race and rarely shying away from a wheel-to-wheel duel.

After two disappointing failed title challenges with Sergey Sirotkin and Alexander Albon, Russell firmly played his part in helped ART to become the dominant force in the series again. He also became the first driver to win the GP2/F2 and GP3 championships with the same team.

ART’s advantage in adapting to the new car was evident with Russell’s and de Vries’ dominant titles, and Russell deserved the opportunity to be in the leading team after battled against the dominant Prema during his time in European Formula 3.

The strength of the ’18 F2 field has been proven, with four of its drivers lining up on the F1 2020 grid, and others securing drives in FE and IndyCar.

2: Stoffel Vandoorne BELGIUM 2015 GP2 champion
Wins: 7 (7 feature)   Poles: 4   Fastest laps: 7   Podiums: 16   Starts before title campaign: 22

Stoffel Vandoorne began the 2015 GP2 season as title favourite, and he ended it having completed his mission of domination.

McLaren had asked its junior to win the title in style, following his strong debut season with ART in 2014. Were it not for a mid-season slump following victory on his debut, he could have been champion as a rookie.

Vandoorne silenced any doubters of his ability with a scintillating start to the 2015 season. He took four successive feature race victories, starting with an overtaking masterclass at Bahrain and ending with a dominant victory at the Red Bull Ring.

He finally had a ‘bad’ weekend at Silverstone, taking third place in the feature race and faltering to ninth in the sprint with a misfiring engine. Another mediocre weekend – by his lofty standards – at the Hungaroring (a fifth and a second place) did little to reduce his sizeable points lead.

Another feature race win came at his home track Spa-Francorchamps, and again at Bahrain and Abu Dhabi at the end of the year. Seven feature race wins in a season is yet to be matched. Not that he was struggling in the sprint races.

Although he didn’t win one, he was on the podium six times and that’s quite an achievement considering he started most of those from eighth on the grid.

Vandoorne’s rivals included current IndyCar star Alexander Rossi and future F1 drivers Sergey Sirotkin, Gasly and Rio Haryanto.

The DAMS duo of Gasly and Alex Lynn had the potential to be the biggest threat to Vandoorne, but their rookie status was evident with a string of mistakes and poor strategy calls. Rossi was able to use his supreme racecraft to nullify his one-lap speed shortcomings.

The Monza feature race was the greatest case study in this. Gasly was on course for his maiden victory before a pitstop error ended his hopes. Lynn then ended his own chances at Turn 1 a few laps later, misjudging his braking and collecting the innocent Sirotkin.

This would have left Vandoorne clear for the lead had Rossi not out-foxed the Belgian on slightly-fresher rubber, one of the rare Saturdays where Vandoorne was beaten.

Whichever strategy Vandoorne opted for, he seemed to always end up at the front such was his speed and ability to manage the Pirelli rubber. While he didn’t win the series as a rookie as Russell did, Vandoorne also didn’t benefit from a year on Pirelli rubber in GP3, and yet he adapted brilliantly from his very first GP2 race in 2014.

It came as a great shock to anybody who witnessed his superlative GP2 title campaign that McLaren didn’t promote him to a race seat for 2016. He got a one-off outing in Bahrain, outqualifying Jenson Button and scoring a point. He finally got the full-time nod for 2017 but struggled in his two years alongside Fernando Alonso and was dropped at the end of 2018.

Fortunately, Mercedes picked up Vandoorne for its venture into FE last year, after he shone in the series with HWA Racelab.

1. Charles Leclerc MONACO 2017 F2 champion
Wins: 7 (5 feature, 2 sprint)   Poles: 8   Fastest laps: 4   Podiums: 10   Starts before title campaign: 0

Leclerc had three years of car racing behind him before F2, which he entered as reigning GP3 champion. It was unsurprising that Prema looked to someone of his quality to fill the void left by Gasly and Giovinazzi. However, Leclerc proved to be far suprerior to either driver, combing the raw speed of Gasly with the best elements of Giovinazzi’s racecraft.

His qualifying form was simply incredible. He effectively took eight consecutive pole positions at the start of the year – only disqualification for a technical infringement in Hungary prevented this record standing.

He may have been humbled by the more-experienced Artem Markelov in his first race in Bahrain, but he executed an unconventional one-stop strategy in the sprint race to rise from 14th to first place in just eight laps. He followed this up with a Barcelona feature race win despite limited radio communications and he would have secured a double-win at Baku had it not been for a penalty for failing to slow for yellow flags.

That Baku weekend was among the high points of his on-track performances in 2017 considering it coincided with his lowest off-track moment of the year – the death of his father. The professional attitude and the ability to still pull out a stunning pole lap and two brilliant race drives confirmed his future star status.

His home weekend at Monaco was one of only two weekends, along with Monza, where the reason for Leclerc not winning was self-inflicted. He had his fair share of bad luck despite what his eventual points advantage might suggest.

Victory at Spa was stripped from him and an oil-spluttering engine at Silverstone threatened a potentially dominant win. However, this apparent engine issue wasn’t enough to startle Leclerc as he carried on to win the race by over eight seconds.

Another one of his star drives came after that disqualification from pole in Hungary put him to the back of the grid. On Saturday, he carved through the field at a track not known for its overtaking opportunities to take fourth place.

The title was wrapped up early after he defeated current Nissan e.dams FE driver Oliver Rowland in a tense feature race at Jerez. If the aforementioned bad luck hadn’t struck, it’s likely rookie Leclerc would have taken the title even earlier.

Considering Vandoorne’s domination of the 2015 field, and Russell’s impressive rise to the top of a stacked 2018 grid, it’s a testament to Leclerc’s supreme 2017 season that he is number one on this list. After all, you can only beat the competition in front of you, and Leclerc not only beat but demolished his in such a way that he acts as a benchmark for future champions.

His subsequent meteoric rise from Sauber in 2018 to Ferrari’s current leading driver comes as little surprise to anybody who saw his sublime 2017 season.

The post Ranking the GP2/F2 champions of the 2010s appeared first on Formula Scout.

Formula 2 has started the year with a documentary series on F1 TV following its 2019 season, focusing on the championship frontrunners and the impact that the black day at Spa-Francorchamps had on the paddock

For a show titled Chasing the Dream, there’s an inevitable focus on “living in a nightmare”, as series CEO Bruno Michel says it, due to the events at Spa-Francorchamps which resulted in Anthoine Hubert’s death and Juan Manuel Correa’s heavy injuries.

The five-episode F1 TV-exclusive series tackles the 2019 F2 season in chronological order, meaning the impactful Spa weekend – which is tackled with care – is kept to episode four.

This means the show begins with the Bahrain season opener, and the oft-repeated ‘F2 is the best single-make championship anywhere on Earth’. Sadly, the series’ scale of importance and speed isn’t shown enough, rather focusing on drivers’ home lives and Ross Brawn soundbites.

It’s an approach that would work with Formula 1 as the subject, given those drivers are already established characters, but viewers new to F2 need to invest more in the drivers’ on-track exploits before exposure to the mundane elements of their lives.

Arden’s Tatiana Calderon and DAMS’ Nicholas Latifi do make great on-screen impressions from the off, one for delivering a back-to-basics explanation of F2 better than Brawn’s and the other for showing down-to-earth charisma that F1 will get to enjoy in 2020.

Of the scant on-track action used, the race highlights are choppy in episode one and difficult to follow. This may be a case of editors having a tricky job tying live commentary to non-TV footage. Thankfully, the other episodes don’t suffer the same fate.

Photos: FIA Formula 2

Music is used almost constantly to illustrate the action, or dialogue, and Bahrain is dubbed with country and western riffs.

The narrative pauses for the first of several side-steps into drivers’ everyday lives across the series, with episode one’s example being ART Grand Prix’s Nyck de Vries in a headband lounging on a boat in Sneek and chatting about Christmas dinner with 2018 F2 champion George Russell. While it isn’t really a convincing example of “being a 24-year-old guy like everyone else”, de Vries gives insight into his motivations that will leave followers of his career reading between the lines.

The audience also gets to follow de Vries on his way into the paddock for round two in Baku, and it’s one of the rare instances where the series explores some gripping visuals and backgrounds, and utilises slow-motion on-track footage.

Being with the drivers inside a team truck, or the green room pre-podium (or even a minivan between paddocks at Silverstone later in the series) is another example of the series at its best as we get to see the drivers interact with each other. From a journalist’s perspective, it’s scenes like this that make you want to jump into the screen and straight into the paddock action.

Episode two begins with the Monaco round, and Arden driver Hubert’s at-home life is explored via a stay with his girlfriend. This is more effective than other similar segments, as once again it leans on interactions between the drivers and people that are close to them rather than isolated straight-to-camera pieces.

There are two big stories of the Monaco weekend, and the documentary surprisingly skips over the quirky tale of de Vries winning in Formula 3 driver David Beckmann’s overalls rather than his own after ART accidentally binned them.

Photo: Carl Bingham / LAT Images / FIA F2 Championship

Hubert’s win is covered with far better context, and some beautiful shots of his post-race celebrations, before the episode takes an unexpected trip to the Canadian Grand Prix, albeit with good reason due to the presence of local Latifi and his ultimately significant Williams practice outings.

Rather than exploring the Canadian’s relatively unknown but interesting background story, the episode examines Virtuosi Racing driver Guanyu Zhou’s shoe collection in his London home and a brief round-up of the racing at the Red Bull Ring.

Episode three begins at Silverstone, and is the most exciting episode when it comes to watching cars on track. Luca Ghiotto (Virtuosi) and Jack Aitken (Campos Racing) have their charges to victories detailed in epic style, and with some much needed scale, and both drivers also share some personal thoughts which add to the feeling of being present in the action.

Calderon gets more time in the limelight, before the Hungaroring round is rushed in to the running time to free up the fourth episode for Spa-Francorchamps and Monza.

Many potential viewers will be more curious about this episode than any other, and it is a great tribute not only to Hubert, but to his Arden team and everyone working in F2, as it shows how painful it was to return to racing just a week later at Monza.

Contributions from significant F1 figures, including the series’ CEO Chase Carey, reflect how that weekend was painful for people in motorsport across the world, but its the use of interviews from Hubert’s team-mate Tatiana Calderon, F2 & F3’s head of communications Alexa Quintin and her boss Michel that instantly leave a lump in the throat.

Capturing Lewis Hamilton and Esteban Ocon’s shocked live reactions to the crash hits hard, and Arden F2 team manager Kenny Kirwan’s and Correa’s recollections of the immediate aftermath highlights how brave both were and still are – especially the latter given his involvement in the crash put him in excruciating physical pain and eventually a coma. The filmmakers cut the music for this episode, with a shot of a slowly closing garage door encompassing darkness telling a thousand words.

The solidarity of the paddock in Monza is shown just as strongly as the loss of Hubert at Spa.

Ending the series is an episode that focuses on the title battle, and some more revealing dialogue from champion de Vries. This time he’s joined by Latifi and Ghiotto in showing his true feelings in an unexpected way, as well as an encouraging chat with an upbeat Correa who’s still in rehabilitation from the injuries to his legs and lungs sustained at Spa.

Making the admittedly niche F2 into a documentary topic for the first time obviously comes with its difficulties, especially when trying to give 10 relatively unknown drivers some significant screen time when off-track. In doing so, the series goes some way to achieving its goal of telling the stories of commitment required to ‘chase the dream’, but also sometimes ignores the appeal of the on-track product of single-seater cars racing closely at some of the world’s top circuits.

The post F2: Chasing the Dream series review appeared first on Formula Scout.

10. Nicholas Latifi

Photo: Dom Romney / LAT Images / FIA F2 Championship

Photo: Joe Portlock / LAT Images / FIA F2 Championship

Re-entry (16th in ’17)
Took four wins and second overall in F2 before F1 graduation

Compared to the drivers that graduated from Formula 2 one year ago, an air of ambivalence met the news that Latifi will step up to Formula 1 in 2020, but it’s easy to forget how strongly he started the season.

After a 2018 season that was hampered by illness, but ended with him comparing favourably to team-mate Alex Albon nonetheless, Latifi needed to prove a point in 2019 and do enough to secure his superlicence.

Yes, this was his fourth full year in the series, all with the same team, but his three wins in the first three rounds – the feature races in Bahrain and Barcelona and the Baku sprint – was a genuinely impressive haul, and one that put him 39 points in front of Nyck de Vries.

His lack of a pole position – not just this season but across his entire F2 career – has rightly been a cause for criticism. But it does mean that all four of his 2019 wins – he added another feature race win in Hungary – had to be worked for, and showed his prowess in racing situations.

Unfortunately, he undid most of his early hard work with a shockingly scrappy weekend in Monaco, and having been spun around by his team-mate in Austria, it took until Silverstone for him to get back on the podium. By then, he wasn’t sounding overly optimistic of reeling de Vries back in, and after another double non-score at Monza (after tangling with Guanyu Zhou), he effectively resigned all hope. Comfortable, no doubt, that he was on course for his F1 drive regardless.

Few will expect Latifi to trouble his new team-mate George Russell next year, but his 2019 wins proved that – helped by the guidance of the late Jean-Paul Driot – he’s grown from a driver with potential into a well-rounded racer.

9. Guanyu Zhou

Photo: Jerry Andre / LAT Images / FIA F2 Championship

Photo: Joe Portlock / LAT Images / FIA F2 Championship

Up 25
Euro F3 graduate impressed as F2’s leading rookie

After an underwhelming Formula 3 stint where he struggled to justify his status as a Ferrari junior, Zhou looked like a different driver in 2019 as he stepped up to F2 in Renault colours and starred as the championship’s top rookie.

Helped by a strong team in Virtuosi, he was on the pace from the start as his fourth place in the Bahrain sprint race showed, and by Barcelona he led the feature race on merit and scored his first podium.

More followed in the Monaco and Paul Ricard sprint races, and his progress was confirmed when he beat veteran team-mate Luca Ghiotto in a straight fight for pole at Silverstone.

A bad start meant he finished third again in that race, and his ultimate lack of a win, and lack of obvious improvement over the rest of the season, was a little disappointing. But another podium in the Abu Dhabi feature race showed he hadn’t lost his way, either.

While he said he found the tyres to be the hardest thing to get used to, maybe born of his lost lead in Barcelona, he impressed with how well he did get to grips with them for a driver who came from European F3 rather than GP3.

That gives him a platform to build on next year, when the main target has to be the superlicence points that could turn the prospect of China’s first F1 driver into a reality.

Further reading
How Guanyu Zhou became F2?s surprise star rookie

8. Christian Lundgaard

Photo: Joe Portlock / LAT Images / FIA F3 Championship

Photo: Joe Portlock / LAT Images / FIA F3 Championship

No change
Best F3 newcomer further grew his reputation

Although Lundgaard wasn’t a factor in the FIA Formula 3 title fight, he was, unlike the main protagonists, a total newcomer at this level, with the exception of his one-off GP3 appearance in mid-2018.

Historically, Formula Renault graduates, such as Daniil Kvyat and Jack Aitken, took time to find their feet in GP3, but Lundgaard had no such problems as he beat Prema’s European F3 converts to win the opening race in Barcelona – at least for a few seconds, until he was given a penalty for a virtual safety car infringement that demoted him to second.

Such a performance was the sort of thing Esteban Ocon or Charles Leclerc could do in their early F3 days, except after an even greater leap in power.

On that form, Lundgaard would have been a serious title threat, but ART struggled surprisingly to repeat that pace with any sort of consistency. When the team was strong at the Hungaroring, Lundgaard seized his chance, taking the win from pole ahead of team-mate Max Fewtrell.

Another pole position came in the hectic qualifying session at Monza, but an early tangle with Lirim Zendeli ultimately meant he would score no further points, and he finished sixth in the standings. A further sign of his ability came in Macau though, when he finished third in the qualifying race behind Juri Vips and Robert Shwartzman, and fourth in the main event.

His move up to F2, firstly for Abu Dhabi with Trident and then for 2020 with ART, is a strong sign of Renault’s belief in Lundgaard’s talent, and one that could give it a headache if he impresses again next year.

7. Anthoine Hubert

Photo: Joe Portlock / LAT Images / FIA F2 Championship

Photo: Joe Portlock / LAT Images / FIA F2 Championship

Up 2
Rookie shone with two special wins before fatal crash

It would be all too easy to inflate Hubert’s position as a result of his tragic loss in the horrendous Spa F2 crash. But the simple truth is that he was already on course for a place in this top 10, having impressed many with his performances in his rookie season.

It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that the F2 paddock lost its single greatest prospect on that dreadful day.

That’s not necessarily a status he held in the eyes of many at the start of the year, even as the reigning GP3 champion. And his chances of a strong campaign looked slim as he and the Arden team struggled for speed through pre-season testing. But Hubert arguably made a greater impression over the races that followed than at any previous point in his career, as?F2’s complexities played to the same strengths that led to comparisons with his hero-turned-mentor at Renault, Alain Prost.

He wowed in his first race as he went from 11th to fourth without a working radio, and such storming race drives from further back on the grid would soon become the norm. There was 15th to sixth in Barcelona, and then a win in the Monaco sprint race as he kept Louis Deletraz at bay, just. He repeated the feat next time out, on home soil, again after qualifying 15th.

Together with new partner HWA, Hubert was helping to drive the Arden F2 effort forwards, and in Austria he somehow joined de Vries on the front row. The points he scored for fourth the next day would be his last.

Despite the lack of funds that led him to Arden in the first place, F2’s top teams were chasing Hubert for 2020. That in itself speaks volumes of the impact he made in his last, unfinished, season.

Further reading
How Hubert was enhancing his reputation in the F2 pack
Anthoine Hubert: 1996-2019

6. Jack Aitken

Photo: Joe Portlock / LAT Images / FIA F2 Championship

Photo: Joe Portlock / LAT Images / FIA F2 Championship

Up 36
Bounced back with three giant-killing F2 wins?

After his tough debut F2 campaign with ART in 2018, few rated Aitken’s chances of bouncing back in 2019 with Campos Racing, but that’s exactly what he did.

Following his third win of the year in the Monza sprint race, it looked like he could have the momentum to snatch second place in the standings. To simply be in that position was an achievement in itself, even though his season ended with a whimper and fifth place overall. Though of a similar age, Aitken was fighting with drivers with more experience in F2, and thus a better knowledge of everything that it takes to succeed in the series.

Aitken firmly outperformed what Ghiotto had achieved at Campos the previous season, with he and engineer Jan Sumann working together to help push the team forward. Qualifying was still a weak point (although some progress was shown by the third places in France and Belgium) but Aitken didn’t let it get him down, instead placing confidence in his ability to move forward in the races.

Baku provided the best opportunity for that, and Aitken seized it to take the feature race win, as well as a sprint race podium. Further feature race podiums came with second in Spain and third in France and Hungary. Brilliant starts, great tyre management and bold racecraft were keys to his success, and all on show in his home sprint race win at Silverstone. His winning move on Louis Deletraz as rain began to fall was the overtake of the season.

His win in the Monza sprint race – an emotional one dedicated to his Renault colleague Hubert – was somewhat different, as he defended from behind after starting from pole. It put him fourth in the standings, just 13 points behind Latifi and two behind Ghotto, so he was unlucky to end up 55 behind, especially after being taken out by an errant Nikita Mazepin from a front row start in the Sochi sprint.

Further reading
How Campos and Jack Aitken became a force in Formula 2

5. Jehan Daruvala

Photo: Colin McMaster / LAT Images / FIA F3 Championship

Photo: Joe Portlock / LAT Images / FIA F3 Championship

Up 43
Rivalled illustrious team-mates in dominant Prema F3 side

Daruvala was expected to play third-best to his highly-rated, Ferrari-supported team-mates after joining Prema for FIA F3. The final championship standings would ultimately play out that way, but he was only a point behind Marcus Armstrong, and arguably provided a much stronger threat in the title race, briefly leading it at one stage as he and Robert Shwartzman proved hard to separate.

The first round at Barcelona went just as the form guide suggested, with his reversed-grid race victory coming only after he’d trailed home in seventh in race one. But then he was only narrowly beaten (by Jake Hughes) to pole at Paul Ricard, and took a second straight win in the race.

Having beaten Shwartzman in Austria, finishing second to Juri Vips at Silverstone put Daruvala two points ahead at the top of the standings, but a needless late tangle with Pedro Piquet in race two was costly, and he lost further ground at the Hungaroring.

He took pole at Spa, but finished only third as Piquet pulled away and Shwartzman overhauled him for second. He was second to Shwartzman once more at Monza, but that was enough to mean it was he, and not Vips or Armstrong, that would take the title fight down to the final round.

Daruvala was no match for his team-mates in Sochi but would still have taken a deserved second in the standings had he not had to start the race from the pits after inadvertently triggering the throttle learning procedure on the grid.

An injury kept him out of Macau and the Abu Dhabi F2 test, but it would be a surprise if he didn’t make the step up after his strongest season yet in cars.

4. Marcus Armstrong

Photo: Joe Portlock / LAT Images / FIA F3 Championship

Photo: Jerry Andre / LAT Images / FIA F3 Championship

Up 2
Second in FIA F3 a well-earned reward after trying season?

The expectations on Armstrong heading into FIA F3 probably exceeded his experience, but after a year in which nothing ever seemed to go his way, second in the standings and a convincing performance in the final round left a positive impression.

Being pipped to the Toyota Racing Series title by compatriot Liam Lawson at his third attempt was a difficult start to Armstrong’s year, and in FIA F3 he struggled to gain the upper hand over his Prema team-mates. Being turned around by Hughes while fighting for second at Paul Ricard was the first of many missed opportunities.

At the Red Bull Ring he dominated Friday, but pole became third in the first race after the “Indy 500”-style DRS-fest he expected turned out to be anything but. He was set to overcome an almighty battle with Shwartzman on the last lap to win race two when they collided and he came off worst.

By now, Armstrong was playing catch up in the title race, and he never really had the pace again to make amends. The race two wins at the Hungaroring and Spa were well-executed recoveries from qualifying nightmares, but luck seemed to be against him again at Monza when he was penalised for a safety car infraction after finishing second in a Prema 1-2-3, ending any lasting hopes.

The most impressive thing about Armstrong’s season was not his pace, but the 19-year-old’s refusal to let his head drop in the face of so many disappointments. He never stopped fighting, as shown by his Sochi performance, where he went from third to first to fourth and back to first to defeat Shwartzman in race one, and was second in race two to snatch championship runner-up honours from Daruvala.

The Macau Grand Prix was possibly peak Armstrong, who was rapid and on top in qualifying two until he hit the barriers, and then got held up at the start of the qualifying race, thwarting any possible fightback. In the main event he worked his way through to eighth, but even then, his old nemesis Lawson came from even further back to beat him.

While it will only be his fourth full year in cars, Armstrong’s step up to F2 for 2020 is entirely logical, and with an ART car underneath him, the expectations will be high once again.

3. Juri Vips

Photo: Joe Portlock / LAT Images / FIA F3 Championship

Photo: Joe Portlock / LAT Images / FIA F3 Championship

Up 2
Red Bull junior took the fight to Prema in FIA F3

Some feared that Vips wouldn’t be able to demonstrate his talent in FIA F3 after being placed by Red Bull at Hitech GP, and – thanks to the sheer dominance of Prema that transpired – it could be argued that he was indeed held back. But the Vips-Hitech combination was the only one to make the Estonian’s old Formula 4 squad sweat.

The promise was there in Vips’ race pace in the first couple of rounds, but it wasn’t until the Red Bull Ring that he and Hitech got qualifying sorted, and he converted third on the grid into a race one victory over Max Fewtrell and Armstrong.

It could hardly have been more timely, coming at his backer’s home venue in a week where former team-mate Dan Ticktum was dropped from his position higher up in the Red Bull pecking order. Vips was being talked about as a serious contender for a 2020 F1 race seat.

He followed it with another win at Silverstone, this time from pole as Hitech produced its strongest performance of the season in its own back yard. It put him within eight points of eventual champion Shwartzman, and it felt like he had the momentum on his side.

But points were dropped in a scruffy second race, and the rest of the season proved tougher than expected. Hurt by a lack of pace and several incidents, he didn’t even make it back onto the podium until he won the last race in Sochi from reversed-grid pole.

Question marks hang over that decline and whether it was him or the car or a combination of both, but Vips provided a reminder of his talents in Macau. Well-fancied after his impressive 2018 debut, he was the strongest driver of the weekend and was unfortunate not to win, instead adding his name to the long list of favourites who’ve been slipstreamed out of victory at a safety car restart.

While the rest of the FIA F3 stars step up to F2, Vips is set to be moved to Super Formula by Red Bull after contesting the final round. It would be a huge shame if such a talent is wasted trying to perform in such a tough series, but hopefully, his strong post-season testing form is a sign he can cut it.

Further reading
Could Juri Vips be Red Bull’s next shock F1 promotion?

2. Nyck de Vries

Photo: Joe Portlock / LAT Images / FIA F2 Championship

Up 11
Mated speed and maturity to clinch deserved F2 title

A lot has happened since 2012, when de Vries first made our Top 50 in his first season of car racing. For one, Max Verstappen has graduated from karts, made it to F1 and had nearly four seasons racing for wins with Red Bull. Yes, the road to this point was a long one, but that does little to take away from de Vries’ 2019: a triumphant crowning of his tumultuous career in junior single-seater racing. In fact, it probably made it all the sweeter.

He didn’t burst out the blocks like Latifi, a single sprint race win from the first three rounds arguably a disappointment. But his win in Monaco was well-deserved for his sheer speed there over the years, and the one that followed at Paul Ricard put him into a points lead that never really even looked threatened.

His season was not perfect. Tyre management was still a weakness on occasions – his lost win at the Red Bull Ring springs to mind – and as with his predecessor George Russell, the de Vries-ART combination was not as fast at some circuits (like Silverstone) as others.

The way in which de Vries actually secured the title was the standout part of his season. After the summer break, he began the latter part of the season by taking pole at Spa, a place where he was expected to go well on the account of past form. But after the tragic events of Saturday in Belgium, he never got to capitalise on his advantage.

A few days later at Monza, de Vries was excluded from qualifying after running out of fuel in a frantic session, sending him to the back of the grid. While rival Latifi got involved in contact, de Vries charged through to third place, a result he repeated on Sunday with a good slice of luck. He sealed the title with a long-awaited return to the top step in Russia.

With a point to prove after finishing fourth in 2018 as the top three went to F1, de Vries felt more at ease at ART than at Prema, and added a calmness and maturity to his game that was often missing in the past. Contributing to that perhaps was a total separation from his soured relationship with McLaren, instead joining forces with Mercedes for simulator work and, ultimately, a Formula E drive.

Given that he only finished 10 points behind Albon a year ago, added to the improvements he’s shown in 2019, de Vries arguably deserves his chance in F1 too. But with that Mercedes FE seat underneath him, and World Endurance squads also eyeing him after some impressive LMP2 runs, he’s got the potential to become one of the top professional racers around.

Further reading
The patience behind Nyck de Vries? long road to the F2 title fight

1. Robert Shwartzman

Photo: Carl Bingham / LAT Images / FIA F3 Championship

Photo: Joe Portlock / LAT Images / FIA F3 Championship

Up 14
Ferrari junior’s progression crowned with FIA F3 title

Shwartzman’s growth as a racing driver through his career to-date has been just as impressive as his increase in physical stature.

Under the guidance of the Ferrari Driver Academy, SMP Racing and his Prema team, he’s blossomed into a driver who won this year’s most competitive junior series with a consistency that few would have believed was possible from anyone at the start of the season.

Shwartzman was not champion because of his one-lap pace. His two poles, at the first and last rounds, were as many as anybody else achieved, but in the meantime, he couldn’t even get onto the front row. But like his Prema team, Shwartzman was at his devastating best in race-trim, and was almost always moving forward.

Aside from a solitary retirement, he finished every race inside the top eight, and all but one race in the top five. An outstanding record in a series with reversed grids.

Strong progress in Sunday races was Shwartzman’s strong suit, whether he’d won on the Saturday like in Barcelona, or finished fifth, like in Austria or at Silverstone. His consistency was most impressive in the first half of the season – five podiums in eight races and never outside the top five – yet this was when his points advantage over Vips and Daruvala was at its slimmest. But instead of crumble under the pressure as the year went on, Shwartzman just pulled away as his rivals made mistakes.

After the dream crowning on home ground in Sochi, he might conceivably have won in Macau too but for minor contact as the field funnelled through Mandarin.

A year ago, nobody had quite been sure what to make of Shwartzman’s late surge to third in the European F3 standings. Nobody can be in any doubt now that he’s one of the top few prospects below F1, and it’s surely only a matter of time – if he takes his form to F2 next year – before he’s in the top class.

Click here to view the rest of the 2019 Top 50

The post Formula Scout Top 50 Drivers of 2019: 10-1 appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photos: FIA Formula 2

While history may not suggest the 2019 Formula 2 season was as thrilling or yielding as many Formula 1 stars as 2018, it was not short of exciting races or future racing professionals.

Nyck de Vries was one of many experienced drivers taking one final shot at the championship. He, along with the likes of Luca Ghiotto and Nicholas Latifi, had watched as star rookies like Charles Leclerc and George Russell had beaten them in the past.

However, 2019 was the year the momentum swung back in favour of the series veterans, becoming the first year since 2012 that a rookie has failed to win a feature race in F1’s leading feeder series.

That’s not to say F2’s 2019 grid wasn’t short of rookies with high potential. Reigning GP3 champion Anthoine Hubert dragged the struggling Arden outfit, with HWA support, to sprint race wins before the tragic events at Spa-Francorchamps.

It’s impossible not to assess the 2019 season without addressing the race that will, unfortunately, define it forever.

Hubert was an outstanding man both on and off track. He was a credit to motorsport, and there’s no telling what he would have achieved in the future. Juan Manuel Correa is continuing his recovery from the Spa crash, and plans an F2 return.

We’ve compiled our list of the top 10 drivers of the 2019 F2 season, taking into account each driver’s team and level of experience within the series.

Key Percentage of team?s points scored (TP), Qualifying average (QA), Feature race average points (R1P), Sprint race average points (R2P)

10. Mick Schumacher GERMANY Prema
12th in standings, 53 points (1 win, 2 fastest laps, 1 podium) – TP 78%, QA 8.3 (9th),?R1P 0.9 (16th), R2P 3.9 (8th)

No driver came into the season with more expectation and pressure than Mick Schumacher. Not only is he the son of F1’s most successful driver, but he was entering as the dominant (albeit controversial) reigning FIA European Formula 3 champion.

The season started well. He was top rookie in Bahrain qualifying and he converted that into reversed-grid pole with a solid debut drive. Pole only led to sixth place in the sprint race, but this was expected given his inexperience of the Pirelli rubber at one of the most tyre degrading circuits.

In Baku, he performed the first of what would become his 2019 party trick. He spun out at Turn 16 in the feature race but blitzed his way through the field to fifth place on Sunday, including a statement move on his Prema team-mate Sean Gelael.

Schumacher was unlucky in nearly every feature race, from been taken out by Gelael at Paul Ricard to his car breaking down in Sochi. He ended the year with a miserable 10 points from the 11 feature races, two fewer than Gelael scored.

His sloppy Monaco weekend was the low point. After a season’s best fourth in qualifying, he caused a red flag in the feature race by clipping Arden’s Tatiana Calderon at La Rascasse.

At the Hungaroring he took an impressive maiden win from pole in the sprint race, and his scintillating charge at the Red Bull Ring from the back to finish fourth was the highlight of his year. He only qualified outside the top 10 twice, and 12th place in the standings is far from representative of the raw speed and racecraft Schumacher demonstrated throughout the year.

Now he’s got a year of experience, he’ll go into 2020 knowing a strong second season will propel him first in line for a 2021 Alfa Romeo Racing F1 seat. Schumacher’s only problem is that he won’t have Gelael alongside him next year, but his main rival for that F1 graduation in Robert Shwartzman, and that the new wheel and tyre sizes will require a lot of learning once again.

9. Nobuharu Matsushita JAPAN Carlin
6th in standings, 144 points (2 wins, 1 pole, 4 fastest laps, 5 podiums) – TP 61%, QA 6.6 (6th), R1P 9.8 (5th), R2P 2.9 (11th)

Nobuharu Matsushita returned to F2 this year after an unsuccessful rookie Super Formula season, with the clear aim of obtaining enough FIA superlicence points – something he would fail to achieve.

It didn’t take him long to adapt to the new F2 car introduced last year, and he took his second-ever series pole just two rounds in. However, reliability woes left him leaving Baku with no race points to go with those earned in qualifying.

His car then blew up in spectacular style in Spain, leaving him with just six points from the first three rounds.

Second place in the Monaco feature race put Matsushita’s year back on track, and he took his maiden feature race success two rounds later at the Red Bull Ring with an example of his exquisite tyre management skills. He would repeat this to take his second win of the year at Monza, fending off Callum Ilott and Luca Ghiotto in brilliant style.

Matsushita wasn’t able to deliver the raw pace or consistency required to mount a serious title challenge. He certainly had the worst of Carlin’s bad luck – for example when he was brutally fired off the road in Sochi – but he quite simply wasn’t quick enough to earn the last few superlicence points he needed.

8. Callum Ilott BRITAIN Sauber Junior Team by Charouz
11th in standings, 74 points (1 pole, 2 podiums) – TP 67%, QA 6.4 (5th), R1P 3.0 (12th), R2P 3.4 (9th)

After a strong debut year, Charouz Racing System (in Sauber colours) seemed to take something of a step backwards in 2019.

Callum Ilott’s team-mate Juan Manuel Correa was the first of its rookie duo to impress, making the Baku podium in his first weekend racing on a proper street circuit. This perhaps served as something of a wake-up call for Ilott, who picked up his own first podium at Barcelona a fortnight later,

Then in Monaco, Ilott put the team on the front row of a feature race for the first time. Unfortunately his car turned itself off on the grid, and Ilott was never able to take the start.

At Paul Ricard, he rose from the back to nick the final point in the sprint race, and at his home race at Silverstone he was on sprint race pole, but inevitably tyre management woes meant he finished in fourth, 0.656 seconds off the podium.

Following Correa being sidelined after Spa, Ilott carried the sole flag for the team in stunning fashion one weekend later at Monza. He was fastest in qualifying, but again he fell to fourth against far more experienced drivers.

Ferrari junior Ilott rounded off his strong end to the season with a podium from ninth on the grid in the Sochi sprint race and a brace of top-five finishes in Abu Dhabi.

Evidently his inexperience with the tyres, as well as his team’s, made it difficult for Ilott to convert his strong qualifying into regular podiums. However, with his speed he should be an outside 2020 title threat with the more competitive Virtuosi Racing.

7. Sergio Sette Camara BRAZIL DAMS
4th in standings, 204 points (2 wins, 2 poles, 2 fastest laps, 8 podiums) – TP 49%, QA 5.4 (3rd), R1P 11.7 (4th), R2P 6.1 (4th)

Sergio Sette Camara was the highest driver on our F2 top 10 list last year not to graduate to F1. Therefore, it was safe to say he was one of the title favourites pre-season.

If you were judging his year off the season opener and closer, you’d expect Sette Camara had been in the title hunt all year. However, that was far from the case.

After a strong double podium in Bahrain, his season quickly derailed. He spun behind the safety car in Baku after apparent contact with Luca Ghiotto, and had to put in a great drive to recover to sixth place from the back in the sprint race.

He scored zero points at Barcelona, but did visit the Monaco podium. At Paul Ricard, he took his first 2019 pole but was beaten by ART Grand Prix’s Nyck de Vries to victory.

It wasn’t until the Red Bull Ring sprint race that he claimed his first win of the year, and even that came a day after clumsily running into the back of DAMS team-mate Nicholas Latifi.

Errors of that kind are not expected from third-year F2 drivers, perhaps a sign of frustration that Latifi had usurped him.

Sette Camara ended the year in stunning style in Abu Dhabi, with an excellent, measured drive to victory from pole in the feature race and a fighting run to third in the sprint.

Had he delivered more performances like that, de Vries might have had a more difficult time. Sette Camara’s 2020 plans are still under wraps, but if he sticks around in F2, he needs to find a way to make every weekend like Abu Dhabi.

6. Nicholas Latifi CANADA DAMS
2nd in standings, 214 points (4 wins, 3 fastest laps, 8 podiums) – TP 51%, QA 5.3 (2nd), R1P 12.8 (2nd), R2P 6.6 (2nd)

You’d be forgiven for wondering why the title runner-up is sixth on our list. Had we made the list after the first three rounds, then Latifi may well have taken #1.

He won three of the first five races, and only started on the front row for one of those. He was demonstrating exactly the type of risk management and racecraft needed to mount a title challenge.

However, his raw pace was never enough to match de Vries or Ghiotto. His last pole position came in British F3 six years ago, and he’s spent 4.5 seasons in GP2/F2 now. He can at least take solace he only qualified outside the top seven once this year.

A barren six-race run mid-season stumped his title challenge, and he just didn’t have enough to take the fight with de Vries to the wire. Going into the summer break he did take a racey Hungaroring win, but didn’t demonstrate that verve enough.

Compared to rivals Ghiotto and Sette Camara, Latifi did suffer a relative lack of bad luck, but part of that has to be a result of him successfully keeping out of trouble.

Once he was confident he was in a strong enough position for a FIA superlicence, Latifi admitted to changing his priority from beating de Vries to the title to securing DAMS the teams’ crown, which he did with Sette Camara in Abu Dhabi not long after signing to drive for Williams in F1 next year. A lot can be read into what that approach says about Latifi.

In total he has amassed 99 starts, the fifth highest in the history of F1’s primary feeder series, and taken six wins in that time.

Importantly he did do a great job beating Sette Camara though, and although he’s got big financial backing, he has earned his place on the 2020 F1 grid. However, going up against George Russell in the same team won’t make for an easy debut.

5. Luca Ghiotto ITALY Virtuosi Racing
3rd in standings, 207 points (4 wins, 2 poles, 2 fastest laps, 9 podiums) – TP 60%, QA 5.6 (4th), R1P 11.7 (3rd), R2P 6.4 (3rd)

In terms of raw race speed, few could match the peaks Virtuosi’s Luca Ghiotto achieved in 2019. That was evident straight away in Bahrain when he came from seventh on the grid to win the sprint race and lead the championship for the first time.

He then ran into the back of Sette Camara in Baku under the safety car, and dropped from pole position to the back in dramatic style at Barcelona when a hit from Campos Racing’s Dorian Boccolacci added to a poor start.

Ghiotto then charged to fourth in one of the drives of the season. He took second in the sprint race, then in Monaco lost a vital podium to a minor technical infringement, and was penalised for a crash with MP Motorsport’s Mahaveer Raghunathan. His title hopes took another blow at Paul Ricard as he was wiped out of the feature race after contact with Correa.

He hit back in style in Austria, taking two second places, and won the Silverstone feature race. It was here where team-mate Guanyu Zhou provided the biggest challenge to his leadership. Virtuosi and DAMS had a clear advantage that weekend. Rookie Zhou took pole, but Ghiotto jad the lead into Turn 1, and went on to triumph in a thrilling battle with Latifi.

There was another star drive at Monza when he bounced back from a season-low 14th in qualifying to finish second on home soil, and won his final F2 race in Abu Dhabi using pace and superb tyre management skills.

His wheel-to-wheel skill will be missed as he moves to sportscar racing in 2020. It’s a crying shame his swansong year in F2 was so fraught with incidents and inconsistency.

4. Guanyu Zhou CHINA Virtuosi Racing
7th in standings, 140 points (1 pole, 2 fastest laps, 5 podiums) – TP 40%, QA 7.2 (7th), R1P 7.5 (7th), R2P 4.8 (6th)

The highest-placed rookie in the standings and the first-ever recipient of the Anthoine Hubert Award, Guanyu Zhou delivered solidly in his debut season.

Champions Russell and Leclerc have increased expectations for rookies, and Zhou is someone who came to F2 with no experience of Pirelli rubber, the weight of a nation on his shoulders, and a new manufacturer backer in Renault.

He had a brilliant barometer in Ghiotto alongside him, who quickly turned from teacher to rival such was his growth.

Even his development over the opening weekend in Bahrain was impressive. He qualified 17th but raced to 10th, then turned that into fourth in the sprint race.

Baku proved to be another learning exercise after some questionable car placement from Correa, but he was already leading races by the third round at Barcelona. He was beaten by Latifi and Aitken, but hung onto third to secure his first podium.

Zhou added two more podiums in successive weekends at Monaco and Paul Ricard, firmly establishing himself among the frontrunners. At Silverstone he then took his first pole, another milestone result for the Chinese driver.

He was back on the front row at Monza but made a rookie error when battling Latifi, which earned him a penalty. Redemption came in the sprint race by charging to fourth place from the back. Moreover, such mistakes were few and far between, and he arguably didn’t make any more of them than his far more experienced team-mate.

Zhou took his third and final feature race podium of the year in Abu Dhabi, and finished seventh in the standings. Satisfyingly for himself, he was well clear of Schumacher and Ilott, who had beaten him as Prema team-mates in F3.

A race win may have eluded him, but he produced numerous drives worthy of the top step of the podium. He’s likely to obtain that elusive victory if he remains with Virtuosi as expected for 2020.

3. Anthoine Hubert FRANCE Arden International
10th in standings, 77 points (2 wins, 2 podiums) – TP 100%, QA 10.2 (11th), R1P 5.1 (9th), R2P 4.5 (7th)

Photo: Joe Portlock / LAT Images / FIA F2 Championship

Having Anthonie Hubert in third place on our list, despite his weaker statistical record compared to some of the entries he’s above, might make it seem like his placing is skewed due to the events of Spa.

However, that could not be further from the truth. He was partnered with Arden, a team with a disappointing record in recent years. It was the ninth best scorer in 2018, with a pair of highly-rated drivers only 14th and 17th in the standings.

Despite fruitless pre-season testing, Hubert made an instant impression by storming from 11th to fourth in the Bahrain feature race – without a working radio.

Then there was the maiden win in Monaco, beating Carlin’s Louis Deletraz in a dramatic finish. His momentum appeared to have stopped at Paul Ricard with 14th in qualifying, but Hubert left the weekend with a second successive sprint race win.

One-lap speed wasn’t his or his team’s forte, but he still managed a stunning lap to qualify second in Austria. He fell to fourth in the race but it was another haul of points, while team-mate Tatiana Calderon failed to score or qualify higher than 17th.

Hubert had two pointless rounds at Silverstone and the Hungaroring, but such were the quality of his previous performances, he was already been courted for 2020 by a number of the top F2 teams.

That came as no surprise to anyone who’d followed Hubert not only in 2019 but throughout his career. From his textbook example of how to win a championship in GP3 the previous year to battling with fellow French stars Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly in karting. Anthoine Hubert will never be forgotten.

2. Jack Aitken BRITAIN/SOUTH KOREA Campos Racing
5th in standings, 159 points (3 wins, 1 fastest lap, 7 podiums) – TP 84%, QA 8.6 (10th), R1P 9.2 (6th), R2P 5.2 (5th)

Just like Hubert, Jack Aitken had to make do with a seat in a lesser-fancied F2 outfit. Once a frontrunning force at this level, Campos has lost its way in recent years without the resources of rivals, but the refreshed team was a race winner this year.

Campos wasn’t the only one licking its wounds, because Aitken was convincingly beaten by current Williams F1 driver Russell at ART last year, and in 2017 while they were GP3 team-mates.

But Aitken performed far better in a perceivably weaker team than during his time with ART. Perhaps with Campos’s full effort behind him and free from some top team pressure, he reminded everyone why he’s so highly rated by Renault.

Aitken was responsible for one of the overtakes of the season at Silverstone to pass Deletraz for sprint race victory, which was joined by the Baku feature race and Monza sprint race as wins for the 24-year-old.

The Baku performance, from eighth on the grid, involved Aitken expertly fending off de Vries while in the lead, and at Monza he came out on top in a thrilling tussle with Ilott and MP’s Jordan King, the latter whom is never an easy pass.

A poor final two rounds did little to tarnish Aitken’s stellar second season but did cost him fourth in the standings

Aitken was also consistently better than whoever Campos put alongside him. GP3 race-winner Boccolacci couldn’t match Aitken’s pace, and his successors Arjun Maini and Marino Sato didn’t even get close to the Brit or the points.

As with Sette Camara, it’s unclear but quite likely this is the end of the F2 road for Aitken, and if it proves to be, he can walk onto his next adventure with his head firmly held high.

1. Nyck de Vries?NETHERLANDS ART Grand Prix
1st in standings, 266 points (4 wins, 5 poles, 3 fastest laps, 12 podiums) – TP 96%, QA 2.9 (1st), R1P 15.4 (1st), R2P 7.0 (1st)

The start and end of Nyck de Vries’ title-winning season may have been disappointing, but there was little of that to be found pretty much everywhere else in-between.

Three wins in four races at Barcelona, Monaco and Paul Ricard mid-season gave him a point lead that he never relinquished. It wasn’t even a case of killer consistency or choosing caution in tight spots, just the simple fact that de Vries and ART was the fastest package this year.

Having said that, de Vries made a knack of avoiding incidents and credit must be given to ART for running such a reliable and efficient car and consistently executing strong race strategies.

Contrast this to de Vries’s 2018 season, where he lost potential wins in Azerbaijan, Spain and Monaco due to unforced errors. It’s a real sign de Vries has matured as a driver.

Five pole positions gifted him 20 points alone, and he converted the most important of those into a title-clinching win in Sochi. He was outside the top four in qualifying only twice, making it increasingly difficult for his title rivals to catch him.

The Dutchman has spent the last few years in the shadow of Leclerc, Russell and the likes of Norris who joined McLaren while he was still there, but he left Woking at the start of this year and made the most of it. The dominant way he won the F2 title made him an obvious pick for Mercedes-Benz’s Formula E team, and his LMP2 prototype performances in the World Endurance Championship have made him a Toyota sportscar target too. F1’s loss is definitely FE’s gain.

The rest…

Jordan King?was millimetres from making this list. Like Aitken and Hubert, he dragged underdog MP to the front of the field several times, taking two podiums on his way to ninth in the points – despite missing Monaco for the Indy 500.

Louis Deletraz was another to just miss out on our top 10 for the second successive year. He’s somehow still yet to win a race, thanks to losing in a photo finish with Hubert in Monaco, a beautiful overtake from Aitken at Silverstone and poor tyre management in Abu Dhabi. He compared well to Matsushita and is returning to Charouz in 2020 for a fourth year of F2.

Juan Manuel Correa put in one of the drives of the season in Baku – getting a podium on his first time racing at a proper street circuit. He followed it up with another second place at Paul Ricard. His plucky if inconsistent style proved effective.

Frenchman Dorian Boccolacci was outshone by Aitken but deserves another F2 chance, considering he spent the first half of this year fighting for his Campos future then dropping permanently off the grid after a Silverstone cameo with Trident.

Ferrari junior Giuliano Alesi?struggled on his graduation from GP3, but got better as the season went on. He ended 2019 with his season-best result of fifth, and was 15th in the standings for Trident. Expect a far better 2020 with HWA Racelab.

He’ll be partnered by series veteran Artem Markelov next year. The Russian made a welcome three-round return after briefly leaving for Super Formula, and earned a double points finish at Monaco with MP.

Sean Gelael?had statistically his weakest year at this level yet with just 15 points, and withdrew from racing at Silverstone.

De Vries’ ART team-mate Nikita Mazepin?was probably the biggest underachiever this year. He ran Hubert fairly close to the 2018 GP3 title but scored just 11 points in his rookie F2 season. He should stay on the grid in 2020, but it won’t be with ART.

As ever,?Ralph Boschung?came on and off the grid when his budget allowed. His string of three top-10 qualifying results to start the season was impressive but continued reliability issues once again limited his rewards to two points finishes.

Against all odds, Mahaveer Raghunathan?scored a point. But he also got enough penalty points to be banned for two rounds. He provided comic relief rather than a worthwhile sporting presence.?On the other hand, his pace had drastically improved by Abu Dhabi from his debut in Bahrain.

Alfa Romeo junior Tatiana Calderon?was poor all year, often only ahead of Raghunathan. A shame considering the flashes of speed she showed in GP3. As with team-mate Hubert, her races were usually stronger than qualifying, but it wasn’t enough.

Further reading
Why Red Bull should end its Super Formula experiment (October)
How Guanyu Zhou became F2?s surprise star rookie (August)
How Campos and Jack Aitken became a force in F2 (August)
How GP3 champ Anthoine Hubert is enhancing his reputation in the F2 pack (July)
The patience behind Nyck de Vries? long road to the F2 title fight (June)
Five things we learned from the 2019 Formula 2 season opener (April)

The post The Top 10 Formula 2 drivers of 2019 appeared first on Formula Scout.

Photo: Carl Bingham / LAT Images / FIA F2 Championship

Formula 2 champion Nyck de Vries said he ‘wanted to make a point’ in his title-winning season after ‘a bumpy ride’ through his junior single-seater career.

De Vries claimed the 2019 title in what his third season in F2 and his eighth year racing single-seaters.

He had been tipped as a pre-season favourite in 2018, when he eventually finished fourth behind George Russell, Lando Norris and Alex Albon, who all graduated to Formula 1, something de Vries admits was ‘painful to see’.

“I think I wanted to make a point for me personally, but also in our community,” de Vries, speaking at the FIA prize giving in Paris, said.

• The patience behind de Vries’ long road to the F2 title fight

“I’ve had a bumpy ride to come to this point. Obviously, starting my career with a very successful time in karting, everyone having very high expectations [of me] moving into cars.

“I won things but perhaps it all took a bit longer than initially expected. But everyone has their own career and walks their own path. I think every career is unique too.

“Last year I kind of take the responsibility for missing out on the true championship battle. We were certainly in a position to fight for it, but we as a team and me personally made too many mistakes to really have a good go at it.

“And then you are kind of on the back foot from the beginning, and you’re just trying to catch up, forcing more and effectively making more mistakes.

“It was a shame, and a little bit painful, to see the whole top three promoted to F1 knowing that one mistake would have been enough to be second in the championship.”

De Vries said the end of 2016, when long-time backer McLaren decided to stop funding his racing, was ‘without doubt’ the hardest point in his junior single-seater career.

The change came after Zak Brown was appointed as McLaren boss, and signed his own protege Norris to a role with the team.

“I signed with McLaren in 2010, ahead of my first world championship in karting,” said de Vries, who split completely with the team ahead of 2019 before signing with Mercedes to race in Formula E.

“There were really high expectations. McLaren was the most dominant F1 team at the time. We moved into cars, McLaren kind of lost a bit of momentum, people got fired, they lost sponsorship, they were kind of going downwards, and I wasn’t able to show what I needed to show either.

“When the new management finally decided to no longer fund my career, I was just ahead of my biggest step in my career. I had to move into Formula 2, which is very expensive, and I’m certainly not from a background that would be able to afford and support that.

“A week before the first test, it wasn’t even sure that I was able to get everything together to race Formula 2. That season was just surviving. We were with Rapax, the team had a lot of financial problems, people were leaving all the time because no one was getting paid.

“We changed teams [to Racing Engineering] halfway through the season, which wasn’t even our decision because we had zero control. I would say that was the most defining period of my career.”

The post Nyck de Vries ‘wanted to make a point’ with F2 title after ‘bumpy’ career appeared first on Formula Scout.