“If you told me at the start of the season I would be Champion before this season I wouldn’t be able to describe how I would feel. Now I’ve been crowned Champion, I have no words to describe this.”
Mitch Evans was somewhat pleased to have beaten Daniel Abt to the GP3 title in 2012.
He took a rookie year (2011) to get to grips with the big fast cars and then went to work on the title.
A graduate of the Toyota Racing Series (and TRS champion), Evans was the first Kiwi to hoist the GP3 trophy. He was also paving the way for two more TRS graduates to take the title: Daniil Kvyat in 2013 and Alex Lynn in 2014.
In 2015, mired in infighting in GP2, Evans was still rated by many media the brightest talent outside F1 “who has a glittering list of accolades to his name despite only turning 21 this year”.
Evans took a traditional route into racing by starting in karts in 2001 when he was aged six. Between 2001 and 2007 he won 13 karting titles and showed such promise in his home country that he moved on to international competition. In 2007 he qualified for the World Rotax Finals in Dubai and became its youngest-ever competitor at the age of 13.
As we know, Evans is now racing Formula E – a championship that is perhaps developmentally immature and is definitely waiting for drive technology to catch up. Fortunately for the Kiwi, he is racing for the Jaguar team, which is at the forefront of development of new, lighter, longer lasting battery packs for both road and competition. He is riding the crest of the tech wave and delivering the results the team needs to keep the development money flowing.
GP3 to F3: drive the car or the car will drive you
The GP3 cars started as a Dallara chassis with a 2.0-litre engine, then upgraded to 3.4-litre race units with 400 bhp. The GP3/16 update saw the cars switch to Mecachrome power.
This year, all bets are off. The new ‘merged’ FIA Formula 3 Championship races at some of the Formula One rounds (not all rounds, and nowhere else, a significant social promotion for the drivers).
The new F3 cars are a blend of GP3 and traditional F3 with a few wild card features thrown in for luck. The engine is once more by Mecachrome, making 400 bhp from 3.4 litres. The chassis is by Dallara and features the ‘halo’ safety device. Tyres are Pirelli and the cars have F1’s DRS low-drag overtaking feature. Unlike F1, though, the F3 DRS is activated for the whole lap once the driver is close enough to the car in front.
This, then, is the first year of the FIA’s new global career strategy, championed by no less a name than Gerhard Berger. Under this framework, drivers can transition from the relatively low powered aero cars of their national Formula 4 championship up to these more powerful Formula 3 cars, on to Formula 2 and then – with dollars in place and an impressive CV of wins to their name – on to the premier championship.
It’s going to take a while for things to settle, and in the meantime there is still strong support for ‘old school’ F3 and for the Formula Renault championships. But one thing is clear: few come to F1 by other means than a strong run in F3, where the talent is clustered and the machinery is technical enough to help a driver develop their pitlane smarts and be able to interpret and analyses the behaviour of their cars at debriefing time.
When the flag drops: GO the Kiwis!
Teams must run three drivers, and New Zealand once more stands out as The Little Nation That Could. From a pool of just 5.5 million people (less than many cities overseas) New Zealand has two drivers gridding up for the opening round this weekend: Red Bull junior Liam Lawson with MP Motorsport and Marcus Armstrong with Prema, racing under the Ferrari Driver Academy banner.
If knowing how to win is an entry qualification then both ‘our boys’ are well equipped to follow in the shoe-steps of Mitch Evans. Both Lawson and Armstrong have won at home, and the latter has won at international level, taking the Italian F4 title in the same year he finished second in the German F4 championship. The fact that the 2019 F3 grid is stacked with drivers who have raced TRS alongside these two indicates they are well capable of holding their own in international-level competition.
Both have completed the GP3 transitional and F3 pre-season tests, and of course Armstrong has been consistently at the sharp end of the time-sheets. His assessment of the new car: more challenging to get absolute performance out of than the lighter, more agile F3 and TRS cars both drivers have raced most recently.
“With more power, more aero but more weight the cars demand respect. You have to work to get the best times out of them and you have to manage the tyres carefully to get the best from them.” The Pirellis have a narrower window of peak performance than, say, the old-school Michelin F3 slicks and are easier to ‘burn’.
Lawson’s run through testing has not delivered consistent front-running times, but as both know, the role of the winter tests is to allow drivers to get familiar with the quirks and nuances of their new cars.
In this context, Armstrong points out, the timesheets are irrelevant.
The price of admission
But let’s also talk dollars. The accepted round figures estimate for a decent GP3 season ‘back in the day’ was $1.2 million NZD. Recent guesstimates for fast-tracking to an F1 seat run at $16 million NZD. A stripped-bare drive for an also-ran team runs somewhere between $3 million and $6 million NZD. Give or take.
In 2015 Toto Woolf put it this way: ““If somebody is talented, very talented, you probably need to spend €1 million in karting through junior, senior and international races. You need at least a season in F4 or Formula Renault which is another €350,000 if you do it properly. You need €650,000 for an F3 season so we are at €2 million. You probably need another season of F3 so you are at €2.6 million or €2.7 million and then you haven’t done any GP2 or World Series. So let’s say you are at €3 million if you are an extraordinary talent.
“GP2 is another €1.5 million so probably, if you want to be on the safe side, you are around €4.5 million and €5 million and you have only done one year of GP2. You are on the verge of getting into Formula One but you are not in there. You need another €2 million to €3 million to get the drive. So you are talking about €7 million to €8 million so let’s call it $8 million.”
Would it surprise anyone if I said those numbers haven’t shrunk in the three years hence?
So how do rising race stars from teeny economies that hardly rate as part of the ‘first world’ get a foot in the door? In the case of Marcus Armstrong, you do it with talent, with passion, with speed. By having good clean aggressive form. By demonstrating an ability to get the very last 1/1000th of a second out of a car at any given circuit, rain or shine. Armstrong has ‘grown up in public’, guided by his passionate racer and business man dad Rick. The path to F3 has been long and Armstrong Junior has developed into a true racer in the unblinking eye of public scrutiny. He stayed with karting longer than most, wringing every ounce of benefit he could out of local and then European and American racing before stepping up into full-size aero cars with a handful of Formula Renault and British F3 drives.
When he made that step, Autosport editor Marcus Simmons confided to me that he and many in the office saw ‘young Marcus’ as the Real Deal, able to go all the way. Both Autosport and Motorsport.com have been following him closely ever since. While a handful of local media got the significance of All Road Motorsport’s offer to get involved in Armstrong’s career development, both those magazines saw it immediately.
Armstrong has known since he first accompanied his dad to race meetings in short pants that this was what he was born to do. Polite, respectful, savvy beyond his years, he has been carefully inculcated in the intricacies of top level motorsport by the Ferrari Driver Academy and Prema. When he raced TRS, our own M2 Competition played their part as well.
Now the pieces are in place and the proof is to be seen on track this weekend.
For Lawson, the path has been different. With the support of former NZ SpeedSport editor Grant McDonald and a close-knit group of backers including Maurice O’Reilly, Lawson’s progress has been fast, fuelled by attracting a cadre of well-heeled backers to follow the successful model established for Scott Dixon’s shot at Indy – pay now, reap rewards later. The kid from Pukekohe is personable, speaks well to audiences or cameras, and has a devil-may-care flair about him that people find easy to like.
It’s subtly different to overt sponsorship – but then, what Kiwi companies can realistically consider a commercial approach to back a local driver in Formula One? Very few. Fonterra maybe? Talley’s? Air New Zealand? Such companies have to have both a marketing imperative (exporting/selling goods in the countries visited by F1) and sufficient capital to justify that step.
So perhaps jumping on board at FIA F3 level makes some sense – you get TV coverage going out as part of the F1 package, you get massive audiences receptive to your marketing, you get to be part of the incredible success stories of young Kiwi drivers advancing against the odds.
Also see: FIA Formula 3 underway this weekend
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