The CEO of F2 and F3 spoke about the beginning of the 2024 and the future of drivers and the categories
At less than a month since the next F2 and F3 appointment, Bruno Michel – the CEO – spoke to the media about the 2024 and the future of these categories.
The beginning of 2024 season
Michel’s first thoughts are about the beginning of the F2 season with the new cars.
At the moment, some teams are struggling, and others are doing a better job. Confident that those teams will be back in a very proper level quite soon.
The teams didn’t give any negative feedback, specifically about how easy it is to follow behind others. With Dallara and the FIA, they worked a lot in the development process seeing how they can follow each other, how they can avoid losing downforce when two cars are being followed… and the result was on the track, as Bruno said:
I think the races were quite interesting and showed that overtaking was not an issue. If we look at what we’ve been doing over the last years we’ve done it quite right. And for me this new car is part of it as well and is working quite well on this instance.
He said right, in fact we’ve had in this beginning of 2024 5 different winners in F2 and 4 in F3 which it means “that there are many younger drivers coming in and being a very strong level“. There are a lot of drivers in both of the categories who are doing a good job, making hard any predictions.
In F2 we saw what happened at the beginning of the season. Maloney has been doing a very good job. The rookie Aron is also doing a great job and Hadjar has been unlucky a couple of times. We have rookies coming as well like Martì… it’s very interesting. I can’t give you a prediction because you have drivers like Martins or Bearman who’s done nothing yet. There are quite a lot of drivers that will be able to do good by the end of the season. In F3 the second year’s drivers are doing quite well… it’s too early really to be able to call anything.
Some weeks ago they were in Barcelona for the in-season tests. As we know, the teams want more tests, but it’s necessary a balance between what they want and the calendar.
The number of tests that we put together is always an interesting question because the teams want to have tests, but also we need to make sure that the budget is not getting crazy either. So it’s a thin balance. I think the tests we had were extremely good in terms of reliability in both categories. You need to put the calendar together in a way that it’s the most efficient for the teams, and we think that doing it that way is good.
And talking about the in-season test in Barcelona he said:
We decided to go to Barcelona, we couldn’t do them at the beginning of the season. They aren’t really mid-season because we only had 3 events for F2 and 2 for F3, but I think it’s quite important to have those 3 days of testing now because the teams have been able to understand what they’ve been doing, take the car together and understand it a little bit better.
These young drivers are the future of F1?
Some of the drivers in F2 are on the mouth of everyone because of an imminent future in F1. One is Ollie Bearman, who impressed everyone in F1 with his standing performance in Jeddah.
Bearman is definitely a very strong driver and we’ve been following him for quite a long time. Does it deserve an F1 seat? Absolutely! And I would imagine that next year he will have one and I’m very very happy about that.
He’s a talent, everyone could see it. But there’s another driver that is probably the one with the most attention in the feeder series since Max Verstappen: Andrea Kimi Antonelli. The Italian F2 rookie did test with Mercedes in Imola and some rumors said that he could join the F1 the next year. At the question about the pressure or a bit of a distraction for a driver who’s only 17 years old, Michel answered:
It’s always good when we have drivers coming that has quite a lot of hype, people are looking him and have a lot of hope onto him. I think it’s also important to leave the driver developing himself without any additional external pressure. It’s part of his learning process as well, that’s part of the game and if you can deal with it properly for sure it’s a great asset for him in the future.
About the kind of the progression up into F1, some drivers struggle and an example is Logan Sargeant. For F2 and F3 prepare them to stepping up is the basic role.
We are trying to do the best we can in F2 with the machinery, with the fact that they’re racing with F1 all the time, with the format… Everything we’re doing is to try to prepare drivers for the F1 as much as possible.
Also, F1 helps them with academies, rookie test…
It’s difficult to say if F1 is doing already quite a lot now because they having those rookie tests which should be done that before we have most half of the grade in F2 that are belonging to F1 teams academies. All these things are making the link between F2 and F1 extremely increased now. I would say it really depends on the drivers and on the environment when you get into F1 and how it’s gonna work. It’s a case by case situation.
Looking for the future
One of the main themes at this moment is the sustainability. F2 and F3 are working on it with the partner Aramco. Bruno Michel showed us some initiatives:
We will increase the percentage of sustainability of our fuel for 2025. I don’t know yet where we gonna be because this is something we working on and I don’t know yet if we will already have synthetic fuel. I can’t give you more details but yes, we are moving forward and Aramco is a fantastic partner to do that. For the rest, we’re trying to get as sustainable as possible in the how many initiatives that we’re doing to try to decrease our carbon print.
Talking about the future, also the F3 will have a new car. The development process is already advanced, as the CEO said:
We passed a few of the safety tests last week and there’s still some to come. The idea it would be to try to have the car available for a shutdown end of June or beginning of July because we wanna be ready as early as possible. We know that we will starting in Melbourne next year so we need to be ready as early as possible and to try to test as early as possible for the teams as well.
