W Series season preview
W Series is back this weekend after a year away. This time it’s supporting F1, and reigning champion Jamie Chadwick tells us she’s up for the challenge of taking another title
Jamie Chadwick took the first season of W Series by storm, and now she’s back and ready to bid for another crown. And with an expanded calendar, a support slot alongside Formula 1 in place of its inaugural season on the DTM calendar, and superlicence points up for grabs, there’s even more at stake this time around.
The intended second campaign in 2020 bit the dust thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, so it’s been a long wait for the all-female series since Chadwick was crowned the inaugural champion at Brands Hatch in mid-august 2019. That will end this weekend with the first of two successive events at the Red
Bull Ring, and the reigning title holder is feeling confident, but not complacent.
The confidence clearly comes from that first season with the centrally run, Alfa Romeo-powered Tatuus machinery: she took victory in the first race of the season at Hockenheim, and scored podiums in all bar the Brands finale. Even so, fourth place enabled her to clinch the title from Beitske Visser by 10 points in what Chadwick described as an“awful ”last race.
But this year, facing stiff competition from old rivals and new competitors, Chadwick says she is well aware of “how hard I need to be working if I want to retain my title”. Even outside an all-female environment, she is no stranger to victory: she became champion in the GT4 class of the British GT Championship in 2015 at the wheel of an Aston Martin; she claimed the title in the Indian-run MRF Challenge in 2018-19; and she was a Nurburgring 24 Hours class winner in 2019, again in an Aston Martin. That year she also joined the Williams
Driver Academy alongside Dan Ticktum, Roy Nissany and Jack Aitken, and took
up a role as one of the team’s Formula 1 development drivers, which she has retained.
With no W Series in 2020, the 23-year-old kept her hand in by contesting the Formula Regional European Championship – which used the same chassis and engine as W Series – with Prema Powerteam, and finished as ninth-highest points scorer. So, after traversing the length and breadth of
Wales with pre-season W Series testing at Pembrey and Anglesey, she’s raring to go for the new season.
“Yeah, I’m definitely feeling confident, but I also think I kind of now know what I need to be working on, and how hard I need to be working if I want to retain my title, ”she states. “i think definitely it’s not making me complacent, if anything it’s making me work harder. And that’s a really important thing to be focusing on. Not everyone knows what to expect for this year, so I’m utilising that knowledge. I’m quietly confident that if I work hard enough, and we can put everything in place, then we can win the championship again. So that’s obviously the goal, but definitely nothing is taken for granted; there’s no complacency going into this year.”
Chadwick spent large parts of the multiple COVID lockdowns while she wasn’t racing focusing on her training, giving her more time to“properly train and properly prepare ”for a full-on season defending her title as best as possible after she found herself “struggling quite a lot physically in the car at times last year”. The Formula Regional-spec car had notoriously heavy steering. Chadwick says that the experience will benefit her in 2021, but “although it’s the same car, it’s still very different in terms of the way that the cars are run and the tyres”.
That experience with Prema came after a 2019-20 winter spent in the Asian F3 Championship, again using the Tatuus chassis and Alfa engine. She finished fourth in that series, but the European environment in F regional was more beneficial .“being able to experience the structure, and the way that a team like Prema work, I think that’s helped me a lot, ”she points out. “the added experience, combined with the fact that I went to a few of the tracks that we’re going to be racing at this year, definitely made a positive difference
“Not everyone knows what to expect for this year, so I’m utilising that knowledge”
for me this year. From a personal point of view it really helped me develop. And also, you know, the team-mates that I had are young guns that are really up and coming [champion Gianluca Petec of moved into Formula 2 for this year, and Arthur Leclerc and Oliver Rasmussen to FIA F3], so to be able to learn from them as well was a useful thing.”
There’s a lot at stake this year, with W Series holding an eight-event season in 2021, up from six in 2019, and will branch out from Europe by finishing with dates at the United States and Mexican Grands Prix. Joining FIA F2 and F3 on the F1 support package gives the series a huge profile boost, something aided by the fact that, unlike F2 and F3, it’s free-to-air on television, with a Channel 4 slot in the UK. Fifteen superlicence points are available for the champion, and Chadwick says this “makes the stakes higher for the championship, which is going to naturally make the competitiveness and all of us drivers push harder, which is what we want to see”.
Asked who she thinks her biggest title challengers will be, Chadwick says: “the list definitely goes beyond two hands of digits. So yeah, I think it’s going to be a tough year, probably tougher than 2019. But I’m sure similar people will be popping up – Beitske,
“The stakes are higher, which is going to make all of us push harder”
Alice Powell, Marta Garcia.
You just need to have consistency, and the main thing is just making sure we get through the first half of the year when the calendar is so compact.”
That’s not all Chadwick has to focus on this year, because she’s also competing in Extreme E with Veloce Racing (the sister team to her management) alongside versatile sportscar and rally star Stephane Sarrazin. Despite the huge undertaking of competing in two very different series, she says:“i’m really loving the challenge. They’re so, so different that it’s quite nice to be able to try and take comparisons and things from either. From my perspective, it’s just time management, making sure that I put enough effort and energy into each one. But in terms of the dual campaign, they’re so different that actually one isn’t going to hinder the other too much.
“It’s been quite nice so far, because, apart from W Series testing, I had the majority of the first part of the year to focus on Extreme E, before it’s going to be a big block of W Series. So I can really separate my focus. But at the same time, I think both skills are useful. The more training I can do, whether it’s in a rally car or on track, the better.”
On top of that, Chadwick is undertaking simulator sessions at the Williams F1 team’s Grove headquarters, something she hopes will lead to time in the car.
Coming into the start of the W Series, Chadwick is on a roll: she’s raced more recently than many of her rivals, and has the experience that comes with being an F1 development driver. If she wins the championship again this year, she won’t be able to return in 2022, but would focus on progressing to FIA F3 or, if possible, straight to F2. Such a move along the path to F1 is exactly what W Series was invented to facilitate.