‘WARRIOR’ AHMED READY TO KICK START F1 QUEST
Rising British star has put coronavirus behind him and is determined to seize 2020’s FIA F3 crown
Rising British star Enaam Ahmed is focused on wowing grand prix team bosses this year by winning the Formula 1-supporting FIA Formula 3 championship after battling back from the coronavirus.
Following two tricky seasons, Ahmed has told Motorsport News he is determined in 2020 to conquer F3 where he’ll compete with Carlin.
“A good season to me is simply to be the champion,” he said. “I’m not going to give you the old classic answer, ‘oh let’s see how it goes’. No, I’m here to win, that’s it.
“The really top guys like [Lewis] Hamilton have this, when I go out there I just want to literally kill everyone, it’s just like a warrior mentality. And that’s helped me a lot in my career fight, even when I have had adversity and people have stopped me achieving what I want. I’m not going to be put in the ground so easily.”
Enaam Ahmed looked every inch the next big thing. Stunningly fast, and instantly so. Charismatic, strong analytically, popular in his teams yet possessing other-worldy focus and determination. In 2017 with Carlin he blitzed British Formula 3, winning 13 races out of
24. Then for 2018 with Hitech he moved to the FIA Formula 3 European championship, for the final season of that parent category to the current Formula 1-supporting F3.
Ahmed started well with two earlyseason race wins and poles, an especially fine showing for a series rookie. But, from mid-year, he struggled acutely in the wake of Prema’s sudden pace upturn. And it checked Ahmed’s seemingly unstoppable momentum.
“I just started to over drive and get influenced by stupid people,” Ahmed explains to MN of his European F3 campaign two years ago. “I probably wouldn’t have won the championship, but [I was] throwing a really good result in the championship away.”
What promised to be at least a top five in the table turned into an underwhelming ninth.
And it more generally related to what Ahmed accepts has been his main shortcoming among the many positives of the opening paragraph. “I probably was a little too emotional in 2018,” Ahmed notes. “That was my biggest thing that I needed to work on.
Seeing a championship getting slipped away like that, that’s probably the biggest thing that I’ve learned. Now I’m a lot more cold about it.”
Sam Waple, Ahmed’s Carlin team boss from British F3, concurs. “His natural talent is very high,” Waple explains of Ahmed to MN, “he’s obviously got a very good natural understanding of what he’s capable of and what he wants out of the car and he’s got that very good feeling for what he needs to go fast. We often see with some of the lesser-experienced drivers is they’re not really sure what they want out of the car, they don’t really know why they’re fast or what’s happening, but with Enaam it’s quite the opposite.
“Where he needs to work, I always thought, is a strong mental confidence and keep working on that then he [stays] up the front. But if he’s in the middle of the pack [he needs to know] how to drive himself forwards rather than backwards. [That’s] something I’ve seen him struggling with a little over the last couple of years.
“In his FIA F3 [European] year with Hitech he started strong, and then through the middle of the year started to get into a bit of a slump, didn’t manage to get himself out of it. I genuinely believe that that’s all mental. He’s got the natural feel and ability to drive up the front but it’s just getting that mental side.
“When you look at for example Lando [Norris, another Carlin graduate], his mental strength is exceptionally strong. That’s one of the things that drives him out of a bad session. Enaam needs to work on that. Once he can get that in the right place, and I think he will, then he can be unstoppable.”
Ahmed notes also that other things impeded during his European F3 campaign, which he’s also learned from. “I just threw it away because I let people influence me to do the wrong things and I listened to too many people, so now I know what’s best for me and they can all piss off frankly,” he says.
“[It was advice] just for the driving. People telling me their opinion and what they think I should be doing and me, being me, I was turning 18 at the time, I was a young kid wanting to prove myself, wanting to make everyone happy, and that was a mistake I made. So I listened to them even though most of it was bullshit to be honest. And I’d actually try and do it and you don’t have time to do that, it’s best to stick to what you know and what you feel is right for you in your gut. I won’t be making that mistake again.
“Also [I’ve learned] just not wasting time with other drivers or things like that, it’s just a real waste of energy, and I’d rather stick to myself now. I never used to be like that, I used to always be the joker of the paddock, but now I’m not interested. I want to destroy them completely, I don’t care.”
Worse for Ahmed, his iffy end to the 2018 season lost him a potential major investor, who was set to fund his progress to F1. Ahmed thought he might even not be racing in 2019, but got a last-minute deal for Japanese F3. It was an experience Ahmed was glad of, and not just because he bagged third in the table despite the almost vertical learning curve.
And this year, having recently turned
20, Ahmed will indeed compete at F1 meetings, in FIA F3, and is doing so back ‘home’with Carlin. Yet like everyone else he had to put his 2020 ambitions on hold due to the coronavirus-related lockdown. And again Ahmed’s experience was worse than for most, as he in fact contracted the virus.
“That was horrendous,” Ahmed explains, “I was completely finished for a month, I couldn’t leave my bed for two weeks and then I couldn’t move. I was so ill, so so so ill, I never felt anything that bad in my life. I couldn’t exercise, I just had no energy to do anything. Now I’m OK luckily, but it was really bad.
“I started coughing non-stop, not hard but just really annoying. Next day I woke up I was horrendous, I was the most ill
I’ve ever been in my life. It was like a small symptom the day before, then boom! It hit me really hard, high fever, shivering, my mum said it didn’t look like I opened my eyes for two weeks. I don’t even remember the first week of the illness because I was so out of it. I didn’t take any medication either because I prefer for my body to fight it on its own.
“I’m fully recovered now. I lost a lot of weight through the virus, but also now that I can’t put that weight back on yet because I’m fasting [for] Ramadan.
I’m very skinny, I’ve got no strength at the moment to do anything, I need to put some muscle back on.”
Ahmed has managed to put the lockdown to good use though. “Now I feel like the lockdown’s been the best thing that’s happened to me to be honest because now I feel ready,” he notes.
“From the beginning of this season I wasn’t in the best frame of mind and prepared that I could be, but now on the lockdown I’ve been working on myself, not physically, 100% it’s been mental. [It was] just deep thinking about yourself and helping understand myself better.”
So Ahmed has not only identified his shortcomings but, he reckons, has dealt with them ruthlessly. And Waple notes
“I was too emotional, now I’m a lot more cold” Enaam Ahmed
indeed that such characteristics mark Ahmed out even more than his brilliant pace. “His work ethic is greater than most I’ve worked with,” Waple says.
“His focus and the way he goes about a race weekend and how dedicated he is to winning is extremely high. I don’t see that in a lot of the drivers we have.”
Ahmed is aware of his own determination too: “The really top guys like [Lewis] Hamilton have this, when I go out there I just want to like literally kill everyone, it’s just like a warrior mentality. Like I really want to literally rip their hearts out and eat it, and that’s how I am. And that’s helped me a lot in my career fight, even when I have had adversity against me and people have stopped me from achieving what I want to achieve that’s what’s helped me to keep going, because I’m not going to be put in the ground so easily.”
Waple tells a tale of the final race of Ahmed’s British F3 championship year, where Ahmed, his title won, was told to follow team-mate Cameron Das home to ensure a rare 1-2-3 for Carlin drivers in the final table. “Enaam in his racing-driver wisdom took a big lunge into the bottom hairpin and basically shoved Cameron out the way [and] went on to win the race,” Waple says, “[and] he clipped Cameron’s front wing and made him box. [Das] ended up P5 in the championship because of it. Enaam just couldn’t accept that he couldn’t win that race. We fell out for a little while over that.”
Waple also recalls that Ahmed’s determination to improve was evident even amid leaving British F3 rivals well behind: “He put a lot of development on himself, he put an awful lot of pressure on himself to be better throughout 2017.
“From the middle of the year he’d already decided that he was going to move up the following year to FIA F3 [European] and mentally he was preparing himself for that and realised that the competition was going to be a big jump, so we saw him engage another gear.
“[He thought] ‘I don’t just need to be P1, I need to be P1 by a few tenths, I need to be so far up the road that when I go to FIA F3 that I’m competitive’. It didn’t matter how many races he won in British F3, he still had that drive and that push to make sure that he was developing.”
Just about everything looks in place for Ahmed to show in 2020 what he’s really made of. Although, with that, and with what’s gone before, results are a necessity.
Waple recognises this: “He’s going to be thinking he needs to win it [the championship], I think that’s in his head [that] he needs to use this year as a stepping stone to the next and if he doesn’t do very well I think he’ll be thinking ‘well what have I got now to do?’so he’ll be putting an awful lot of pressure on himself to be right up the sharp end for sure.”
It’s a challenge though that Ahmed is absolutely up for. “A good season to me is simply to be the champion, that’s about it to be honest,” he asserts. “I’m not going to give you the old classic answer that I used to give and most drivers give, ‘oh let’s see how it goes’. No, I’m here to win, that’s it, f*ck everything else.”