The 2021 British Formula 4 champion looks back on his freshman GB3 campaign
This year I had my debut campaign in the GB3 championship, and it was an OK season. It was not my best and we had a few mistakes, such as the first round at Silverstone, as well as some bad luck with engines. But, all in all, we’ve been there or thereabouts all the time, we just need to polish a few things to be there for next year.
Not only was I new to the series but the JHR Developments team and its team principal Steven Hunter had done a few races before but not the full championship, so it was a steep learning curve. We missed a few tricks, but towards the end we started to get a bit more into it and we won our first race, at Brands Hatch late in the year. Hopefully we can build on that next year.
Moving from the older British Formula 4 car to the GB3, there’s not so much a massive difference in power because while a 80bhp step sounds good, it isn’t really that big.
The difference is more the fact that you have proper aero, which gives you a lot more downforce.
In F4 you had to hustle the car in the corners, and it would forgive you quite a lot, but at the Formula 3 level you have be much smoother with your inputs. The downforce in GB3 is like having a massive invisible elephant on the car and the faster you go it will stay there, so keeping it all in balance and not moving erratically is the main thing.
I don’t know exactly why I had a great weekend at Brands, I just turned the steering wheel and something happened. By that point of the season we knew what we were doing, and no-one gets much time to test on the Brands Hatch GP circuit, which is a leveller. Steven had put a good car together and even though we had top-speed issues throughout the year, we managed to work around it.
I’m not sure what I will be racing next year. We’ve had some discussions with different teams and people, but nothing is set, except we will race in GB3 as I can’t justify moving on just yet. My goal is to be in the top two or three in the GB3 championship next year and then we can look at moving on to something else. We can challenge for the title, but we’ve also got to remember there are new people coming in who could be fast.
A natural side of my driving is that I am pretty good on tyres. I used to be a bit poor, but we sorted that out. The main thing
I need to work on is how to qualify, because it is pretty crucial. In GB3 we don’t have DRS like the FIA F3 cars, and if you make a good start you’re pretty much guaranteed to stay there. It’s more keeping the tyre towards the end of qualifying as at the end everyone’s going to go faster.
It’s been an honour to be named as a BRDC SuperStar. With it there are things such as the media day as well as you get training and teambuilding days. Using the skills that they’ve given you, plus the individual budgets to go and do your own things, is really good to help driver development. At any time you have someone like Andy Meyrick, the BRDC SuperStars director, to call and get an outside opinion, which can be really helpful.
There is a sense of pride being part of the BRDC SuperStars as if you look at that plus the Rising Stars, there’s only 25-30 people selected. So to just be part of that little group is special.
Looking ahead, we want to look at different routes, so we did a couple of tests in the USA this year, at Road America and Indianapolis. We were pretty fast in the first, even setting an unofficial lap record, but in the second test we had some issues. But it was eye opening because you can see the differences between Europe and the US.
It’s going to be a long few months until we go racing, but we’ll have tested during a lot of it and hopefully we can get some hotweather testing somewhere like Spain too. There’s sim work, training, hopefully a bit of testing in between, and also spending time with my family. We don’t talk about schoolwork though!
“In F4 you had to hustle the car, but at F3 level you have be much smoother”