Photo: Fotospeedy
Sainteloc Racing made the surprise announcement today that sportscar racer Pierre-Louis Chovet would be joining its Formula Regional European Championship line-up for this weekend’s round at Zandvoort.
Chovet is currently racing for Oregon Team, who are renowned for picking up junior single-seater racers and turning them into GT racing stars, in the International GT Open series in a Lamborghini Huracan GT3 Evo 2 shared with Maximilian Paul.
Together they have won four races and taken four poles so far this season and remain in title contention with one round to go. He explained to Formula Scout why he is returning to open-wheel cars this weekend in the Netherlands.
“We’ve been in contact with Sainteloc since the beginning of the season as the FREC team needed an experienced driver in the car to help them grow,” Chovet said.
“Unfortunately, for various reasons we couldn’t make it possible earlier. Planets finally aligned and I can’t wait to race alongside the team in Zandvoort this weekend. I don’t know what to expect in terms of performance, but I believe in hard work and dedication, as well as their very strong engineering line-up, so let’s make the most out of it.”
French team Sainteloc was known for its programmes in sportscar racing and rallying until it made the switch to single-seaters last year in Spanish Formula 4. It expanded into F4 United Arab Emirates, Eurocup-3 and FREC for 2023, and while it has already won seven races in F4 it is has only claimed one podium in FRegional-based series so far.
The 21-year-old Chovet went the other way as he went from single-seaters to sportscar racing last year. He did one European GT4 round in an Alpine and then switching to Lamborghini Super Trofeo Europe as one of the manufacturer’s official young drivers. That then opened the doors to move up into a coveted Oregon seat at the GT3 level for 2023.
He has not been out of practice in single-seaters though, as he actually started 2022 with an incomplete FRegional Asian Championship campaign in which he came 16th in the standings (having been championship runner-up the year before) and contested the first ever Eurocup-3 races five months ago.
Chovet has won FREC win to his name from 2020, and the highest level he raced at in single-seaters was FIA Formula 3 where he contested four rounds over two seasons and had a best finish of sixth.