How Nakamura-Berta broke podium records en route to F4 title double

Photos: ACI Sport

Italian F4 added more races in 2025, but it didn’t mean more starts compared to previous seasons and Kean Nakamura-Berta had to rely on consistency to set a new record in the longest-running F4 championship

After 11 years with regularly massive grids, the Italian Formula 4 championship had to revisit a format change for its seven-round 2025 season. Rather than every event featuring three races, a fourth was added at rounds where entry lists exceeded the 42-car cap. It was a tweak previously needed for 2016’s first two rounds, once in 2022 and for the 2023 season opener.

For those events, qualifying was split into two and the results determined which of three lettered groups drivers would be put into. Three ‘qualifying’ races followed, with groups A and B in the first, A and C in the second, then B and C in the third. Those all lasted 25 minutes-plus-one lap, five minutes shorter than the regular race length, then the event’s points table determined the 36 drivers who progressed into the fourth ‘final’ race. A full season therefore meant, as in previous years, 21 starts.

Since Italian F4 does not use reversed-grid races, and despite historically having had one of the category’s strongest fields in terms of depth, the championship has had a tendency to be dominated and most often by Prema drivers. Six of the first 11 champions won nine or more races, and 2025’s format change rewarded winning with the opportunity to do more winning.

Freddie Slater delivered 15 of Prema’s 16 wins last year, with the odd one out being Kean Nakamura-Berta’s maiden success at Paul Ricard. He had made the podium once in the first 14 races, suffering a dip in confidence that his victory reversed.

“It’s a relief that finally I’ve won a race and I think I’ll treasure this win over many wins I’ve done before because I got a bit of confidence back,” he told Formula Scout at the time, before a run of top-four finishes (including three podiums) to end 2024.

Nakamura-Berta was edged to fifth in the standings and the rookie title by team-mate Alex Powell, and the pair were the highest placed drivers to stay on the grid for 2025. While Japanese-Slovak racer Nakamura lost his Alpine Academy backing in the off-season, he was the title favourite for this year as Powell moved to R-ace GP which had only ran one car full-time in 2024.

Prema’s sophomore star delivered on the title-fighting expectation in the season-opening round at Misano, topping his qualifying group and converting pole into three wins out of three. Rookie Salim Hanna Hernandez topped the other qualifying group but was beaten to race one victory by Prema team-mate Sebastian Wheldon, then came fourth and third in the next two.

A sign of things to come were Powell’s results. He was seventh in Nakamura’s qualifying group, set the fastest lap in his first race but finished 11th, struggled to overtake in the next one and finished eighth, then was a penalised 11th in the ‘final’ race.

Before any precedents could be truly set though, wet weather shook things up during round two at Vallelunga. PHM Racing’s David Cosma Cristofor, who would go on to come 26th in the standings with just seven points, was fastest in qualifying by a huge 1.549 seconds. He jumped from outside of the top 10 to top spot before red flags waved and prevented rivals from reasserting themselves as ahead.

Nakamura topped the other group, which Powell was eighth in, and converted pole into victory in race one. A slow-starting Cosma lost the lead immediately in race two, and Nakamura then looked set for an easy victory. But he came under lots of late pressure and had to put in a defensive masterclass to hold off Wheldon. His fifth win marked the best ever start to a season in Italian F4 history, with no other driver having begun their season with such a long unbeaten run.

He got to watch race three from the garage, and in the chaotic first few laps Wheldon and Powell went from fifth and 10th to first and second. Powell had no answer to Wheldon’s pace, but he was at least back on the podium.

Cosma finished 14th, a result he repeated in race four but by climbing up from 21st rather than falling down the order. Nakamura’s victory hopes ended on lap one as he lost his front wing on the rear of Wheldon’s car, and after pitting he recovered from 28th to 11th as US Racing’s Formula Winter Series champion Gabriel Gomez claimed his first race win after three third places from the first five races.

Most podiums in Italian F4 season

The four-race format was not needed in the next rounds, and at Monza things were super close in qualifying. Pole for all three races was decided by under 0.03s, and the track’s pronounced slipstream effect set up races key for learning wheel-to-wheel skills as well as qualifying’s fine margins.

Wheldon won race one from pole, but at one point Gomez and Nakamura were ahead and he got back past them after going three-wide. Nakamura gained 10 spots from 13th on the grid, while Powell went from 18th to fifth and back again.

Defensive prowess earned Nakamura victory in race two while Wheldon frequently overdid it at the first chicane and Gomez got between them after starting 10th. The Prema team-mates collided in race three, and Newman Chi won.

Powell showed what had been missing at Mugello, although not immediately. He was 0.425s off the pace in Q1, enough for fourth on race one’s grid as Nakamura went quickest, but then he topped Q2 by 0.36s to earn two poles.

Nakamura led lights-to-flag in the safety car-filled race one, then Powell nailed the challenge of a race which included rain and strong winds to land his first win then followed it up with a dominant second victory. His 65-point haul from the weekend equated to 51% of his total tally for the season, and after over six-and-a-half years with its support the Mercedes-AMG Formula 1 team now no longer has Powell’s name on the list of its junior drivers.

A ninth podium of the season significantly grew Nakamura’s points lead as closest title rival Wheldon finished 14th, and it also marked the start of a run of nine podiums in a row.

Round five was at Imola, and the stars of qualifying were Gomez and Prema’s Sasha Bondarev although Nakamura was less than 0.04s off pole twice. Gomez led home Hanna in race one to move up to second in the standings, then race two lasted 17s and was ultimately cancelled.

Newman Chi, Alex Powell and Reno Francot

Chi and Hanna stalled at the start, and were collected by several cars. Yellow flags waved but Kornelia Olkucka still crashed, leading to her Maffi Racing team-mates going off in avoidance of debris but ending their races.

Van Amersfoort Racing’s Maximilian Popov spun, other drivers had heavy crashes and when red flags waved 16 drivers were already out. Due to noise curfews preventing a restart, the race was rescheduled to feature in the final round at Misano.

Race three was the next day. Nakamura fought his way past poleman Bondarev on lap one before the safety car appeared, then pulled away after the restart. Bondarev closed back in, along with Popov, and Nakamura was warned over his defending before the safety car reappeared. Once again he got his tyres up to temperature to get a gap on the restart, but a lap later was back defending. Bondarev got past on the outside into Tamburello with two laps to go to win, as Popov lost out to Chi and later Gomez and Hanna.

The season’s only round abroad took place at Spanish track Barcelona, and sophomore Emanuele Olivieri returned to form to become R-ace’s lead driver in the standings. He had made the podium twice at Misano, finished second in the fourth Vallelunga race and then taken top-five finishes in the next two rounds but not reached similar heights to Powell despite comfortably beating him to the F4 Middle East title at the start of the year.

In Barcelona qualifying, Olivieri claimed two poles and was 0.118s shy of a third while Powell was 15th and 13th in the two sessions. Nakamura claimed race one pole, and Gomez and Wheldon were on the front row of the next two races.

Gomez stalled, got hit at turn two, punctured then pitted on race one’s opening lap, and retired shortly after. Nakamura dominated, extending his championship lead over Gomez to 80 points while Wheldon faded to sixth late in the race.

Race two was declared wet, and began behind the safety car since the field thought it was dry enough to start on slick tyres. Olivieri appeared to make an error bringing the pack up to racing speeds, and lost out to Gomez and Nakamura who were evenly matched until the safety car returned late on. Popov landed his fourth podium as Olivieri finished fifth.

Emanuele Olivieri

Heavy rain meant race three was red-flagged early. Wheldon led Nakamura, but as the race was abandoned it counted for nothing. The four-race format returned for the 44-car Misano finale, but the rescheduled encounter made it a five-race event.

Wheldon pipped Gomez to race one pole by 0.078s, Gomez returned the favour by 0.044s for race two, then also clinched race three pole. A controlled display by Wheldon to win race one wasn’t enough to keep his title hopes alive as Nakamura put in a composed display in second place, earned by passing Popov.

Gomez’s group was back on track for race two, but he didn’t get to line up from pole as an alternator meant he couldn’t even get to the grid and joined the race for one lap later on. Nakamura was already one point away from the title due to dropped scores, so it was comfortably secured as he finished third behind Wheldon and Chi.

Wheldon returned to second in the standings, but was not in race three in which Gomez handled a late attack from Hanna for his fourth win and move back ahead by 16 points.

The combined results put Wheldon and Gomez first and sixth on race four’s grid, and Gomez lost ground early on with a grassy moment. Wheldon was fastest on track throughout but lost the lead to Nakamura early on took a while to recover it. The championship’s top thee finished where they started, and Wheldon moved one point ahead of Gomez.

The ball was back in Gomez’s court for the season-ending rescheduled Imola race, as he had pole. Nakamura also had an opportunity to not only break Italian F4’s record podium tally for a season, but to do it in 20 races rather than 21.

Gomez led all the way until the last lap when, having held off many overtaking attempts, Nakamura got a run on him onto the back straight and after putting two wheels on the grass snatched first place. The champion got his ninth win and podium record, Gomez clinched runner-up spot as Wheldon finished seventh and Williams junior Bondarev took his second podium.

Gabriel Gomez

Hanna came fourth in the standings with sixth podiums, and will step up to a 2026 Formula Regional European Championship seat with Prema, but on a points-per-race basis Tomass Stolcermanis had the potential to be in that position. He only did the first two rounds with Prena, but claimed a podium and three other top-five finishes that still put him 11th in the championship.

PHM’s Reno Francot was another impressive part-timer, his three-round run beginning with a double podium at Mugello.

Existing under the same promoter as Italian F4 is E4, a sister ‘continental’ championship contested by most of the paddock and is essentially three further Italian F4 rounds with their own points table.

Ugo Ugochukwu and James Wharton’s 2023 record of five podiums in a season was thoroughly beaten by Nakamura this year as he picked up four victories, three runner-up finishes, a third and a fourth from the nine-race campaign. Despite taking the title by 47 points, it wasn’t wrapped up until the final race which was two weeks after his Italian F4 crowning.

The wins were shared by Gomez and Francot in round one at Paul Ricard in France so Gomez left the track as points leader, then Powell denied Nakamura a triple pole at Mugello. Nakamura resisted Powell’s early attacks in race one there to win, then did the same in race two but a track limits penalty demoted him to second between Powell and Francot.

Wheldon romped to race three victory ahead of Powell, and Francot overtook Nakamura to cause his sole podium-free race.

At the Monza finale, Nakamura won a dramatic race one, fended off title rival Gomez in race two then undid the places lost at the start of race three to become the first ever champion of both Italian F4 and E4 with another win. Francot was third in the points.

Had those events been incorporated into Italian F4’s schedule, here’s how the points table would have looked…

Combined 2025 Italian F4 + E4 table