Photo: F1 Academy
Akcel GP and Pinnacle Motorsports have named their full line-ups for the upcoming Formula 4 Middle East season.
New team Akcel is competing with technical support from PHM Racing and has been born out of the Indian Racing Warriors project which planned to enter GB4 in 2024 in collaboration with Scorpio Motorsport. The team tested but never raced.
In F4 Middle East it will field the already announced David Cosma Cristofor, Hamda Al Qubaisi and Reno Francot.
Al Qubaisi, now 22, has been racing F4 cars since 2019 and won six races in F4 Middle East’s predecessor F4 United Arab Emirates. She has also won four races in the all-female F1 Academy series, and one in Saudi Arabian F4.
She came fourth in two F4 UAE seasons, was third in F1 Academy two years ago and fourth in the inaugural season of the Saudi Arabian championship last year. In 2022 she raced in Formula Regional, with a 12th place finish her best result.
Francot is entering his third year of F4 competition, having been runner-up in the Central European Zone championship as a rookie in 2023 then coming 14th in Italian F4 last year. The 17-year-old Dutchman also cameoed in other series.
Pinnacle has announced three drivers for F4 Middle East, but only one of those will be doing the full season.
Yuzhe Wang came fifth in Chinese F4 last year as a part-timer, then joined Pinnacle for the UAE-based and F4-spec Formula Trophy series and finished 22nd in the standings. The Chinese racer will race full-time in F4 Middle East.
Kyuho Lee and Yuta Suzuki will only do the first two rounds at Yas Marina Circuit taking place over the course of a week this month. Single-seater debutant Lee won the 2024 FIA World Cup for OK-N karts, and the South Korean also came 17th in the IAME Euro Series and 19th in the IAME Winter Cup for X30 Senior karts.
Suzuki came 34th and 21st in those two IAME competitions the year before, and in 2024 raced shifter karts in Europe, a variety of classes at home in Japan and also made his single-seater debut in the entry-level Super FJ category aged 16. He did 13 races in total, and in his sixth outing at Sportsland SUGO took a victory and a second place. He followed that up with victory at Twin Ring Motegi, and in the championship event at Suzuka was second in his semi-final and fourth in the final.