Photo: TGR NZ
Campos Racing has completed its five-car Eurocup-3 line-up by signing Formula Regional Oceania race-winner Michael Shin.
The 19-year-old South Korean already has experience higher up the single-seater ladder, but did not land a seat on the 2024 FIA Formula 3 Championship grid after doing the last three rounds of the 2023 season and taking a best finish of 17th.
Shin is only in his third year of single-seater racing. He spent 2022 in Formula 4, coming 11th in the British championship with one win, a points-free 29th in the United Arab Emirates championship and 23rd in the Motorsport Games F4 Cup.
He began 2023 with a FRegional Middle East campaign in which he initially struggled to score before a strong final round that included a podium lifted him to 14th in the standings. He then raced in GB3, where in the opening round he picked up a fourth and a fifth place. They would prove to be his best results and he sank to 18th in the standings after missing a round.
Shin bounced back from the bad results he ended last year with by shining in FRegional Oceania over the last month. A win at Ruapuna was the highlight, and four other podiums meant he came an impressive fourth in the championship.
“To join Campos Racing for the 2024 Eurocup-3 season will be a great opportunity for me,” said Shin.
“They are a very strong team and provide an excellent environment for the drivers to grow. It will also be a valuable step in my career as I get to learn the European circuits that I will be racing on in the future. We have an exciting season ahead of us, and I am looking forward to our first race.”
Campos’s team principal Adrian Campos called Shin “a fantastic addition to our Eurocup-3 programme and the icing on the cake to put together an extremely talented driver line-up”, as well as saying he will be “a key player in our title bid”.
The driver and teams’ titles went to Campos in Eurocup-3’s inaugural season, and it has gone for the biggest line-up on the grid in its pursuit of winning those titles again in 2024. Its French rival Sainteloc Racing recently expanded its line-up to four cars by signing Mexican youngster and NACAM F4 podium-finisher Diego de la Torre.