Photo: Dutch Photo Agency
The finalists for this year’s FEED Racing France and Richard Mille Young Talent Academy shootouts have been named.
Launched in 2019, FEED Racing France is a scheme and racing school founded and fronted by 1997 Formula 1 world champion Jacques Villeneuve and former CART driver Patrick Lemarie that has used its shootout to provide a scholarship for drivers to race in French Formula 4.
That element has not been mentioned through the promotion of this year’s contest, but FEED’s website still lists a “competition to win a season in F4” as part of its business.
The 2025 Volant F4 was a multi-stage process starting with a five-day pay-to-drive course in F4 cars, which attracted 57 drivers.
There was then to be a quarter-final day and a 16-driver semi-final day, both split into four sessions and being pay-to-drive, then a 10-session final for six drivers on September 22-25.
There were 24 drivers who automatically qualified for the quarter-finals, and nine named as wildcards to form a list of 33 to fill the next stage’s 32 slots. They were split into two groups of 16, each contesting a whole day earlier this month.
Six drivers from each quarter-final day at Magny-Cours qualified for the semi-finals there (meaning 12 participants), then half of those progressed to the final.
That list consists of 18-year-old Israeli Yuvan Rosen, 16-year-old Swiss karter Mathys Sarua-Pictet, former stock car racer Troy Adams’ 14-year-old son Truly, and the French trio of Clement Outran (16), Mattheo Dauvergne (14) and Sacha Bouder (17). Outran came fifth in the 2024 IAME Euro and Benelux series on X30 Senior karts.
The RMYTA shootout organised by the Nicolas Todt-led All Road Management firm hands a paid-for 2026 Spanish F4 seat with MP Motorsport to its winner and is open to karters no older than 17.
It had 65 applicants, and six were chosen for the final. The first stage of that is a day spent at Italian driver training firm Formula Medicine’s facilities for “fitness, mental and physical assessments”, then on September 21/22 there is on-track testing at Jerez.
The oldest finalist is 16-year-old Kasper Schormans. The Dutch racer was Rotax Winter Cup, BNL Series and BNL Kick-Off winner and Rotax Max Challenge International Trophy runner-up on Rotax Junior karts, and has since come fourth in the CIK-FIA European championship and fifth in the WSK Final Cup for KZ2 shifter karts.
There are also 15-year-olds Elliot Kaczynski, Iacopo Martinese and Noah Wolfe, and 14-year-olds Borys Lyzen and Aston Sharp.
Martinese was third in the 2024 European championship for OK Junior karts and this year has come fifth in WSK’s Super Master Series at home in Italy and sixth in Champions of the Future in the OK class. Englishman Wolfe was 10th in the latter and 12th in the European championship.
Kaczynski, from Sweden, was runner-up in the South Garda Winter Cup when in junior karting.
Scotland’s Sharp has already done F4 testing, and was 14th in 2024’s CIK-FIA World championship for OK-J karts.