Getting to know Freddie Slater: fiercely competitive, focused and fast

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Formula Scout hears from the stand-out Formula 4 racer of 2024 – and key figures around him – to understand what marks him out as one of the hottest properties below F1.

“A lot of people want to get into Formula 1. But I want to get into F1 and win world championships, not just get into F1. The only way you’re going to do that is by being as prepped as possible.”

Double Formula 4 champion Freddie Slater may have only just completed his first full season of single-seater racing, but he has his sights firmly fixed on the ultimate prize: F1.

Despite narrowly failing to add the Euro 4 crown to his Italian and United Arab Emirates successes, Slater is rightly considered one of the hottest properties in junior single-seaters and has already been snapped up by Prema for his graduation to Formula Regional in 2025.

A place among the four finalists for the prestigious Silverstone Autosport BRDC Award, with a shot at the coveted prize test in an Aston Martin F1 car, underlines his stellar reputation.

Not for Slater the feigned indifference or ignorance of win tallies or records to be beaten. After clinching the Italian title with four races remaining, his immediate thought was about overhauling Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s championship record of 13 wins in a season, something he achieved in the Monza finale to take his final score to 15.

Indeed, but for the unfortunate timing of a race-ending safety car which narrowly preventing him from retaking the lead, he could have wrapped up the season with what have been a record-breaking fourth clean sweep.

Though undoubtedly talented, his success is built on three pillars – his Prema squad; his management team at ADD and in particular performance coach Craig Boyd; and his close-knit family.

Formula Scout spoke to Slater and some of those who know him best to find out what makes him tick, why he has proved so unbeatable, and where he goes from here.

To quote one of those who knows him best, ADD director Fraser Sheader: “Arrogance is the wrong word because he isn’t arrogant at all, but he’s got this kind of inner belief that he can do it all the time, which is part of the reason he’s got so many great results.”

Allied to Slater’s ultra-competitive mindset is an incessant quest for self-improvement, with every lesson being stored away for future reference as he progresses towards his goal.

Having worked with Slater for over 10 years, Boyd has been instrumental in guiding and developing his career most closely and emphasises the importance of what he calls Slater’s “growth mindset”, the desire and commitment to continually improve.

“Obviously the ultimate goal and his main attribute is the desire to win, but then that has to filter down into ‘How are we going to win?’ and having an open mindset does give him the tools to be able to win at any stage and in any situation,” Boyd believes.

Out of the car Slater exudes calm, appearing unruffled, almost phlegmatic; he handles media communications with a maturity beyond his 16 years and is constantly pushing himself and those around him to find more, while always fully crediting the work of his Prema team.

With 19 wins and 13 pole positions from 45 races across the three F4 championships in 2024, Slater has enjoyed, in his words, a “mega season”.

It is, however, the Italian championship, arguably still the blue riband of national F4 series worldwide, where he has been close to untouchable, crushing a strong field including multiple karting champions and F1 juniors.

Yes, he has been with series giant Prema, which has won the teams’ title in all but three out of 11 seasons, but that is no guarantee of success in such a competitive championship.

Slater attributes his performances to the amount of hard work and preparation he and the team put in to prepare for the year.

“Obviously, Prema have given me an amazing car all year. We worked really hard over the winter,” he says. “Of course, I knew this championship was going to be hard and I think it met my expectations.”

“I couldn’t have done it without Prema,” he said after clinching the title in Barcelona. “The team gave me great people to work with and made my life easier.”

Prema team principal, Rene Rosin, is happy to repay the compliments, underlining to Formula Scout at Monza that Slater has done a “terrific job this year, starting from the UAE, where he was already quite impressive, quite mature for his age, then breaking the record of Andrea Kimi in F4 in the number of wins.”

“The determination, the speed – being fast in all conditions – is something that, of course, has been underlying this year. He has really done a terrific job in terms of preparation; when he arrives at the races, he knows what he has to do, what are the targets,” Rosin says.

Rosin highlights Slater’s ability to nail qualifying: “When he has had a difficult quali, for example for traffic or, because with 15 minutes quali in F4, you can have a full course yellow or red flag, he’s always been able to bounce back in the second quali to be a protagonist.”

Slater himself underlines that with “such a high level of drivers and so many of them, qualifying is super, super difficult and always really tight,”

“It’s not like Ginettas where you can race through from the back, so it’s the most crucial part of our weekends. Obviously, there’s fine margins and one bit of traffic, one slight mistake can cost you a lot.”

With close to 40 cars on track, fighting for position in two 15-minute sessions, nailing the perfect qualifying lap requires a driver to manage timing, traffic, tyre temperatures and to minimise errors on what might only be two push laps.

“The margins are tight and the short amount of time to do the lap time makes it quite difficult but also fun,” he says. “It’s been tough. It’s definitely been what I needed, and I think it’s important to face these challenges to make you better in the long run.”

Indeed, Slater has only qualified outside the front two rows on five occasions across 30 races in the Italian and Euro 4 championships, including one race at Paul Ricard where a gearbox problem left him struggling in 24th.

The hard work over the winter has meant he could always start the weekend with the car in “a good place. We barely make any changes. It’s more just getting myself in the right mindset and the right focus, approaching the session in the right way,” he says.

Inevitably in such a dream year, there have been plenty of standout drives. The year began in crushing style at Misano in May – three poles and three lights-to-flag wins. Another two hat-tricks – at Vallelunga and Mugello – would follow, to equal another Antonelli record.

Getting off to a flying start was key to building momentum and putting down a marker to the competition. “If you can break the back of it early, the others are trying to chase that gap,” says Boyd. “It gives you an underlying confidence in a situation where you are a little bit ahead, so, as long as you don’t get complacent, and one of my main roles is keeping everyone’s feet on the ground, a lot of performance comes from that.”

Significantly, Slater himself picks out round two at Imola as a highlight, “where it was quite good to win race three and to bounce back from the first two races,” when a disqualification for a technical infringement after winning on track and then an overly optimistic lunge at Jack Beeton in race two left him pointless.

Rosin takes team responsibility for “our mistake with the wing” in race one, but praises Slater’s “mental strength” after losing the win – “if some other drivers had been disqualified [it] would have impacted them, [but] he put it behind him.”

Slater prefers to look to the lessons he took from his race two error. “You learn more from the ones you lose. In that Imola race I just made that mistake. I was a bit too greedy at that point, and I should have just waited. It’s definitely something that sticks in my head. I think about it quite a lot when I’m in certain moments.

“Even when I’m winning, there’s still a lot of things that I can learn from; there were multiple things in Mugello that I could learn from, so there’s always little bits and you never stop learning.

“Mugello was quite satisfying,” he adds. “We clarified that we’re here to win, [bouncing] back from that setback and [coming] out punching. It was just a super tough weekend because we’re so limited on tyres that we have to manage so much and with my starting positions it made it quite difficult to have good tyres for all three races.”

After dominating Ginettas in 2023, Slater made his much anticipated single-seater debut in British F4 at the end of the year. But he really announced his arrival in style with pole on his European F4 debut at Monza in his first outing with Prema. Slater stayed with Prema for the Euro 4 finale, while gaining additional experiencing with Van Amersfoort Racing in the final two rounds of the Italian series, as part of the carefully designed development plan.

“Obviously, everybody runs their cars differently. There’s a lot of set-up changes you can do, so it was just more changing our approach, having a go with other teams,” he says of the parallel programme.

Although “we chose to come back to Prema, I learned loads with VAR, I got to know them quite quickly and I still talk to them now and they’re good mates. But it’s being able to adapt to different teams, scenarios, different languages etc. [that] makes you better in the long run.”

Having experienced both the British and Italian/Euro series, the decision was made to commit to Italy for his primary campaign for 2024, following the path beaten by fellow Brits Ollie Bearman and Arvid Lindblad.

For Slater, the decision was motivated by the desire to get experience of tracks he’ll encounter further up the ladder.

“British F4 is great for getting up to speed, being on the limit [but] it’s because we’ll come to these tracks in the future categories that we need to learn [them] as soon as we can.

“If you’re trying to do a two-year F4 campaign, [then] maybe you can do British and Italian, but I only wanted to do one year in F4, [so] the best way was to come to Europe to learn all the F1 tracks, because that’s the goal, that’s where we’d like to be.

“When you go to FREC or to F3, you kind of know what to expect when you get there. It doesn’t take you two sessions to learn the track, you’re already trying to find the best lap time. I think it’s quite important to have that approach.”

In truth, he is happy to leave career decisions to his ADD Management team, under co-directors Sheader and Mark Berryman, with Boyd ensuring that everything runs smoothly during testing and race weekends. ADD has established a strong name in the business through its involvement with drivers such as Lando Norris.

However, as Sheader explained to Formula Scout, there was more to opting for European competition than simply a desire to learn the tracks.

“Generally, we’ll put a driver in the combination where we think he’s weakest. I’m not saying that Fred’s weak but if you look at where his particular strengths are; it’s in greasy, changeable conditions, one lap shootouts, elbow-out type of racing [where] in our opinion, he’s ahead of the curve.

“We’re massive fans of national domestic championships; hence why we’ve put many drivers including Lando and Fred into Ginettas, because there’s a huge place for that kind of racing. Doing British [F4] is great for 99% of drivers, [but] Fred had done that grind, [those] British changeable conditions, the nitty gritty racing, from such a young age and did so much of it, that he just got really good at it, so actually honing other areas of his skillset was more important.”

The belief that drivers need to learn the circuits is overblown, Sheader believes. “The good ones don’t need more than five to 10 laps before they’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s going on. For us, it’s about going to where you’re going to bring the most out of the driver.”

Racing in Italy offered better weather, meaning “more consistent conditions,” allowing the driver “to practise that process of finding tiny gains, rather than just having the best car control or being the bravest.”

Allied to that, “the bigger open European circuits [provide] a style of racing more consistent with what you’re going to be [experiencing] in the future,” and, ultimately a driver needs to prove himself against the best, so you need to “go where the competition’s hardest.”

As a result, Slater has been able to demonstrate his pace across both the twistier, more kart-track like venues such as Misano and Vallelunga, as well as the faster, more open sweeps of Mugello and Barcelona.

To ramp up for the European season, Slater started the year in F4 UAE, taking two wins and pipping team-mate Kean Nakamura Berta to the title in a frenetic final race in Dubai.

“I don’t know what is with those tracks [in the UAE], but they seem to just enhance a lot of racing compared to any other tracks. So, the racing was just chaotic, and it made it exciting for the fans,” Slater recalls.

While the silverware was a pleasant bonus, the real value came from the experience gained. “We learned a lot from UAE, because I made a lot of mistakes [and] it gave us quite good focus points to work on [before] the first [Italian championship] round.”

Boyd agrees that “the learnings from that championship allowed us to be super strong at the start of [the Italian] one. Lots of consecutive starts, lots of different scenarios where you can really prep well for the Italian championship.”

However, perhaps the most significant benefit of the UAE series came from the chance to consolidate Slater’s partnership with race engineer, Vincent Garnier, who moved across the garage having looked after Lindblad’s car in 2023.

Slater attributes much of his success this year to the “good bond” the two have formed over the season.

“I started working Vincent during winter testing, so we’ve had to build our relationship. I started to get to know him and we kind of decided [that] we’re going to work together for the UAE.

“It’s been super important to build that relationship and get stuff to kind of where I need it and where he needs it,” he explains. “You don’t want somebody on the other end of the radio or telling you some of the data that you don’t fully trust. It doesn’t help you when driving because you can’t focus on what you’re doing.”

Sheader underlines the effort both have put in to building that rapport. “It doesn’t just come to [Freddie]. He puts a lot of effort into building relationships and spending time with people away from the track, so they get the most from him and vice versa.

“That’s where he is mature beyond his years [which] I think says a lot about his family background and the huge impact that they’ve had in terms of them bringing him up well and in understanding how to work with people.

“I think that if you put Fred with almost anybody that was of a high calibre like Vincent, they’d find a way of just getting more from each other.”

While acknowledging the strength of the pair’s understanding, Rosin stresses that “the team behind him is not just his engineer, his mechanics, but everybody has their parts, and everybody has done a very good job.”

Within the garage, his team-mates and their engineers have had “their own part on the success of the team,” as Prema clinched the teams’ and rookies’ titles alongside Slater’s triumph.

For Boyd, it is his charge’s ability to assemble a “micro team” around him that has been crucial.

“Freddie’s very good at getting people working around him very well. A lot of drivers expect to turn up, and the team just put maximum effort into them, but the next level of athlete in this sport is very good at getting the people to work well with them and getting the people within the team to want to work for them.

“That’s where you find the extra little bit of performance,” he reckons, drawing a parallel between Slater “sweeping the floor or making the coffees” with the way Sebastian Vettel built a rapport internally by remembering details of his mechanics’ family lives, for example.

For Sheader, it is all part of maximising the percentages and eliminating any weaknesses. “Not to sound corny, but all the one percents add up.”

Slater has been a member of the ADD Management stable since stepping up from junior to senior karts.

“Mark [Berryman] and Fraz [Fraser Sheader] have been a massive part of my career so far. I wouldn’t be where I am today without them. That’s a million percent,” Slater says.

“When they approached me, I wasn’t too sure actually of what the benefits were going to be of having somebody like that around you. They put my focus on the right things. They don’t make me focus on things that aren’t in my control, things that I can’t change. My job is to go out there, drive as fast as possible and win the race or [take] pole position.”

With ADD taking care of business outside the cockpit, “it just lets me focus on my job more clearer.”

Sheader recalls that “we started conversations when he’d just stepped up to seniors. We’d obviously always followed Fred because he was a proper driver. He was serious. But there were definitely some bits in there that we thought needed to be polished, which is normal for any young driver.

“He bought in [to it], all of the people around him bought in,” he adds, and this allowed ADD to start working with and on Slater during his formative karting years.

“That year in seniors was arguably one of Fred’s biggest and best years because it brought with it a lot of frustration where he wasn’t doing the kind of winning and the dominating that he was doing before for all sorts of reasons, but it gave us the chance to sort of strip him back down to [analyse] where are the areas of opportunity and what can we do with him.

“He’s got this massive engine in terms of how far he’ll dig deep, how much pain he can put himself into, and how much resilience he’s got to keep on going on. And we really sort of found that out during that that senior year when the kit wasn’t at its best and he was struggling. From there we sort of earned his trust, so he started to understand the ADD philosophy and what we were about and how we go about doing what we’re doing.

“The journey sort of kicked off from there really. We were able to sort of start to mould him and get him into the place we wanted to get him, get him prepared nicely for Ginettas, and then get him nicely prepared for F4.”

His success has unsurprisingly prompted discussions of interest from F1 junior academies, but Slater does not feel the time is right to commit, hinting at a self-belief similar to the young Max Verstappen.

“My ADD management team are giving me enough tools that I need and I’m not really in contact with anybody. It’s not going to make me better now.

“I’m more focused on what I’m doing. There might be talk behind the scenes, but I don’t even know about it. So, it’s just full focus on winning.”

Slater believes that he has managed to hone his naturally aggressive style to the demands of a winged single-seater, and specifically managing the tyres.

“In karting, inputs are quite aggressive. It’s all going on a little bit. And my natural driving style is quite aggressive. I’m definitely not a calm driver when driving, I like to have it moving around. So, I really had to focus on that this year,” he explains.

“I’ve tuned my driving a little bit, my racecraft, etc. There were some key bits that made the championship harder than it should have been, because I think I could have done a better job in the middle part and it would have made it a little bit easier at the end, but then we managed to put it all together,” he explains.

“The F4 car doesn’t really like being forced too much. In the higher categories with a bit more downforce, maybe you can push a little bit more, but in F4 it really is about being as calm as possible and looking after the tyres, because the tyres don’t last more than two or three laps.

“I attack the track quite a lot. I attack the tyres a bit too much, probably take a bit too much life out of [them], so I think I’ve had to change my approach from karting and that’s been something I’ve focused on this year, which is something that’s quite obviously good for the future hopefully.”

He stresses that his aggression manifests itself in how he attacks the track rather than how he races his competitors. “I think I race pretty hard, but pretty clean, I would say, most of the time. Obviously, I made a bit of a mistake in Imola, but it’s more my driving styIe.”

The third pillar of Slater’s success is his close-knit and racing-obsessed family. Father Adrian runs the business founded by Slater’s grandparents, luxury bath and cosmetics products company Baylis & Harding together with sister Tania, Slater’s aunt. Slater may owe his racing genes and his favourite number 27 to his father, although Adrian jokes that his son’s competitive spirit has been inherited from his mother.

While he has raced himself, unlike many racing dads Adrian keeps himself in the background on race weekends, content to let the team and ADD get on with what they do best.

With the family business’s name displayed prominently on his car, it would be easy to see Slater as another kid backed by a wealthy father, but Sheader dismisses the suggestion forcefully.

“Looking at a top junior driver, it is simplistic and lazy just to ascribe their successes to having ‘loads of money’ or the good fortune to being ‘just really naturally gifted’ and [having come] out the womb super fast. We don’t really believe in that.

“95% of these kids now are well funded, whether it’s through the family, friends, a manufacturer or an F1 team. If you look at the F4 grid now, the top 20 have done serious test programmes, all comparable with each other in terms of total spend. [It is] how that [money] has been spent that differs and I like to think that’s where we do a different job to most people,” he argues.

“The kids that we see, like Lando or Freddie, just worked super hard and are very self-critical, constantly looking for more.”

The importance of preparation, of learning from every experience, of constantly seeking to improve, pepper Slater’s comments, with “prep” clearly being a recurring theme.

Interestingly, Boyd can see how Slater has “validated the prep in his own mind – he has prepped a lot for stuff before and been successful.”

“When you have had great success through prepping in your own mind, just ticking that off before each weekend is a big thing for him. It can be prep in the car on the way to the track in the morning, on the plane or even days before. It’s like a tick box for himself really.”

Sheader is hesitant to be drawn into comparisons with Norris at the same stage of his career, as they are “completely different characters, [with] different strengths” but does highlight their common work ethic.

“I really do believe that Fred’s clearly an exceptionally talented kid, and a lot of that groundwork was done before we got involved, but one thing is sure: he works as hard, if not a lot harder than 99.9% of the kids around him.

“Not to bang the same old drum, but he just has got a huge work rate in him and the harder you kick him, the more he comes for. Some drivers shy away from that, but he doesn’t, which is a huge asset,” Sheader adds.

As with all top talents, Slater is constantly analysing, questioning, and thinking about his driving.

“The ones that sparkle are the ones you never have to push. When you get back to the hotel they’re asking a thousand questions, and when you wake up in the morning there’s a message on your phone because they’ve thought about it that night. And they want to look at a bit more video and watch more races. It’s just relentless,” Sheader adds.

“Freddie is definitely one you don’t need to push. He comes with his own momentum.”

Where Slater has improved himself as he has matured from teenager to “young adult” is that he has a “much more open mind to things in terms of basic learning,” Boyd feels.

“He takes a lot of stuff on board, whether it’s on track, off track and I think as a sportsman, as an athlete, you have to be careful not to go down a too-fixed-mindset route. Every weekend is different; every situation is different. You’re racing different people every week and whether it’s track conditions, a different team structure or a different team may be stronger at one track, and [it is vital] to have the open mindset to always learn different things each weekend.”

Earlier this season, series commentator Ian Salvestrin was fulsome in his praise for Slater’s media savvy on the Formula Scout podcast celebrating 10 years of the Italian championship, but Sheader jokes that this is not something that ADD can take credit for.

“I don’t think he’s actually had any actual media training with us,” he laughs. “We just tell him not to be a plonker, to be honest.”

With similarities to what might be considered the ‘Williams school’, he admits that the ADD style allows little time for back-patting and self-congratulation. “There’s very little reflecting and there probably should be a bit more of it and we should probably go: “Fair play Fred, you’ve moved on a long way,” when all we’re ever doing is breaking his nuts!

“We never sit down on a Monday morning and go ‘Didn’t you do well at this?’ We just go: ‘That safety car restart wasn’t mint,’ or ‘we grained that front-left early in race two.’

“It’s the same with Lando,” he adds. “There’s a constant analysis of where you’re not good enough, what you need to be better at, whether it’s sleeping better, eating better, or understanding thermal deg or whatever it may be. There’s always something.”

Winning championships is about “how you deal with the [poor] weekends. Get a third rather than a fifth or whatever it might be. That’s where Fred really does do well because he very often goes forward on the first lap.

“When the car or he aren’t performing quite at their best, somehow, they still get a result out of it and that’s the difference, isn’t it?”

At home, Slater is “the oldest of five siblings. It’s quite chaotic but it’s quite fun,” he says.  And the environment provides stability. “It’s quite nice to have somebody there to come back to even if you’ve had a bad race. My family is super supportive.”

Alfie, two years his junior, has followed his older brother into European karting and Ginettas, while “six-year-old Bobby’s just started karting. So, you might see a few Slaters for a bit longer,” he jokes.

He admits that the family karting rivalry can get quite heated. “Alfie’s a bit of a hazard [on track] and he doesn’t really care. He’s kind of hunting for me whenever I’m out on track. When I was about 10 or 11, we used to do some testing together. My kart always came in a bit more bent than his. He smashed me out. We’ve had some good times.”

“Bobby and I were talking the other day and said: “Why don’t we have an F1 team? Me and you together. We’ve gotta have that happen.’ And I was like, ‘Mate, that’s a dream,’ [but] then obviously Alfie [thought] it would be quite cool to do F1 with us. Obviously, the dream would be to have three siblings in F1, but also to do something quite fun like a sports car race all together. There are some cool things that could happen in the future,” he says.

While an all-Slater F1 line-up or Le Mans entry might be on the bucket list for the distant future, in the shorter term the step up to Formula Regional Europe is already fixed for 2025, although we might also see the odd GB3 appearance when calendars permit.

Ironically, given Boyd is chatting with Formula Scout while sheltering from the Monza rain in the WSK hospitality, the consistency of weather was again a major factor in opting for Europe. “For me, it’s the temperature swing. You get a lot of higher temperatures in Europe, so tyre deg, stuff like that. You get a lot of peak in the tyre, which is something that you’ll take forward into F3. There’s a lot more learning from that than there is in the UK stuff.”

Though excited for the “opportunity to go for some more race wins and hopefully, more championships,” in truth, Slater himself says he would have been happy wherever he ended up racing.

“I just get told what I’m driving, and then I just try and drive as fast as possible. But I’d drive anything really!” he told Formula Scout during the season.

According to Sheader, Slater like Norris before him, “never asked what they’re doing or who they’re doing it with. They just go: ‘Just tell me where I need to be, and I’ll do my bit.’ People find that often hard to believe, but genuinely, I don’t think Fred’s ever asked what championship he’s going to be doing. He just rocks up and trusts that we’ve got his best interests at heart. He’s going to deliver wherever he goes,” says Sheader.

Obviously, Slater had not been short of options in Britain and Europe. He sampled the current iteration of GB3 during an impressive cameo appearance at Donington in September, while he got his first taste of FIA F3 in the post-season test at Jerez, running with Rodin Motorsport on both occasions.

Gaining experience across different categories is vital, says Boyd. “FREC is the main focus now, so try and get that kind of dialled in [but] we try to really do a lot of different bits to keep him adapting, keep him motivated and I think create some new challenges for him every time.

“He’s got the skill set to be pushed quite a lot and he wants more days in the car. He asks to do more stuff, which is the right way round really.”

Although Sheader concedes that the step straight to FIA F3, following the steps of Bearman and Lindblad, had “certainly been discussed,” he adds that it had never been “top of the list.”

And Slater himself is in no hurry to climb the ladder before he is fully ready, wanting to ensure he is “as prepped as I can [be]” when he gets to F1.

“There’s no point in rushing it because you don’t want to get to F2, have your shot, not be prepped and not have the tools in your pocket to deliver. The timing has to be right if you want to be into F1. A lot of people want to get [there] but I want to get into F1 and win.”

Not all drivers live up to the hype from their early years as they progress up the ladder, but with guidance from Prema and ADD, both entities that know what it takes to reach the top, a supportive family, the financial backing to move forward, and a personality and commitment that matches his speed, Slater has all the attributes to follow his predecessors as Italian F4 champions, and fresh F1 graduates, Ollie Bearman and Andrea Kimi Antonelli.