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Photo: IndyCar
IndyCar champion Alex Palou has revealed he will have his own team in the new Eurocup-3 series.
Palou Motorport will be run by his father Ramon, and based in Llinars del Valles which is 16 kilometres away from Barcelona’s Formula 1 track. The workshop will be set up from scratch, rather than buying into an existing team.
Eurocup-3 will use cars based around Tatuus’s Formula Regional tub but with different bodywork and tuned up engines to make them closer to Formula 3 on pace.
“We had a little surprise prepared!” the younger Palou posted on Twitter after the existence of his team was revealed.
Palou finished third in Euroformula as a 17-year-old car racing rookie in 2014, then moved across to GP3 with Campos Racing for two years. He picked up one win there, then switched to Japanese F3 and also stepped up to Formula V8 3.5 for 2017. His moved into the second tier of single-seaters proved productive, as he claimed a win and three poles from six races.
However he lacked the budget to stay at that level, and instead competed in European F3 in 2018, coming seventh in the championship. He returned to Japan a year later, going professional in SF and fighting for the title as a rookie.
A move to IndyCar then followed, with Palou claiming a podium on just his third start. He joined the crack Chip Ganassi Racing team for his second season and became champion, and was fifth in the standings last year. It looks likely that Palou will move to McLaren for 2024, as he is already one of the team’s Formula 1 reserve drivers.
Monaco Increase Management, the firm that guides Palou’s career, is involved in the new team and in the reveal announcement there was also ThreeBond Racing branding.
ThreeBond is a team which co-runs Drago Corse’s car in Super Formula, and previously competed in F3. It ran Palou to third in the Japanese championship in 2017, and before that competed in FIA European F3 in conjunction with T-Sport. Its relationship with Palou Motorsport is yet to be explained.
Palou is understood to have first considered creating a team to race in Spanish Formula 4, but settled on Eurocup-3 due to there being a higher chance of being competitive from the off as it is a new series.
Although only Palou Motorsport has formally been announced, Campos Racing and MP Motorsport are all all-but-confirmed to be racing in the series along with several other Spanish F4 teams. There are expectations within the series of a grid of up to 25 cars for the inaugural season.