Photos: ACI Sport
Prema’s Slater was a dominant champion, but Bohra gained some compensation for US Racing in Euro 4
Freddie Slater began 2024 by winning the Formula 4 United Arab Emirates title, so came into the Italian F4 season pretty confident. It showed, with a dominant start at Misano where he won all three races from pole.
By season-end, only his disqualification at Imola on technical grounds prevented him from scoring 400 points, the maximum possible since the best 16 results from the 21-race campaign count in the championship standings. His 15 victories and 383 points broke Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s records from 2022, and his title-winning margin was the lastest ever too.
“Hopefully, it’ll be a record that lasts for quite a while, and it won’t be easy for future drivers to beat! Honestly, it’s been super special, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it,” he said after the final race.
Slater won at least once at each of the seven rounds, contributing to him leading exactly two-thirds of the season’s 324 race laps. This was despite missing race one at Paul Ricard too.
While 10 of his wins were crushing lights-to-flag domination, he also showed his ability to pull off a pass for the lead, with daring moves on Jack Beeton at Mugello and Akshay Bohra at Paul Ricard. With frequent safety car interruptions, he importantly regularly aced the restarts too, whether heading the field or following.
However, some of his moves did cross the boundary of permissible aggression, notably at the Red Bull Ring in September when he was given five-second penalties in successive races for his part in contact with an opponent.
Slater did not quite have it all his own way, with Van Amersfoort Racing’s Hiyu Yamakoshi and the US Racing duo of Beeton and Bohra pushing him hard.
Bohra took four poles, Yamakoshi started from first place three times at Imola and Beeton was on pole position twice, but they could only manage four wins between them.
Yamakoshi started strongest of the three and briefly had the points lead, albeit only for around six hours between races two and three at Imola following Slater’s disqualification from race one victory (which was accompanied by a 10-point deduction).
When Slater careered into Beeton in race two while chasing Yamakoshi, in what he summed up as “a bit of a shambles”, it looked as though his season was in danger of imploding. But he pulled it together, winning race three by “playing the long game” and pressurising Yamakoshi into a mistake. After winning the first two races, Yamakoshi finished 27th in the third.
Yamakoshi raced in French F4 and Spanish F4 as a car racing rookie, and this writer considers his 2024 Italian F4 switch as a breath of fresh air for the paddock as he impressed onlookers and VAR with his honesty, courtesy and teamwork. He admits he was undone by Slater’s strategy, referring to what he called his “chicken heart mentality not being enough for that pressure”. Losing concentration momentarily in the Variante Alta chicane, he “hit the board and lost the front wing and also got a puncture”.
“Yes, I made that mistake, but this is also a good experience for my future, so it was very special, very sweet,” he told Formula Scout. “Almost taking three wins was amazing,” he recalled, with the emotions from hearing the Japanese national anthem on the podium clearly still high.
Although Yamakoshi was third in all three races next time out at Vallelunga, noting that “I am quite strong in high temperatures”, thereafter his season gradually began to fall apart. He struggled for pace at Mugello and Paul Ricard mid-season, and went points-free at the Monza finale after qualifying outside the top 20, leading to him being pipped by Beeton to the championship runner-up spot.
Nevertheless, if he can continue his current rate of progress, he could surprise with VAR in Formula Regional Europe next year.
On balance, Beeton probably deserved to nick the runner-up spot, after a season of great consistency but only one victory at Barcelona, which he greeted with “a big sigh of relief!”.
He had come close at Mugello, leading Slater away from the restart before “mess[ing] it up, almost getting overtaken, and then I was overtaken two laps later”.
Looking back on his season at Monza, he told Formula Scout: “I started off slowly, but as the season’s come on, we found some form, the pace has been really good and I [was] able to get a win eventually.”
It was no more than the Australian deserved. He racked up eight runner-up spots, all but one of those in races won by Slater and including a mid-season run of five in seven races. Beeton had the edge on the rest of the field in qualifying too.
“Yeah, I’ve had a lot of podiums, unfortunately mostly P2,” he said with a wry smile. “But I’ll still take it. The pace has been just really strong. The car’s felt really good the whole year, just Misano in round one I struggled a bit. It wasn’t my best track, but since then I’ve just been determined to improve every session, looking at the data, comparing with my team-mates, obviously Akshay is also very fast so it’s good to be able to compare with him, see what I’m doing wrong and just keep improving.”
Bohra had the better of Beeton was first, with three podiums from the first five races. His only win came at Paul Ricard where he and his team were on top throughout, irrespective of Slater’s problems, and he topped both qualifying sessions.
His consolation came in the three-round Euro 4 championship as two wins in Mugello set him up nicely for a deserved title. Bohra steps up to FREC with R-ace GP, looking like a potential race winner.
US Racing had taken a storming 2023 Italian F4 title with Kacper Sztuka, after only losing one of the last nine races, and this year Gerhard Ungar’s team was a thorn in Prema’s side from the off. It regularly had three or even four cars at the front, testament to hard work during in-season tests where the team worked through “lots of different set-ups” according to Beeton.
Ungar conceded that his drivers had been “missing a bit of consistency maybe here and there, but all have been at one point competitive”.
“Yes and no,” replies Ungar when asked whether he was happy with the season. “If I would say we are unhappy, I think it would be wrong. For sure, you’re always targeting to win the championship. We won the Euro 4 but not the big one, the Italian.”
Alongside Beeton and Bohra were fellow F4 sophomores Gianmarco Pradel and Matheus Ferreira. Pradel took his maiden win in the final race at Monza, battling wheel-to-wheel with Slater until the safety car ended thire fun, while Ferreira ended his season two rounds early – having failed to live up to his early promise – and was replaced by Edu Robinson.
Of the rookies in the team, Maxim Rehm impressed the most, and was the top non-Prema driver in Italian F4’s rookie standings. He took a fine victory in the final Euro 4 race, which was also at Monza.
Over at Prema, Mercedes-AMG Formula 1 junior Alex Powell pipped Alpine-backed team-mate Kean Nakamura Berta to fifth in the standings to be Italian F4’s top rookie, but said that his sights had been on the main prize at the start of the year.
Powell was second in all three races at Misano, and runner-up twice in round three at Vallelunga, but he faded away mid-season before bouncing back at the end of the year to win in Euro 4 at Monza.
“Overall, it’s been a season full of highs and lows; we had some tough periods this year, but we managed to bounce back well. I’m really happy and proud of the work we did as a team, and of course, I’m thrilled to bring home the rookie championship,” he said.
Old karting rival Nakamura surprisingly took his time to really find his feet in Europe, having run Slater close for the F4 UAE title. A win at Paul Ricard seemed to unlock the door, and never finishing lower than fourth in the final five races helped him close the points gap to Powell. He was another who had success in the Euro 4 finale, taking a win and a pole.
Tomass Stolcermanis, the final member of Prema’s highly rated karting graduates, also showed plenty of pace on occasions but an average starting position of 9.8 in Italian F4 too often left him exposed to the midfield chaos.
With a full year in F4 with Prema already behind him, more results were expected from Rashid Al Dhaheri. He was consistent and made few mistakes but lacked the pace to win. The step up to FREC with Prema in 2025 may end up suiting his driving style more than the cut-and-thrust of F4.
Two drivers moved across from British F4 for their second year in the category: Dion Gowda at Prema and Gustav Jonsson at VAR. Both underwhelmed in Italy, with Gowda the least competitive of Prema’s full-timers by taking just two podiums, while Jonsson did make strong progress but had a disappointing start.
The Swede led for eight laps at Paul Ricard after surviving the opening laps using slicks on a damp surface before narrowly losing out to Nakamura for the win, the two running side-by-side through the run-off while battling, and he was unlucky to end up in the gravel while fighting Slater for second at the Red Bull Ring in Euro 4. By the end of the year, Jonsson was a match for Yamakoshi on pace.
With a massive 17 entries between them at each Italian round, the ‘big three’ teams unsurprisingly dominated both championships. They locked out the podium in all Italian F4 races, and Davide Larini (PHM Racing) and Ethan Ischer (Jenzer Motorsport) prevented a repeat in Euro 4 with one trophy each.
However, it was Ischer’s team-mate Reno Francot who was the best placed driver from the rest of the paddock in the Italian F4 standings. He had the edge for most of the season in the Jenzer camp and the speed to poke his nose into battles at the front regularly, but also had misfortune and made a few mistakes.
Enea Frey showed potential with two points finishes in France as the highlight of his rookie season with Jenzer.
Larini and Maximilian Popov showed flashes of pace for PHM. Popov scored some good results late on, although it was his team-mares’s surprise pole and second place in the Euro 4 finale which took the plaudits.
Further down the grid, expectations were high at R-ace with Enzo Yeh and Luka Sammalisto, but both struggled to break out of the tight and incident-filled midfield. Sammalisto had to miss three events after breaking three vertebrae at Mugello.
AKM Motorsport’s Emanuele Olivieri impressed on occasions, notably at Imola, and Kirill Kutskov scored on his Italian F4 debut for the ever-cheerful Maffi Racing at Monza despite missing practice with an engine issue, and should return for a full season in 2025 if he can pull together the budget.
Possibly the most remarkable performance came from Romanian newcomers Real Racing and Luca Viisoreanu, who qualified fourth and then ran in a strong third in one of Euro 4’s Monza races.
ART Grand Prix’s F1 Academy squad cameod there, while Hitech GP appeared at the Red Bull Ring. The first British team to join the series, its weekend was perhaps most notable for the single-seater debut of 2021 Italian F4 champion and Formula 1 driver Ollie Bearman’s younger brother Thomas.
The Italian championship remains the pinnacle for F4, despite the category’s growth in Britain and Spain, but the sheer number of talents it attractes makes it a victim of its own success at times.
Grids of close to 40 cars inevitably mean lengthy safety car periods and even red flags, meaning there is often very little actual racing. And the wide-open spaces and run-off needed by circuits such as Monza to host F1 mean there is maybe too much temptation for inexperienced drivers to take too many risks.
While Slater comfortably led the most laps, the safety car was a clear second in the rankings – on track for a total of 95 laps. The nadir came in the Monza finale with only two green-flag laps and the season appropiately ending behind the safety car.
Andreas Jenzer was one of many team bosses to voice their criticism. “We are always behind the safety car, it is not racing any more. We need to do something about the quality of driving,” he said then.
The Euro 4 races were not blighted to quite the same degree; maybe because of the smaller fields or perhaps because there is not quite so much at stake. Ungar expressed the dilemma facing organisers face in improving the racing.
“This is a good question. On the one hand, I don’t like this big field, because I think it would be nice to race not having these red flags and safety cars. Maybe 25 cars would be ideal,” he said to Formula Scout.
“But on the other hand, I’m also for an open championship, [where] everybody can come, which I don’t like in Formula 3 and Formula 2, to be honest, because it’s closed. No one can come, more or less; not like 40 or 50 years ago [when] you could even buy an F1 [car] and go. So that’s why I don’t want to complain about too many cars. You cannot have both.”