Photo: Fotospeedy & Chinese F4
Motopark will run run six cars for the second round of the Euroformula season at Spa-Francorchamps this weekend, but its Japanese offshoot CryptoTower Racing Team will have a changed line-up.
Josh Mason will return to the series to drive the #21 car he campaigned last year, while reigning Chinese Formula 4 champion Gerrard Xie will race the #6 car at Spa and will be eligible for rookie classification honours.
Motopark has previously had to split its roster of cars in half, with three cars entered under its own name and three scoring points for CryptoTower.
But for the 2023 season opener at Algarve last month that changed, with there now being four full-time Motopark cars while the two CryptoTower entries compete on a part-time basis.
Tim Tramnitz and Enzo Trulli were at the wheel at Algarve, with Tramnitz taking an early points lead and Trulli winning a race, but neither are set to return.
Trulli’s priority is his Super Formula Lights campaign in Japan, while Tramnitz is ruled out of the next four Euroformula rounds due to clashes with his Formula Regional European Championship campaign as well as the fact that competing at Spa would have impacted his points eligibility when FREC races there later in the year.
Mason, 21, finished ninth in Euroformula two years ago with Double R Racing then switched to CryptoTower for 2022 and won three times en route to fifth in the standings. He started 2023 by racing in FRegional Oceania, where he came eighth in the points table with one win.
Xie is far less experienced, with the highest level he has raced at being GB3. He graduated to the British series, which sits between FRegional and F4, earlier this year with the Hitech GP-supported Hillspeed team and has a best finish of eighth from the first two rounds.
He dominated his home country’s F4 championship as a 15-year-old last year, winning 12 races out of 14 and claiming seven pole positions out of eight. One of his two races losses was the Macau Grand Prix, which he finished second in.
The karting graduate also dominated the Fomula Renault Super Challenge (the name of Asian FR’s successor series) to win two titles in his first year of car racing. His success also earned him a scholarship to race in FRegional Middle East for 2023, but he was unable to get a deal sorted in time before the season started to use it.