Photo: MP Motorsport
MP Motorsport will run an unchanged driver line-up for the second F1 Academy season, and will be sponsored by a new initiative from Red Bull.
Hamda Al Qubaisi, her sister Amna and Emely de Heus came third, sixth and ninth respectively in F1 Academy last year, with Hamda taking four wins, three other podiums and two poles while Amna won two races and made the podium in two others. De Heus also took a victory and a second place in the all-female Formula 4-spec series.
Amna, the older of the two sisters, has been racing in F4 since 2018 and had an F4 United Arab Emirates Trophy pole and win to her name before arriving in F1 Academy. Hamda made her F4 debut in 2019 and alongside six F4 UAE wins also has an Italian F4 podium on her CV. The pair raced as team-mates in the 2022 Formula Regional Asian Championship season.
De Heus’s single-seater career began in Spanish F4 in 2021, and she scored a point in the all-female and FRegional-spec W Series in 2022.
“We will stick with the drivers whose talent we are familiar with – all three have already become true members of the MP Motorsport family in recent years,” MP’s team principal Sander Dorsman said about why the 2023 line-up was retained.
“Together, we look forward to a challenging new F1 Academy season in which we hope to repeat and further improve on our strong 2023 results. Hamda proved to be one of the title favourites while Amna and Emely each took their wins. And since we narrowly missed out on the teams’ title last year, we hope to go one better this year.”
The newly created Red Bull Academy Programme that will be sponsoring the trio is not a young driver development scheme like the long-running Red Bull Junior Team, but rather an industry-wide initiative to support women in motorsport. This includes backing engineers and pit stop crew members as well as drivers.