R-P-M revises line-up for FREC finale, Deligny tops testing

Photo: FREC

R-ace GP’s Enzo Deligny topped pre-event testing for the Formula Regional European Championship’s final round at Monza on Thursday.

Four hours of running in the afternoon was scheduled, but instead testing ran for two hours-and-47 minutes with a delayed start due to heavy rain.

Prema’s Freddie Slater was the first to set a representative laptime 16 minutes in, with CL Motorsport’s Michael Belov beating him a minute later.

It took two more laps for Slater to reclaim top spot, and his 1m58.915s lap kept him ahead for 32 minutes before belov edged ahead by 0.185 seconds.

There was a flurry of improvements after that, and Trident’s Ruiqi Liu, Deligny and Slater all lowered the pace.

Van Amersfoort Racing’s Pedro Clerot was the first driver to lap in the 1m57s, but only spent 30s atop the timesheet before Slater laid down two benchmark laptimes in a row.

His later 1m57.616s effort took 23 minutes to beat, with ART Grand Prix’s Taito Kato the first to do so by 0.027s.

After three red flag stoppages earlier in the session, there was there was four more in the next hour and that contributed to Kato being the fastest driver until the last 20 minutes when Deligny set a 1m57.128s then made another big gain to 1m56.752s on the lap after.

Kato was shuffled down to fifth, as Slater got within 0.417s of title rival Deligny’s pace, VAR’s Dion Gowda went third fastest late on and Clerot improved to fourth.

Everyone outside of the top five was over a second off the pace, and there were 83 laptimes deleted due to track limits violations.

Race Performance Motorsport are running two new drivers this weekend, Tomass Stolcermanis and Jan Przyrowski, and they ended testing in seventh and 12th.

Stolcermanis, 18, has spent the past two years with Prema in Formula 4. He came fifth in E4, ninth in Italian F4 and 18th in F4 United Arab Emirates as a part-timer in 2024, then took his first single-seater win en route fourth in F4 Middle East’s standings this year.

Despite only doing two rounds he also came 11th in Italian F4, and last month made an E4 cameo with AKM Motorsport.

Przyrowski is one year younger but also has two years of F4 experience, both spent with Campos Racing. In 2024 he was 22nd in the Formula Winter Series as a part-timer and 10th in Spanish F4.

This year he was Spanish F4 Winter Championship runner-up, winning four of the nine races, and is contending to be runner-up in the main championship too. He has three victories so far, and there is one round left of the season.

After making his FREC debut with R-P-M last time out at Hockenheim, James Egozi will drive for Sainteloc Racing this weekend in preparation for contesting the FIA FRegional World Cup-awarding Macau Grand Prix with the team.

Test results