Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd
FIA Formula 3’s new car ran for the first time in pre-season testing at Barcelona, and generated mixed reactions.
The Dallara F3 2025 uses 16-inch tyres, while its predecessor ran 13-inch rims, and was designed to have reduced steering loads. After a first day of testing so busy “I didn’t jump out of the car”, Prema’s Noel Leon was “a bit tired” but elated.
“I think this new car will be good for racing,” he teased, calling it “faster in some corners” than the Dallara F3 2019.
ART Grand Prix’s Laurens van Hoepen believed through “medium and low-speed corners, the new car is quite similar” and “in the high-speed it’s quite a bit different” due to aerodynamic upgrades.
Rodin Motorsport’s Callum Voisin claimed “there are a few minute differences” meaning “it feels like a nice upgrade in general”. He said “you don’t feel the added weight so much, which is quite nice and overall balance-wise, it’s pretty similar to what it was before, maybe a little improvement” and emphasised with “all the internal bits” it “is very similar to” its predecessor.
After topping day two, Campos Racing’s Nikola Tsolov stated the opposite: “The car’s so different to the old one, you can’t even compare it. Everything you can think of feels different. We were expecting the car to be a bit slower, but in the end, it’s actually faster than the old one, even though it’s heavier, which is a positive thing to see. The way you drive it is different as well. The aero’s quite different, so that’s the main thing to learn. We’ve tried quite a lot of different things aero-wise, which is the area we have improved.
“We’re still looking forward to understanding a bit more about the new tyre, that’s the only thing touching the ground in the end, so it makes the biggest difference.”
MP Motorsport’s Tim Tramnitz said “the afternoon session on day two” can “give you at least a direction of where you are”, and called the car “a very big difference” in which “a lot’s coming from the tyres, because it seems like there’s a lot of grip in the corners”.
DAMS’ Niko Lacorte countered “technically there are some little differences”, and Van Amersfoort Racing’s Theophile Nael made the most of wet running for building understanding before the “very different” conditions of round one in Melbourne.
“[Larger tyres] is helpful for the degredation and the wet tyres, not something I thought about in the beginning. We can push a bit more with the tyres,” he added.
Jeremy Cotterill, MP’s team manager, summed up testing for his team as “no major issues, a few little hiccups, but nothing too stressful” and “I’d like to have been two seconds a lap quicker than we were, but I guess everybody is the same”.
His Campos counterpart Adrian Campos Jr was another claiming “everything is different”, and due to that “we need to have a new mentality for this new car, which is what we did”.