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How To Become Formula One’s Next Big Star

Peter Orosz

Before he becomes a globe-trotting racing god, the modern Formula One driver competes in GP2. It’s a racing series removed from the madness and attention, created to breed talent for the ultimate challenge of F1. We spent a Grand Prix weekend in GP2 to see the lives of Formula One’s future stars.

Interludes of Cacophony

In the summer heat of Central Europe, in the thrum of a racing weekend, it is cool and hushed in Sauber’s garage. On my left is the Formula One racing car of Kamui Kobayashi, the Japanese driver who debuted in F1 with a swashbuckling, overtaking bang on the afternoon Jenson Button won the 2009 world championship in Brazil. Barely an hour after qualifying for the 2012 Hungarian Grand Prix, the car, a Byzantine assembly of pipes, tubes, bottles, gold foil and carbon fiber, is in a myriad pieces, which is the way most racing cars spend most of their time. Mechanics tune away on the exposed bits in no great hurry. On my right is Ines Koschutnig, the general manager of Racing Engineering, a Spanish motorsport team who compete in GP2, and now it’s not quiet anymore.

It’s a screaming, devastating fury of GP2 racing cars out there, the wail of 24 4-liter V8’s reverberating off the roof of the grandstand above the Hungaroring’s start-finish straight, the plexiglass panes separating the track from the pit lane shaking violently, like willows in a sonic boom, and there’s a great cloud of dust above the track, glittering and whirling in the hot sun. Ines is unperturbed. She’s wearing the Racing Engineering summer uniform of red shirt and black shorts, black sunglasses, she’s looking at four screens at the same time, and then, two seconds later, it is quiet again.
Her cars are out there, racing.

In the back of the garage is a rack with a dozen pneumatic wheel guns and there’s a Sauber mechanic who does nothing for the entire duration of the 38 lap GP2 race but polish them to gleaming perfection. Sauber’s is a white world with a dash of black and a sprinkle of red. They’re Swiss. The floor of the garage is space station white. It is a relief to see the occasional skid mark here and there.
Ninety seconds or so later, the field blasts by again, the sound not quite as violent and compressed as before because the cars had dispersed a bit. Over the laps, the field will spread out. The boundaries between silence and noise will blur.
The fabulously named Johnny Amadeus Cecotto Jr., son of retired Venezuelan racing driver Johnny Cecotto and winner of the previous GP2 race in Germany, a week before, crashes his Barwa Addax car into the tire wall. It’s a violent crash made disconcerting and eerie by the complete silence it happens in. It’s very real but even though we’re within walking distance of the accident site, we see it on a screen and we know nothing about Cecotto until he removes his steering wheel and emerges from the cockpit, unhurt. Later, in the paddock, I will see the remains of his car’s nose cone discarded on the floor of the Barwa Addax garage, a twisted mess of carbon fiber. When broken, you can see carbon fiber for what it really is, fabric soaked in resin, then baked in an oven. The nose cone looks like a pair of old jeans.

The Racing Engineering cars come in for their pit stops. The stops may not be as fast as McLaren’s recent 2.3-second world record but the human mind is not a stopwatch and what the pit crew does looks athletic and fluid and impossibly fast, like an East African marathoner at full throttle. The new wheels are placed on aluminum stands to position them at just the right angle. The car comes in, the driver gliding it to a stop with sub-inch precision. The old wheels come off. With the same movement, the mechanics grab the new wheels, the nuts already inserted, and wheelgun them into place. They signal with their hands. The driver then takes off, a shrieking, sliding, violent exit from a confined space. It’s all over.

Then, suddenly, the race is all over, too. It begins in cacophony and ends in silence. The Racing Engineering cars finish 7th and 9th. Ines and I leave the Sauber garage. Out there, in the heat and the dust, a blond British boy born in the 1990s just won his first serious motor race.

The Road to Formula One

“The realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very small.”
— David Foster Wallace: “The String Theory”, Esquire, July 1996

The Hungaroring is shaped like a eukaryotic cell undergoing cytokinesis, with turns 2 and 12 forming the cleavage furrow. Sandwiched between these turns, on a flat rectangle of asphalt normally occupied by a parking lot and a go-kart circuit, is a swarm of transport trucks, tarps and makeshift garages making up the GP2 paddock during the Grand Prix weekend. It is a microcosm of Formula One, and if you stand in the middle and look southwest, towards the start-finish straight, you will see Formula One’s gleaming, gigantic motor homes, like so many castles in the sky, floating above the GP2 paddock. There is a symbolism to the geography. The reason to be in GP2 is to aspire to drive a Formula One car one day.

Formed in 2005, the GP2 series took over Formula 3000, which had itself taken over Formula Two, as the last step for a driver on his way to Formula One. The vast majority of the current crop of young talent in Formula One has graduated from GP2. Lewis Hamilton, Nico Rosberg, Sergio Pérez, Bruno Senna, Kamui Kobayashi, Pastor Maldonado, Romain Grosjean—the only name missing is Sebastian Vettel, who came straight from the Renault World Series. Driving in GP2 is not a career in itself, it is a stepping stone: If you win the championship, you cannot race in GP2 again.
The path to Formula One is, of course, not straightforward. While there are informal alliances between F1 teams and GP2 teams—Racing Engineering, for instance, is friendly with Sauber—there is no equivalent of a yearly draft. Formula One is a secretive, complicated, devious business, and deals are struck individually. Talent by itself is not enough. There’s also been a heavy influx of rookies to Formula One over the past few years, limiting the number of seats likely to come on the market in the coming years.

Compared to the hundreds of people who man a Formula One team, a GP2 team is almost a family business. Racing Engineering, for instance, has less than two dozen people working for it, and that includes the drivers. What makes this possible is that, unlike in Formula One, the teams don’t build their own cars but buy them from the series, who also handle repairs and upgrades. The teams are responsible for setting up the cars and racing them.
To the untrained eye, a GP2 car would probably pass for an F1 car. They are, in fact, the fastest things around a track after F1 cars and IndyCars. The current chassis are carbon fiber monocoques manufactured by Dallara, powered by a 612-hp, 4-liter Renault V8 rev-limited to 10,000 rpm, and raced on the same capricious Pirelli compounds used in Formula One. They are, to put it mildly, crazy fast.

The GP2 season is a little over half as long as the Formula One season and most of its races are twinned with F1 as support events for the Grands Prix. To complicate things a bit, there are two races each weekend. After a 30-minute practice and a 30-minute qualifying session on Friday, the first race is run on Saturday afternoon. It’s called the feature race and it’s structured like a shorter Formula One race: 180 kilometers, at least one pit stop, the same points system.
This is where things get tricky. There’s a second race on Sunday morning, called the sprint race. The grid is determined by the results of the Saturday feature race, with a twist: the first eight finishers are ordered upside-down, and a shorter race with no pitstop for ⅔ the points is then run. This is why Racing Engineering’s Fabio Leimer was so unhappy with his 9th place finish on Saturday, which Ines and I watched from the Sauber garage. A single overtake would have put him on pole position for Sunday, which, in turn, would have paved the way for victory on the Hungaroring, where overtaking in the dry is notoriously hard. And this is also why Nathanaël Berthon, the team’s other driver, was happy with 7th: it put him on the front row for the 120-kilometer sprint race, where he finished second.
In all, it’s a smaller, cozier, less crazy Formula One, with the focus on the drivers, not the cars. “We’re here to promote the drivers,” Alexa Quintin, GP2’s head of communications, tells me after Sunday’s sprint race. She’d worked for the Renault F1 team in the past and when she talks about GP2, she sighs with obvious relief.