Felipe Drugovich has won the F2 championship – but does anyone care?

F1
- Last updated: September 10th 2022

Felipe Drugovich has won the F2 championship with composure and maturity – but is anyone in the F1 world paying attention?

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Felipe Drugovich is in a commanding position in the F2 championship, but appears to be attracting little F1 interest

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For some young drivers who shoot to F1 stardom, it seems all is laid before them.

Lewis Hamilton was given the best of the best machinery as he was guided up the ladder by McLaren, as were Charles Leclerc with Ferrari and George Russell with Mercedes.

Others, like Antonio Giovinazzi or Nicholas Latifi, arrive on the F1 grid due to their manufacturer association or the budget they bring.

This means that often their junior contemporaries – despite winning titles or achieving very high-level results – simply don’t get a fair shot.

More recent examples include Nyck de Vries (2019 F2 champion), Robert Schwartzman (2021 F2 runner-up), Callum Ilott (2021 F2 runner-up) Luca Giotto (2019 F2 third-place). Looking further back when this trend began to form, we can cite Bruno Junqueira (2000 F3000 champion) Sébastian Bourdais (2002 F3000 champion), Giorgio Pantano (2008 GP2 champion), and Davide Valsecchi (2012 GP2 champion) – drivers of prodigious ability who were given little-to-no chance in F1.

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Drugovich on his way to winning the 2022 Saudi Arabia F2 feature race

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For much of this season it has looked like the newly-crowned king of Formula 2, Felipe Drugovich, might sadly fall into the latter category.

The Brazilian had made a strong start and was driving with caution when he was taken out of the Monza sprint race today, but a non-score for nearest rival Theo Pourchaire meant Drugovich clinched the title.

Only recently, with the fallout from the Piastri/Gasly/Herta movements, have paddock murmurs emerged touting the Brazilian for the race seat vacancy at Alpine.

Prior to this he was rumoured to be in negotiations to take the reserve role at Aston Martin, but this is all late in the day for a driver which has lead F1’s main feeder series for much of the season.

Race-winning performances and consistency elsewhere brought the title to him – also helping drag a midfield team up by its bootstraps as he did so – but it appears few in F1 are interested.

“I think it’s probably because I’m not in a junior team,” he told Motor Sport when queried on the subject. “I think also because no one really expected me to fight for it – maybe this these two things?”

It’s a situation his team manager Jeremy Cotterill described as thus in F2’s new Chasing the Dream series, made partway through this season: “That, to my knowledge, he hasn’t been approached or snapped up by an F1 team amazes me.”

As well as showing speed, Drugovich has displayed dogged determination throughout his career in moments of adversity, but this looks like it could well be go unrewarded with a chance in grand prix racing.

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Drugovich has impressed with a midfield team – MP Motor Sports – not used to winning so frequently

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Drugovich arrived in F2 with the unfancied MP Motor Sports in 2020, on the back of an unremarkable season in FIA F3, but announced himself by winning the second race of the season in the F1 feeder category at the Red Bull Ring.

He followed this up with two more victories at Spa and Bahrain, earning him a move to a stronger team in UNI-Virtuosi for 2021 with the aim of kicking on for that year’s title.

It wasn’t to be though, as the Brazilian and his new team failed to gel.

“There was an expectation, given how strong we’d been with Callum [Ilott] the year before that he was going to come here and our package was going to help him to go fast,” says UNI-Virtuosi engineer Geoff Spear.

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“It’s very competitive this level, and it doesn’t take much to be off – and if you are, you can be well off.”

Once again the Brazilian proved himself in a difficult situation. Drugovich regrouped, returned to MP, and has been nothing short of scintillating in 2022. He’s won four races so far this season and leads the title fight by 21 points.

MP has never before won this many races with two drivers in a single season, never mind one, and the Brazilian has added consistency to his game also – since his four wins, which all came early this season, he finished outside the top five just twice in the proceeding ten races.

“One thing I changed massively is the approach and trying to be more consistent this year,” he says. “And for sure, it worked and helps. As soon as you have a baseline then you can build up and be better everyday.”

This strengthened his grip on the prospective title as the season came into its final stages, but does anyone care?

It speaks volumes about F1’s apparent awareness of Drugovich that he’s been mentioned in IndyCar broadcasts as a potential new driver on the scene, but barely at all in the world of grand prix racing.

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Celebrating Monaco feature race win this year

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Why is he being ignored in relative terms? The answer is difficult to ascertain, but does seem to some degree to be linked in trends and fashions in F1.

Grand prix racing is becoming ever more conservative in its driver choices, only going for drivers that have come up the European junior ladder. The idea of a driver coming into F1 from IndyCar or other disciplines used to be reasonably common place – now it’s treated as a novelty.

“It appears for even the best drivers that no F1 academy affiliation equals no chance”

However, for many blazing a trail up the junior ladder system, even that isn’t enough, as Drugovich appears to be showing. Unless you have a huge budget to accompany you, as was the case with Nikita Mazepin, Zhou Guanyu or Nicholas Latifi, drivers have to have to be part of an F1 team’s junior academy to be considered.

As Drugovich says, it appears for even the best young drivers that no F1 academy affiliation is equal to no chance, or at least very little. You might win F1’s main feeder series by 69 points, but racing’s top tier still isn’t interested (as far as the public is largely made aware).

Though it is of course a good thing that grand prix teams spot and fund young talent early, it makes it more difficult for drivers that develop later on, and that are therefore often successful in F1’s actual feeder series.

Of all F1 debutants from the last three years, most them have raced in the junior categories with the support of an academy or some form of relationship with a team. Examples include Zhou, Schumacher, Yuki Tsunoda, Lando Norris, Alex Albon, and George Russell.

The exception to this is if you bring considerable backing in the mould of Nikita Mazepin or Latifi. Drugovich’s family automotive parts firm sponsors his racing activities, but to what extent is not clear.

Nyck De Vries has a similar junior record to Drugovich, having won the F2 title at his third attempt, but while the Mercedes reserve has a prominent face in the F1 scene for years and is regularly linked with vacant seats, Drugovich is not the subject of the same speculation.

“There’s no reason why de Vries should be any closer to an F1 seat than Drugovich,” one F2 insider told Motor Sport.

“De Vries won his title against probably the weakest field since the series became F2 – and he’s 27.

“Drugovich is still just 22, but is probably overlooked because Russell, Leclerc and Piastri all won the championship at the first time of asking.”

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Will Drugovich get his F1 chance?

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If, as appears to be the case with Brazilian, you don’t come with huge amounts of sponsorship or aren’t linked with an F1 team, you’ve little chance of ever getting through the door.

The issue is compounded by limited testing and the longer careers of drivers such as Kimi Räikkönen and Fernando Alonso, which limits the seats that become available each year.

However, there could be more happening behind the scenes which we don’t know about, so perhaps Drugovich cause isn’t entirely lost.

Mick Schumacher was tipped to join Alfa Romeo in 2020, but eventually signed for Haas. F1 reality series Drive to Survive revealed that much had been going on behind the scenes to engineer Schumacher’s move to the American team, which wasn’t covered all that much by the press at the time.

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Will Drugovich join the list of F2 champions, like de Vries, left watching from the sidelines?

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It’s possible that a deal is quietly being worked on in the background that would add another twist to this year’s driver market.

At the very least, the Brazilian and Italian national of Austrian and Serbian descent would be a welcome addition to F1’s grid, which can appear homogenous.

And if he is given the chance to unleash his talent in grands prix, he can dream of being the first Brazilian to win an F1 championship in over 30 years. Austria last took a title with Niki Lauda, almost four decades ago. Italy hasn’t had a champion since Alberto Ascari in 1953, and Serbia has never had an F1 driver.

Drugovich’s entry into F1 would be significant on several levels but, to the bewilderment of many, it still looks a somewhat distant prospect at this point in time.

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