Despite having fewer resources compared to some other teams, R-ace GP has always done wonders with very few. Once again, the French team fights for both Drivers and Teams titles in FRECA and currently leads the standings at mid-season point. Feeder Series talked to R-ace Team Principal Thibaut de Mérindol about this first half of the season.

By Perceval Wolff

Ten races, six wins, twelve podiums, one driver (Martinius Stenshorne) leading the overall and the rookie standings, and another one (Tim Tramnitz) currently third overall. These are the main achievements of R-ace GP this year. The French team seems the only one able to challenge Prema Racing with more than one car.

Stenshorne: ‘A hidden talent under the radar’

Thibaut de Mérindol could surely not hide how proud he was of being one of the first ones to have trusted Martinius Stenshorne.

“We signed him very early last year, even before testing him. We had the opportunity to engage him in F4 UAE the year before and this boy blew my mind,” De Mérindol told Feeder Series. “I had the feeling he had the ability to extract the maximum of our package at every moment. He is undoubtedly one of the best drivers we have ever got if we talk about racecraft, race intelligence, attack, defense, aggressivity….

“That really blew me away. Unfortunately, we were not able to keep him for Italian F4 last year, because we couldn’t offer him guarantees on the performance of our package. It’s understandable. But as soon as I learnt he was planning to jump to FRECA, I knew he was the real deal. Everybody started following FRECA this year, looking after Antonelli and Câmara because they had dominated Italian F4, but I could see that Martinius was a hidden talent that went under the radar.

“It’s a half-surprise to see him performing. I knew he had the talent and the basics to do very well, but it would have been difficult to predict he would get to speed so quickly and so good.”

Tramnitz: Up to expectations, but…

De Mérindol did not hesitate to praise the performances of Tim Tramnitz as well. However, the gap between the German and his teammate who sits atop the standings is something he points out.

“Tim has had the level of performance we expected from him, but maybe a little less because we would like to see him at the level of Martinius or Antonelli, but there has been a little gap in the standings [35 points behind Stenshorne, e.n.]. But we know he can come back quickly because when we analyze the data, the numbers, there are very few differences between Martinius and Tim.

“He lost a lot of points by colliding with Martinius at Imola and with Haverkort in Hungary. That is mainly why he is behind in the standings, but he can totally come back in the fight. The circumstances made that Tim is a little behind where we expected him, but he has the pace, he has the performance.”

Zagazeta: A need to manage emotions

However, while Stenshorne and Tramnitz are fighting for wins and pole positions, the start of the season has been more difficult for Peru’s Matias Zagazeta, currently sitting in 17^th in the standings.

“With Matias, it’s harder, but we are putting as much efforts into Matias as we put into Martinius and Tim. Matias is capable of being very close to his teammates, to get two-tenths behind them which would allow him to enter into the top 10. But he has a problem for managing mental workload and emotions. He can lose his capacities very quickly, rather than finding solutions to the problem.

“We are trying to work with him on this, with a mental coach, about mental preparation, about what we can do to prepare him. When we manage to put him in a protected environment, without pressure, when he’s fine with the car, he can really be surprising, but for the moment, he is too inconsistent.”

Stay active while mourning

Unfortunately, this first half of the FRECA season has been marred by the death of one of its drivers, MP’s Dilano van’t Hoff at the second race of the Spa-Francorchamps meeting. The weekend after, all teams had to go racing at Mugello. How did the team and these very young drivers cope with the situation?

“Between Spa and Mugello, the plan for the whole team was several processes of preparation at our workshop at Fontenay-le-Comte,” De Mérindol explains. “These processes take around three days before each race weekend with debriefing, briefing, simulator sessions, etc. When we learnt that Dilano passed away, we talked to the drivers and their families to ask them what they wanted: stay active, prepare Mugello, etc. or take a moment for themselves at their home to think, discuss….

“It became quickly clear they wanted to stay active, to focus on what they had to do, on their targets, on their work rather than thinking, dwell on the past and maybe lose the meaning of what they were doing, of their life objectives.

“In this kind of situations, there are no bad or good answers. But we had this collective answer between the drivers, the engineers, the mechanics. We wanted to keep the meaning of what we were doing. We arrived at Mugello, without forgetting Spa, thinking about Dilano and MP, but still focusing on our target, on performance, on pole positions, wins and podiums.

“In this kind of situations, we all think about what the point is in all what we are doing. But we need to think that what we are doing today, it’s what allow engineers, mechanics, drivers to thrive in a passion job in which they are fulfilling themselves. Motorsport is not just about guys who do some laps around a track for fun, it is a life project for so many people.”

‘No number 1 car, no number 1 engineer, no number 1 driver’

Asked whether he would prefer the Drivers or the Teams title, Thibaut de Mérindol explained his thoughts on the topic.

“If it is to be Drivers champion and second best team, or Teams champion and second best driver with a fight until the final race, for me it’s the same. However, if we are Drivers champion but that we are nowhere in the Teams standings, it would mean we would have only performed with one single driver and that our two other drivers are lost and that’s what I want to avoid. I’d rather be P2 in both standings than this situation, to be honest.

“As a team manager, it is more representative of the value of our team, of the good quality of how our team works, of our capacity to adapt to all types of drivers, to extract the best of each one of them. I really prefer the homogeneity of our drivers’ results, it is really important, especially for the internal dynamics within the team.

“There is no number 1 car, no number 1 engineer, no number 1 driver. If we want to have a whole team pushing in the same direction, we must focus on everybody equally.”

‘A game-changer’ to enable progress in Italian F4

Alongside FRECA, R-ace GP is also engaged in another European championship with Italian F4. But unlike in FRECA, the French team has never been in contention for podiums in this series. These last few months, some progress has been noted with the R-ace cars fighting more and more often for points.

“Italian F4 is inherently a very difficult championship. Not because of the car, but because of what is around the championship. In FRECA, our only interlocutor is FRECA during the season. F4 asks much more resources on a logistic and organizational point of view. That is something we deeply underestimated when we arrived, we needed human resources we didn’t need in FRECA.

“As it is the first step of the single-seaters ladder, it is hard to have experienced engineers or mechanics. It’s hard to keep them in the F4 category more than two years, because it’s a difficult category with a lot of workload, and it’s not the most valuable category from the outside, as they would rather do like drivers and progress in the ladder and go to FRECA, F3, F2, etc.

“The championship is dominated by two-three teams, but unlike FRECA, it’s not regulated. Teams can take as many drivers as they want, and they can take six-eight drivers. As we are not part of these dominant teams, it’s more difficult for us to make our mark in the drivers market. I don’t criticize the domination of these teams, and I totally enjoy it in FRECA so that would be hypocritical from me. It is only logical. They make a better work than others. But the circumstances make it difficult for other teams to shake up the order.”

Though the difficulties of Italian F4 cannot be underestimated, R-ace GP has been using any resources they can to get an upper hand in the ACI-run championship.

“This year, we’ve got a real game-changer to enable us to progress. Hadrien David’s former race engineer in FRECA has accepted to become our F4 Team Manager. He is an experimented engineer, who has worked with WRT before us and is able to guide the team on the good path. The stability of our technical staff this year helps us to gain experience, to understand more and more how we can fetch more performance.”

Guided by performance-seeking

Despite fewer financial resources, R-ace GP is beating – or at least fighting – teams that have won everything from F2 to F4 for decades. What is the secret of R-ace?

“I don’t know (chuckles). I would say that our DNA is that all of our choices are guided by performance first. It is probably a basic answer that everyone would say but there is a gap between saying it and applying it without nearly any concessions. We are always trying to evolve, in our processes at the workshop, in engineering, in the financial management of the company, in the ways to become more efficient, etc. In the choice of drivers of course.

“One of our main assets in FRECA is the difficulty of diversification. Nearly all of my attention is directed towards FRECA, whereas it is probably not the case of teams engaged in F2 or FIA F3. That is also why we are conservative in our diversification. We could probably be running in other championships if we wanted. Pay an engagement, find drivers, every team can do it. But do it with the right determination, the right intensity to be able to perform, it’s much harder.

“If we want to think of other championships, we need to make sure we have a very strong structure behind, very strong human resources, with people that we can count on.”

R-ace GP will start the second half of its FRECA and Italian F4 season this weekend at the Circuit Paul Ricard in the south of France. The second part of the interview with Thibaut de Mérindol will tackle R-ace history as 20% of the current F1 grid has been through the team, as well as the French squad’s future projects.

Header photo credit: Sebastiaan Rozendaal / Dutch Photo Agency