The 2023 Euroformula Open season will be one to forget for organisers GT Sport as its teams launch their winter preparations for 2024. Rarely is a junior series so impacted by events off track that they overshadow the action on it, but that was the case for Euroformula Open this year. The series also had to cope with dwindling grid numbers, making the issue of survival more difficult year on year.

By Juan Arroyo

The tale begins in late January, when the Pau Grand Prix was announced as a late replacement to Mugello in the season calendar. GT Sport’s CEO Jesús Pareja was “delighted” to be the “top series” in the 80th running of the Grand Prix de Pau. At the time, Pareja called Pau, together with Monaco and Macau, “the oldest and most prestigious urban track in the world”. He also thanked ACI Sport, Italy’s motorsport federation, for their understanding as they “stepped down” from the Mugello event, originally scheduled for late September.

Winter testing in Barcelona saw 10 entries present, a drop from 13 the previous year.

The lack of entries was partly driven by the departures of Drivex School and Van Amersfoort Racing, which consistently provided entries for years while numbers dwindled. In their place came Juju Noda’s family-run team, Noda Racing, and Paolo Brajnik’s NV Racing, which never officially raced the previous season despite appearing on the entry list one weekend.

Motopark, the dominant force in Euroformula, entered six cars in winter testing. The German team and its satellite CryptoTower Racing made up most of the names in the final points standings – many of them one-off drivers who had ongoing campaigns in other championships.  Among these were Super Formula Lights’ Enzo Trulli and FRECA’s Tim Tramnitz, the star drivers of the opening weekend in Portugal.

As Tramnitz, Francesco Simonazzi and Noel León shared wins in Portimão, a more significant story brewed in the background. The grand prix organisers in Pau had instituted a requirement that all competing cars run biofuels in an effort to make the weekend a low–carbon emissions event. The news arrived in the Euroformula Open paddock just two weeks prior to the event, which, as Alfredo Filippone of GT Sport explained, was not ample time to adapt the engines for the ‘greener’ fuels.

“We checked with engineers, with people from the oil industry and the engines if it was feasible, and it was not feasible in the time frame we had,” Filippone explained to Feeder Series in May. “It required changes to the engine and probably testing and there was not enough time for that.” Filippone also said at the time that green fuels were not part of the original agreement between Pau Grand Prix organisers and GT Sport.

Motopark team manager Timo Rumpfkeil also said that Pau Grand Prix organisers “were not able to provide the fuel for testing”. The series ultimately announced on 5 May that it was abandoning the Pau round, one week before the event was to take place.

Pau organisers responded to GT Sport’s withdrawal with legal threats in a strongly written press release published on 7 May.

“The lack of formal procedures; the silence in the last few days of GT Sport, which still displayed Pau on its calendar and official website as of 5 May; the use of a false pretext to justify at best an unprofessional and disrespectful attitude and at worst other lowly material considerations; and the simple observation of the low number of cars entered in the first round of their championship demonstrate in all regards the weakness of the promoter,” the statement read.

“The event was never in question despite this withdrawal, and cancelling the event would have been an offence to the six other engaged categories. But thinking we would just stand by with crossed arms and complain about this behaviour that leaves us orphaned from one of the most highly anticipated categories of the weekend is not our state of mind.”

Faced with a hole in their calendar, GT Sport made use of their relations with ACI Sport to reinsert Mugello into their schedule. The round, scheduled for late September, took the two-race format originally slated for Pau – serving as the replacement for Pau in the end. And so the first hurdle was cleared.

But it didn’t take long for the second hurdle to come into view. On the weekend it was supposed to be racing in Pau, Euroformula Open announced it would be switching tyre suppliers from Hankook to Pirelli “with immediate effect”. The cause, according to the press release issued by GT Sport, was a factory fire in Daejeon, South Korea, in March that severely disrupted Hankook’s production capacity.

Before being replaced for 2023, Michelin was the  championship’s long-standing tyre supplier. In 2021,he French company and Euroformula Open decided to increase the wheel size from 13 inches to 17 inches once a proposed update kit was installed on all Dallara 320 chassis for the 2023 season. However, they later discovered that the change in tyre size also required changes to the design of the car – an insurmountable hurdle in itself.

Instead, Euroformula Open eventually settled on Hankook as their supplier in March to preserve the 13-inch tyres before the Hankook fire necessitated another switch to Pirelli in May. For the latter agreement, GT Sport mentioned a “shared intention” to continue their partnership with Pirelli in the years to come.

From May onwards, the championship continued with relative normalcy. The low number of entries was disappointing, but the series found a new positive in the “pack racing” element it brought to the table, especially at circuits where slipstream was more effective. That close racing was still not enough to prevent Noel León of Motopark from dominating the championship.

On most weekends, León was the highest points scorer on the grid, with finishes inside the top five in every single race until the fourth round at Le Castellet. His Motopark teammates Bryce Aron, Cian Shields and Jakob Bergmeister, as well as BVM Racing’s Simonazzi, usually fought for the remaining podium spots.

Elsewhere in the pitlane, Juju Noda’s stint in the championship was a source of much public attention both positive and negative, primarily centering on the lighter minimum weight at which she and her car could compete.

Ahead of the season’s opening round at Portimão, GT Sport introduced an amendment to the weight rules that set the minimum weight for female-driven cars at 560 kg. Meanwhile, all other drivers had to adhere to a minimum weight of 580 kg.

At the next round at Spa-Francorchamps, the regular minimum weight defined in the regulations was raised to 586 kg, but the 560 kg minimum for female drivers remained in place for both the Spa and the Hungaroring rounds. Then, for the Le Castellet round, the minimum weight for female drivers was raised to be 15 kg lighter than their male counterparts, or at 571 kg.

Noda claimed her maiden victory in Euroformula Open in the first race of the Le Castellet round. The first-placed finish cemented her place in history as the first female winner across the championship’s 25-year history – a landmark achievement for the 17-year-old. The Japanese driver collected another podium in the third race to wrap up her best weekend yet in the series.

The weight rules remained untouched until 31 August, when the championship voided any of the prior clauses permitting a lower minimum weight for female drivers. The removal of the rule was first reported on 5 September, three days before the championship’s Red Bull Ring round was to get underway. On the evening of 6 September, Noda Racing announced its withdrawal from the Red Bull Ring round and pulled out of Euroformula Open altogether following the rescission of the rule, with Hideki Noda, Juju’s father and manager and Noda Racing team owner, claiming it had been effected without enough notice.

After the fireworks of the rulebook, the championship continued relatively quietly through the second half of its season. Charlie Wurz, Joshua Dufek and Levente Révész all abandoned their FRECA campaigns late in the year to join the championship, with Wurz and Dufek going to CryptoTower and Révész to Motopark. Additionally, Trulli made a one-off return with the Motopark satellite team at the season finale in Barcelona. By that point, though, León had already been crowned champion.

Bryce Aron, a challenger of León’s throughout the year, was not present in Barcelona; the American driver withdrew to take part in the annual Chris Griffis test for Indy NXT drivers. León, Simonazzi, Wurz and Dufek have all taken part in FIA F3 post-season testing since the finale.

As for Euroformula Open’s 2024 season, an official calendar was published in October, with a visit to Hockenheim added to the schedule in place of Mugello, and there has been no indication of any further upheaval with tyre suppliers. Still, questions about this and next year’s grid size continue to fuel doubts about the championship’s future. A major portion of this year’s entrants will be looking to move up to other Formula 3–level championships, thus vacating seats in Euroformula Open and leaving GT Sport with another hurdle to clear over the winter.

Header photo credit: Euroformula Open