The Formula 3 paddock visits Melbourne’s Albert Park Circuit for the second time in the championship’s history this weekend, and many drivers on the grid will race on this track, and in Australia, for the first time. How are they preparing?

By Daniele Spadi

The high-speed Albert Park Circuit is composed of public roads southeast of downtown Melbourne, Australia. The race proved popular with the F2 and F3 grids last year even as drivers struggled with the circuit’s low margin for error.

In a media roundtable ahead of the weekend, several of F3’s 17 rookies emphasised the importance of building confidence lap after lap around the 5.278-kilometre, 14-turn circuit.

“ [Melbourne] is kind of a mix between a normal track and a street track,” MP Motorsport rookie Alex Dunne told Feeder Series. “In some seconds you’re close to the wall, and in other areas you have a bit more run-off like you would in a normal track.

“In FP [it will be important] just to build up to it. You’re not going to do a pole lap on the first push lap of FP, so just trying to build up to it is the best thing you can do.”

ART Grand Prix’s Laurens van Hoepen was of the same opinion, noting to Feeder Series the importance of “doing a good track walk to see how the track actually is in real life and then just building up from FP from the first lap, making sure you’re already close to all the reference points that you made before”. Each driver, he says, must “keep improving every lap to have a good data point and be ready for quali.”

Hard work on the simulator

Ahead of the weekend, drivers also prepared for their first taste of the circuit on the simulator.

“I think a big part of the preparation is the sim,” Dunne told Feeder Series. “I think it’s the same for every driver on the grid. There’ll be a lot of time spent on the sim, especially for the rookies when it’s a new track.”

Both Van Hoepen and Trident’s Sami Meguetounif echoed the Irish driver’s thoughts. “Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of time before quali in F3 and F2,” the Frenchman said, referencing the two series’ one 45-minute practice session per weekend. “So even if you are a  rookie, if you want to do the job in quali, you need to be straight away on pace in practice. And for that, I think sim is really useful.”

After a positive debut round in Bahrain that saw him qualify fourth and finish there in the feature race, Meguetounif went back to Trident’s base to prepare for the second round.

“We had two weeks [before Australia], but only two days after the race, I went straight away to the Trident workshop in Milan, and we didn’t stop working from that with a lot of sim. We drove a lot of laps and also quite a lot of race sims, and I really feel that it helped me,” the Trident driver added.

“We also [did] some prep outside of the sim with briefings and some analysis of what the team did last year. Obviously they won with Gabriel [Bortoleto, 2023 F3 champion], so that was only a great thing that we looked at. It worked well for me.”

Header photo credit: Diederik van der Laan / Dutch Photo Agency via Red Bull Content Pool