One year ago today, Dilano van ’t Hoff lost his life at age 18 following a crash in a Formula Regional Europe race. In a series of conversations with Feeder Series over the past year, those lucky enough to have known him pay tribute to a driver taken from us too soon.

By Michael McClure

When I ask those who knew Dilano van ’t Hoff to describe him to me, a few phrases recur in their responses. He was, in sum, a character – a joker and a fighter with a cheeky smile who was determined to do his best in motorsport, on his own terms.

The usually laconic Van ’t Hoff kept much to himself in the paddock, but his desire to be a champion was well known.

He achieved that goal in both karting and single-seaters. Winning the Dutch championship in the Mini class in 2016 helped him make a name for himself ahead of his full-time switch to international karting. Five years later, his dominant title win in Spanish Formula 4 in 2021 off the back of a narrow loss in the winter in F4 UAE set him out as a driver to watch on his ascent up the junior single-seater ladder – an ascent cut tragically short on 1 July 2023 while racing at the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium.

The year before his passing was marked by great adversity. Surgery to fix a broken collarbone forced him to miss three rounds of the 2022 FR Europe season in June and July, and the subsequent surgery he had in January 2023 to address complications to his shoulder from the original procedure kept him away from the car over the winter, when many of his rivals gained mileage in the Middle East.

Winning championships may have been impossible under those circumstances, but Van ’t Hoff could be proud of himself for doing his best to persevere regardless. Despite significant physical pain, he took a podium at Barcelona after his mid-season return from injury and scored three more points finishes in the series before his death.

Those results, and the 19th- and 23rd-place finishes he achieved in the standings in 2022 and 2023 respectively, hardly highlight the potential he had, says Frank Coekaerts, his engineer at MP Motorsport in FR Europe. 

“I regret that we never have been able to see his true potential. I would love him to know that,” he says.

“I think I have an even bigger need for that than Dilano himself, because Dilano was convinced of this. I just want the rest of the paddock to know how good this guy was, and that is never shown.”

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Dilano van ’t Hoff was born 26 July 2004 in Dordrecht, a city to the southeast of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, as the only son and second child of Alex van ’t Hoff and Esther Schuller. Racing was a family endeavour for the Van ’t Hoff family; Alex competed in endurance and GT racing events domestically and internationally, including in 24-hour races at Dubai, Zolder and the Circuit of The Americas.

The young Van ’t Hoff liked cars from his earliest days and spent time growing up around the family’s horses, but it wasn’t until another driver’s withdrawal – and Van ’t Hoff’s insistence on substituting for him – from a local race contested by his stepbrother that the youngster’s racing dreams took flight. Regular visits to Strijen, a kart track just south of Rotterdam, followed.

There he met the people who would become his racing rivals throughout his childhood, including current F1 Academy driver Emely de Heus, who first met Van ’t Hoff in 2012 at Strijen. De Heus’ father, Bert de Heus, had raced on the same circuits as Alex van ’t Hoff in the 24H Series and the Dutch Supercar Challenge. After getting their licences for club karting, their kids would soon spark a years-long friendship – and rivalry – of their own.

“In Holland, we karted only against each other at the club races near our home. We did it more for fun than for competition,” De Heus says. “In the juniors, the championship was him and me and another guy. So one time we were good friends, and then the other time we didn’t like each other because either he was in front of me or I was in front of him. The championship was always about him or me and also another guy.”

In 2015, for instance, De Heus pipped Van ’t Hoff to fifth place by one point in the Mini juniors class of the Dutch Karting Championship. The next month they were in Las Vegas for the SuperKarts! USA Supernationals, until then the biggest races of their careers, enjoying downtime together. 

“I remember in Las Vegas, we went outside of the karting. We went to the Cirque de Soleil,” she says. “His dad was a bit angry at us because we didn’t stop talking in the show. That was a funny memory. And we just kept talking about the races instead of looking at what was going on in the show.”

Floris van der Est also met Van ’t Hoff at Strijen, about 15 to 20 minutes away from his childhood home. “We always said in Dutch, Op Strijen leert rijden. It means on Strijen, you learn to drive the go-karts as good as possible because every corner is there,” van der Est says.

Van ’t Hoff, it seemed, had already mastered the skills, but he wasn’t giving anyone else the secrets.

“The first time I met him, it was a friend of mine and a friend of his who introduced us to each other,” Van der Est recalls. “I had seen him a couple of times and he was driving the Mini go-karts, 60 cc, and I was driving junior. And I saw him – he was really fast – and he was on his own. You got along with him, but he was not always talking to somebody else. It was hard to really know him. And after I think two, three weeks, we became friends on the circuit. And after that we became good friends. And later on we became friends not on the circuit, also in our normal lives.

“I saw him after driving. We had a race weekend. On Friday we were driving and on the Friday night we were also gaming online. We were racing online,” he says.

“We were always playing a Formula One game. I think it was F1 2017. Or we are playing Assetto Corsa or some other game, but always we are on FaceTime. And we are laughing at each other for 30 minutes, and go back racing. He said something, a joke or something, or I was joking, and it was always funny. And sometimes when we don’t race in the weekends, we were still gaming, and we were gaming all the night long until two in the morning,” he continues.

“Most of the time he was at home, I was at home. We were all in our own homes. Sometimes he came to my house to play the game. Sometimes I have a new thing for my race simulator, or he had some new stuff and I was going to him. And in the summer, a couple times, we would go swimming at his father’s home.”

In 2017, when he was still racing primarily in the Netherlands, Van der Est and Van ’t Hoff saw a lot of each other. For 2018, Van der Est and Van ’t Hoff wanted to drive for the same team, but even after enlisting the help of current IndyCar driver Rinus van Kalmthout – known professionally as Rinus VeeKay – and his father, it never worked out.

Van ’t Hoff, already a national champion in the Mini class, had other, arguably bigger plans.

After a couple of entries in WSK events in Italy and IAME events in France as well as a third-place finish in the 2016 Supernationals, Van ’t Hoff committed to the international scene in 2018 in junior karting. His results that year – third in the IAME Euro Series with Fusion Motorsport and sixth with a win in the FIA Karting European Championship with Forza Racing – burnished his reputation, and it was while at these teams that he picked up his distinctively English accent.

Commentator Chris McCarthy, whose voice had accompanied Van ’t Hoff’s career since the late 2010s, felt that his talent was already being recognised from his performances on the national scale.

“He was getting those seats because he was a very talented person. He had a presence about him on the circuit,” McCarthy recalls. “He was an aggressive driver, but in a good way. You can tell he was there to win. He wasn’t there to make up the numbers. Even just as a kid, I got that impression from him. Very nice kid, a bit of a joker as well. He’s a really funny character.

“I had some really funny interviews with him. Part of my job when I did the FIA championships was to go out, leave the commentary box, go out on the drivers’ parade and speak to drivers. And I had a couple of really funny ones with him. He was a character,” he continues. “I always really enjoyed speaking to him, with a microphone or not. As a kid, he was very mature.”

One of those memorable races was the 2018 IAME International finals at Le Mans, where Van ’t Hoff finished third, ahead of the likes of Taylor Barnard, Alex Dunne and Isack Hadjar.

“There were 130 drivers on that grid and he was front row for the final, which was incredible. And then he was leading the race at points. He was trying, he did some moves around the outside at Turn 2 which just shouldn’t have been on, but he was doing them.”

As Van ‘t Hoff karted internationally in 2019 and 2020, his onetime rivals back in the Netherlands saw him less frequently. Van der Est, who called time on his karting career in 2020 to focus on kickboxing, still kept up with his progress, and sometimes they would still practise at Strijen together, albeit usually in different classes of karts.

One day, the usually individualistic Van ’t Hoff was happy to have a helping hand.

“I have to push him, push him to start his own. He was driving away, and 100 metres, 200 metres later, his engine stopped. So we have to push him on his own, and he falls over his kart and we’re laughing really hard,” he says. “It was on a normal Saturday. We are both driving. Strijen is a hard circuit. You can drive a lot of laps, and you train your condition in the kart a lot there.

Then Van ’t Hoff got back on his kart and set, perhaps unsurprisingly, a “really fast” time at the circuit where he grew up.

On one occasion, Van der Est was faster.

“I have a good memory in 2019, we were going to race indoors. He was going with his helmet on the scooter, then me on my Vespa. It’s a blue licence plate. So you don’t have to put a helmet on here in the Netherlands back then, but we were with this kart helmet on the driving. And that was the first and the last time I beat him in the kart. I was, I think, three tenths faster than him. It’s the only time I won.”

Van ’t Hoff was a strong but not invincible opponent in senior karting internationally. He finished fifth in the WSK Euro Series, fifth in the FIA European karting championship, and fourth in the WSK Open Cup in addition to winning the Trofeo delle Industrie, the oldest kart race in the world, in November. In a 2020 marred by the COVID-19 pandemic globally and illness and crashes personally, Van ’t Hoff still finished 10th in the WSK Euro Series and fourth in the new Champions of the Future series as well as 14th in the world championship round, his best placement in that event.

“I was always looking online to his races, watching the live timing and all. I wanted always to know what Dilano was doing, what he was driving. I know in 2019, he was always winning or in the top three. After that, something happened and he was driving a little bit slower. After I think two, three months, he was going really fast and he was almost the world champion.

“Unfortunately, he never got to be a real world champion with OK senior, but he was always close. He was always giving it a full 100%.”

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Van ’t Hoff knew by 2020 that his karting days were coming to an end. The next step from the OK class would be junior single-seaters, beginning with F4 UAE over the winter. He burst onto that scene with a stellar rookie campaign at Xcel Motorsport, and while he missed out on the title by just one point to Enzo Trulli, he took a series-high five wins and 13 poles from 15.

Van ’t Hoff was not, of course, a total newcomer to driving F4 cars. When he completed his first F4 tests in 2020, De Heus was there with him.

“My dad was a good friend of Alex,” De Heus says. “So that’s why I knew what he was doing with karting, and he knew, I think, what I did. And I did my first F4 test with MP and my dad told his dad, and then we went together to Zandvoort and it was his first test. We did that together.”

Eventually, both Van ’t Hoff and De Heus signed for MP for the 2021 Spanish F4 season. They put their rivalry behind them and grew closer again.

“The first test for the F4 Spanish was in Barcelona. We didn’t talk a lot yet. So we sat next to each other in the aeroplane and it was a bit awkward because we didn’t know what to do. The last time we saw each other, we were fighting on the karting track.

“But then, he started to show some funny videos on his phone and we started talking. And then we were friends again.

“In the beginning of the season, he didn’t really talk a lot to his teammates, but like halfway through the season, he was just laughing with everyone and playing football outside racing, just before the race.”

That period of increased openness coincided with Van ‘t Hoff’s rise in performance.

“In the beginning of the season, he was already fast,” she says. “In the races, you start to show it and then in the training, you can be fast, but you never know what everyone else is doing. So I think that also helped him.

“But he’s the kind of guy that first, you want to know how everyone is, then you start talking to everyone. He can be really closed off and then everybody thinks of it like, ‘Oh, who is this guy? And why doesn’t he talk?’ But he is always walking with his AirPods in.

“Then he just starts talking. He just starts talking to make a joke, and then he sees people laughing and then he keeps making jokes and that’s how he talks to people,” De Heus continues.

“You make jokes about the most stupid things. I didn’t speak English that good in the first year of F4. Then he kept making fun of me and how I spoke English. So a bit like that, making fun of people in a funny way.”

By the time the paddock reached Jerez, Van ’t Hoff had a sizable lead of 93 points over nearest rival Sebastian Øgaard. The Dutchman wrapped up the title that weekend in a shortened race three having taken the rookie championship with pole position that morning. 

Van ’t Hoff, De Heus and some of their teammates at MP had some extra time that weekend.

“In Jerez, there was a swimming pool and nobody was at the hotel, so we just went swimming because otherwise we needed to wait five hours before dinner with the team. I still remember that. And I remember with Richard Verschoor and Rik Koen, we went in a rental car, but nobody was really allowed to drive a rental car in Spain. So we went drifting on the roundabout and went to the McDonald’s because we didn’t like the dinner. And then we went back to the hotel,” she says.

“He loved McDonald’s. Sometimes he just ordered with Uber Eats and then we just got McDonald’s because we were not allowed to drive the rental car yet.”

Van ’t Hoff ended his Spanish F4 campaign in Barcelona with 10 wins, 13 poles and 16 total podiums – as well as many new memories.

“The F4 after party, I think it was after the last race, we did dinner with all the drivers and the teams. There was a party after it, and he was dancing with everyone and having fun with everyone,” De Heus says. “It was a really funny evening.”

While excelling in F4, Van ’t Hoff was already preparing for a full-time step up to Formula Regional competition in 2022. At the tail end of 2021, he entered three rounds in FR Europe as a guest driver in a fourth MP car alongside Franco Colapinto, Kas Haverkort and Oliver Goethe.

That came ahead of his 2022 FR Asia campaign with Pinnacle Motorsport, where he lined up alongside Spanish F4 title rival Pepe Martí, single-seater newcomer Ayato Iwasaki and Le Mans class winner Salih Yoluç. Despite missing the opening round after contracting COVID-19, Van ’t Hoff took 51 points that season, highlighted by a pole position in Dubai that he converted into his sole podium of the campaign with third place.

Diederik Kinds, a longtime race engineer at MP Motorsport, worked directly with Van ’t Hoff at Pinnacle in FR Asia and witnessed his campaigns in FR Europe from up close while engineering MP teammate Sami Meguetounif. He says of Van ’t Hoff that “if you didn’t work with him directly, he was a very distant guy” – a façade he used to his particular advantage in the second round of the season in Dubai.

“He still saw everybody as a competitor, as somebody to beat,” Kinds recalls. “I remember a story from the Middle East where [Gabriel] Bortoleto hit him. Took him out of the race. And Bortoleto, standout guy, honest guy, nice guy as well – he’s very friendly. He came over to the pit box and said, ‘Is Dilano here? Because I want to apologise.’ I said, ‘I’ll get him.’

“So I walked around the panels. Dilano’s sitting there. I said, ‘Bortoleto’s here. He wants to apologise.’

“And Dilano said, ‘No, mate. No.’

“So, I go back to Bortoleto. I said, ‘Can you come back later? Because—’ ‘Yeah, I’ll come back later.’

“So, one hour later, Bortoleto’s back. I go to Dilano again, and Dilano said, ‘No, no, no. I don’t want to see that guy.’

“I said, ‘Mate, he keeps coming and he will keep coming, so please deal with it. He just wants to apologise. That’s it.’

“So he gets up, walks out of the pit box and hardly looks at Bortoleto.

“He says, ‘Come with me.’

“So they walk out the back of the paddock, and I see Dilano making some gestures… [gesticulates] and turns around, leaving a shocked Bortoleto or something.

“And, well, he said something like, ‘Yeah, I saw him apologise, but I told him to get stuffed.’

“And the next day, what happens is Dilano is behind Bortoleto. And Dilano makes the smallest of moves, and Bortoleto just opens the door completely. Dilano is behind, and he just opens the door. So that’s what he achieved.

“He wouldn’t be mates with everybody. He will make sure that he’s a competitor, they see him as a competitor. That was the whole point of it.”

“But in acts like that, when you saw him,” Coekaerts interjects, “you would think he was 40 years old.

“Remember the Barcelona thing in the paddock? It was an incident with [Axel] Gnos. Gnos and Sami. We park up in the parc fermé, and Sami’s all fucking Marseille out of the car. And he’s [shouting] in his face and wants to open the visor of the guy and all the rest of it. And it’s filmed from the camera of Dilano’s car. He stops behind it.

“And Dilano unbuckles, gets out of the car, but doesn’t rush, doesn’t run or anything. But his whole body language, he walks over like, ‘The kids. The kids are at it again.’

“He grabs Sami by the shoulder, spins him around on his heels and says, ‘The FIA guy is here’, and just drags him away. It’s like 40 compared to the kids. Fucking brilliant. And it was all on film because his camera is still running.”

Coekaerts relates Van ’t Hoff’s approach to mediating that conflict – “that’s him all over,” he says – to his interest in kickboxing and mixed martial arts, which contributed to the fierce character he portrayed.

“The thing with him was people thought he was like an aggressive pitbull,” Kinds says. “He gave everybody this impression, and that was enough because he was forcing respect like that in a way. But in between the team, best guy, nicest guy ever, sweetest guy ever.”

Van ’t Hoff had formed a tight bond with his FR Europe teammates, Meguetounif and Victor Bernier. Meguetounif and Van ’t Hoff had been teammates in 2022 as well; Bernier joined the squad from satellite team FA Racing by MP, where he spent his rookie FR Europe season.

It’s what race fan Lotte van Holst, a regular attendee at FR Europe rounds, remembers from her interactions with Van ’t Hoff, whom she met at Spa in 2022 and Imola in 2023.

“I had a French flag with me,” she says. “And Sami was like to me and Dilano, ‘That’s the Dutch flag, that’s the Dutch flag.’ And we all both said, ‘No, no, it’s not.’ And then it was like, ‘You want an autograph on the flag?’ I said, ‘No, I want a picture with you two guys, Victor and Sami. And then we’ll take a picture with the flag.

“And then he said to Dilano, ‘You need to be in the picture.’ And Dilano was like, ‘No, no, no, no, no, I’m not French. I’m not French.’

“‘Yeah, but you need to be in the picture’ and he was like, ‘No, I don’t want to be.’

“And then Sami said, ‘Dilano, you have to be in the picture.’ So that was also a really beautiful moment that we all four were laughing, like if we have known each other for years. And we took a picture.’

“Sami was – how do I say – really making fun of it and taking the time with Dilano and making fun of him. I have two pictures I really like with them.”

“You’d see them walking up to briefing together and back from briefing together,” McCarthy adds. “Those three seemed very close to me. The first look I had at that was when we went to Imola and I spoke to all of them and they were having a bit of a laugh. They all seemed like a good bunch of friends to me.

“Sami and Victor had raced him in karting as well that 2018 season. All three of them were racing. They were in different teams… he was with Forza, but they were in the same paddock on the same grid. They’d raced each other for years. Maybe not Spanish F4, but other than that, they’d been on the same grid and in the same paddock, and they seemed pretty close as friends as well.

“I was often in the same hotels as MP, and as a team unit, they’re very close. They were exciting to me as well because they were one of the only if not the only team with three big drivers who had done a full season. For Dilano, we’re adding two seasons together there, but they had three drivers that were returning.”

Van ’t Hoff’s start to the 2023 FR Europe season in April at Imola came three months after he underwent surgery in the Netherlands to repair an injury in his shoulder. He had already had surgery on it in May 2022, ahead of the Monaco FR Europe round, after breaking his collarbone earlier in the year when he fell off a scooter while with friends. He had also injured his shoulder in a previous karting incident.

MP Motorsport FR Europe team manager Rupert Shakespeare admits that even with “some doctor giving him some medication before the race,” Van ’t Hoff “shouldn’t have been driving” that weekend.

The Dutchman then missed the Le Castellet and Hungaroring rounds of FR Europe. He had entered the Zandvoort round in between the two but withdrew after the first free practice, missing out on what turned out to be his only opportunity to race in single-seaters on home soil.

Upon his return to the track at Spa in July 2022, he was still not fully healed, and it showed; he struggled to leave the final few spots in the order in both qualifying and the races. But by Spielberg six weeks later, Van ’t Hoff appeared to have returned to his competitive, cunning best.

“Qualifying in Red Bull Ring, that was a Dilano classic,” Shakespeare says. “We were last in the pit lane. All the cars go out and the warm-up’s very important.”

Coekaerts picks it up from there. “The first quali was fucked up because we didn’t do a warm-up properly and we never got the tires going and all the rest of it. He goes out for [qualifying two], and he’s literally out of the pit lane, and he’s on the radio, like, ‘Yeah, mate, I cannot do a warm-up.’

“I said, ‘Then fucking overtake them’, as a reaction, and he storms through the field, finishes the out lap from last in the pit lane first and goes on to qualify second. The other guys were too busy warming up, on the video, and Dilano just storms past them.”

“He didn’t have to follow the crowd,” Shakespeare adds. “He would do his thing. He had that confidence.”

Van ’t Hoff ultimately tumbled down to eighth in the combined qualifying classification and retired from the race after a collision with then-teammate Mari Boya. But at the very next race at the Circuit de Catalunya, the penultimate round of the season, he achieved a significant milestone: his first FR Europe podium.

“To see him fight through that at arguably the most physical track on the calendar and get a podium and have that fight with Hadrien David and get a third place, that was quite a rewarding experience,” McCarthy says of a race he called. “That was another FRECA race before, but now it’s one I’ll always remember.”

Only later did those at MP realise the true severity of his injury at the time.

“The guy finishes on the podium in Barcelona, and he’s effectively driving one-handed. He kept saying, ‘My shoulder is not okay’. But then by the end of the year, I got to see an X-ray of his shoulder. It was a bit more than not okay. It was loose plate, broken screws, all the rest of it,” Coekaerts remembers.

“What is maybe not always reflected on the results sheets, but if we’re talking about this period that I worked with him that he was hampered by this injury, I would wish that half of the drivers in the paddock would have the tenacity of Dilano, and our lives would be a lot easier. Because the guy just does not give up.

“I don’t know if you ever were lucky enough to see any X-rays from his shoulders, but we all know that Barcelona is a physically demanding track. It’s unreal when you see it afterwards. Because you get used to things. He keeps saying, ‘Oh, my shoulder is not right, my shoulder is not right.’ But if you hear something 10 times, at some point, when things are not going right, it’s also human to think like, ‘Yeah, come on. It’s okay with the shoulder now. We need to get on with it.’

“But then he’s on the podium and you get to see it and you think… fuck, man.”

“He is in pain here,” Kinds adds, pointing to an image of Van ’t Hoff on the podium on his computer screen. “He never smiles.”

“It set him back,” Coekaerts says of Van ’t Hoff’s shoulder injury, “because he was on a rise towards the end of the season. Then it all turned out to be badly repaired. And he had it done again in Holland. He didn’t have one day of winter testing, and he lost the whole Middle East. We started from scratch again the next year. And it was coming, coming, coming. And then it all ended.”

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Heavy rain affected the second FR Europe race at Spa-Francorchamps on 1 July 2023, held in the morning before the 24 Hours of Spa endurance race. A lengthy safety car period that began in the race’s 14th minute only ended 11 seconds before the 30-minute maximum time ran out, leaving drivers with the lap they were starting plus one more in green-flag conditions.

The heavy spray meant that drivers could only make it through a few corners before disaster struck and the red flag came out.

R-ace GP race winner Tim Tramnitz spun into the barriers just after the blind crest at the end of the Eau Rouge–Raidillon complex. A few seconds later, Van ’t Hoff himself lost control of his car around the same spot and went into the barrier. He was hit side-on by Adam Fitzgerald as Enzo Scionti and Joshua Dufek were also involved in subsequent contact with the debris field.

Tramnitz, Dufek and Scionti emerged unhurt. Fitzgerald was taken to the hospital, where doctors confirmed he had broken four vertebrae, his sternum and his elbow. Van ’t Hoff was reportedly unconscious and had to be extricated from his car.

Two hours later, it was announced that Van ’t Hoff had passed away, aged 18.

All those at Spa on that fateful Saturday can recall the gloom and devastation that coursed through the paddock. A minute’s silence was held ahead of the 24 Hours of Spa later that day, where Van ’t Hoff’s team members and fellow FR Europe paddock members gathered to pay their respects.

Holding a flag for the race, amongst the crowd, was Schuller, who had made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from her home in Dordrecht to Stavelot that afternoon.

“I have an unmeasurable respect for the mother,” Coekaerts says. “Because the mother drove down from her house to Spa after the accident, and it was on the edge of the mother comforting all of us rather than the other way around. I was totally blown away by that woman. It was unbelievable,” Coekaerts says.

“She was so composed,” Shakespeare adds.

“Man, she came in here with me,” Coekaerts continues. “She said, ‘Where did you guys sit?’ I always sit here. Dilano was sitting here. She wanted to say, ‘Where, where were you sitting with him? Where were you working?’

“Obviously, she will have a difficult, very difficult time afterwards. But in that moment, it was almost as if she was comforting us. Because that’s also what she said. She said, ‘We felt that we wanted to be here.’”

Shakespeare adds, “His sister came, and then that evening, like 20 of his mates drove down from Den Haag and came to see us. They had never been to a racetrack, and they’d always heard about Dilano’s racing life. That was quite something. That was impressive.”

For those close to Van ’t Hoff, that afternoon at Spa one year ago marked the beginning of a long process of grieving his loss and honouring his memory. MP Motorsport made the decision to skip the FR Europe round at Mugello the following week to support Van ’t Hoff’s family and friends ahead of his funeral on 11 July at Reyerparc outside Ridderkerk, located roughly halfway between Rotterdam and Dordrecht. Around a thousand people, including the 70-odd staff of MP Motorsport, were in attendance to pay their respects.

In addition to his parents, Van ’t Hoff also left behind his girlfriend, Katrina Coronel; his older sister, Luca van ’t Hoff; and his niece May, born just two months before his death.

“His family was everything for him,” Van der Est says. “He was always thinking about his family. He wanted to make his sister proud, his father proud, and when everyone in his family was proud, he was hardly thinking about himself.”

There were many more people who also never got to say the goodbyes they wanted.

“Two weeks before his death, he was at my dad’s company,” De Heus tells me, “but I was not there. So I didn’t see him, but I spoke to my dad. It feels a bit weird because I didn’t see him the last year. It feels like you couldn’t really say goodbye or something.”

Van Holst, who was in Spa on the weekend when Van ’t Hoff lost his life, could never give him a gift she had for him.

“Friday, I didn’t meet him in person again, but I saw him driving the electric scooter with a stroopwafel in his hand, with his girlfriend, laughing. That’s the only thing I remember from Friday, and that he was preparing himself for the race on Friday. I had a little bag of stroopwafels I wanted to give him, but [the opportunity] never came.”

“I spoke to him a lot on the phone and I maybe saw him once in 2021,” Van der Est recalls. “I saw him not much in 2022 and May [2023]. He was at my home because his best friend, Thijs [van Dijk], wanted to tune his car. I have a company in tuning. I tune cars. And that’s the last time I saw him in person. We had spoke that we were going to, as in the past, game, but we have different lives. I’m so sad it’s not going to be anymore how it was.”

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MP’s FR team carried on with its 2023 season at Le Castellet, three weeks after Van ’t Hoff’s death at Spa. Meguetounif qualified third for the first race and drove to second, his best result of the season, as Bernier came home seventh. By September, a third entry, renumbered to #14, had come back too. It was driven first by Bruno del Pino at the Red Bull Ring, then by Javier Sagrera in the final two rounds.

For 2024, MP have an all-new FR Europe line-up of Valerio Rinicella, Nikhil Bohra and Nikita Bedrin. Meguetounif moved on to F3 with Trident, while Bernier switched to Porsche Supercup and the Porsche Carrera Cup France. Whether Van ’t Hoff would have moved up to the Formula 1 support paddock with them will forever remain unknown.

The MP awning is a tribute to Van ’t Hoff’s legacy in myriad ways. There are Racing for Dilano stickers on the walls and the cars, and as Coekaerts sits next to me inside the trailer, his laptop’s screen saver rotates through images of Van ’t Hoff. But Coekaerts, Kinds and Shakespeare pay tribute to him in a subtler way too – by imparting to current and future drivers the importance of having a candour like Van ’t Hoff’s.

“What was highly appreciated with him was his honesty – his honesty to putting his hand up when it was his mistake or when he could have done better himself,” Coekaerts explains. “He would tell us straight to you what he thought about the car as well when the car wasn’t right, and I appreciated that.

“We had a kind of unspoken agreement when things were not going right. We are both fairly flammable, let’s say, and the thing was we didn’t speak to each other for like 20 minutes after the session, and then we could sit down and quietly discuss everything openly and honestly. And that’s what I really appreciated from him.

“He didn’t hold any grudge or he didn’t throw it back at you later or whatever. It’s really good,” Coekaerts continues.

“I think other drivers struggle more with that because we see so many drivers now who have four or five coaches, a mental coach and a physical coach and another coach, left, right and centre, whereas Dilano was just Dilano. But he was honest with you.

“There’s so much influence from outside or from the entourage of the drivers that cloud their honesty because everything needs to be covered or everybody needs to be covered and everybody has to have his invoice placed at the end of the month. That’s what it comes down to. And that problem was not there with Dilano, so you were one on one. This is what I think, and this is what I think of you now, and it gets sorted. Whereas now, it’s like everybody is sugarcoating.”

Coekaerts wants drivers, in the mould of Van ’t Hoff, “to be honest and to put their hand up when it’s their fuck-up or whatever. Honest opinions about the car. Like, don’t base your opinions on the car based on the time sheet; tell me what we need to do, tell me what we need to do to progress regardless.”

MP’s cars continue to sport the Racing for Dilano logo on their cars, as do those of several other teams in the series. The Racing for Dilano Foundation has been set up by the family to support young athletes, particularly racing drivers, with mental and physical rehabilitation needs following accidents in competition.

Van ’t Hoff’s friends have also taken the mantra into their own lives. 

“I want to go racing for him,” Van der Est tells me towards the end of our phone call. “I’m racing for Dilano, and I put it on my helmet and it is on my kart. It’s also because I want to make the memories back that I have. I want to have the same memories back on track that I also have with him. I want to bring the smile on his face. I’m back on the kart after two years of no driving.”

For Van der Est, continuing to race – the passion that defined Van ’t Hoff’s life – symbolises the perseverance embodied by his late friend’s family.

“He has the impression left on his family that you have to keep going when something is not going your way. You have to make it go your way. And now the hard time the family has, they are strong, they stay strong and they want to be strong for Dilano, and that’s something special I see,” he says. “There is the footage MP Motorsport made of him, and when you saw him there, that is the Dilano I know. He wanted to be the best.”

Coekaerts highlights two quotes from that tribute video, created by MP for Van ’t Hoff’s funeral and narrated by McCarthy, as reflective of his driver’s ambitions.

When asked to whom he looks up in motorsport, Van ’t Hoff answers, “A future version of myself.”

In another exchange, he says, “I don’t believe school teaches you.”

“Then what does?”

“Life.”

If only Dilano van ’t Hoff had more time to learn from his.

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Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency