Following a scoreless season opener at Jarama, Griffin Peebles achieved a podium and two other points finishes at Portimão in his best weekend in Spanish Formula 4 so far.

By Juan Arroyo

Peebles was always going to be a driver to watch heading into this season. After spending his rookie Spanish F4 season at Tecnicar, the second-year driver joined MP Motorsport, with whom he won the Formula Winter Series this winter.

Yet in a field of more than 30 cars, Peebles was unexpectedly anonymous as Spanish F4 opened its season at Jarama.

He was 14th and 23rd fastest respectively in the two qualifying sessions at the Madrid circuit. Thanks to his second-fastest lap in Q1, he started 14th in race two. There was  little more to write home about in the races, with 13th-, 23rd- and 16th-place finishes – far from the results Peebles hoped for.

“It had really high degradation on the tyres,” Peebles told Feeder Series. “And it felt like that showed some differences in between tyres. We had some differences between the tyre sets, so some people were struggling with that.”

“I had one bad set, I believe, in one of the qualifying sessions. We had some different times in even though it was almost the same track condition. Jarama just was really difficult to overtake. It was all basically based off qualifying, and I couldn’t really pull everything together in qualifying.”

Peebles’ claims about varying tyre quality are not without precedent. Spanish F4’s parent series, Eurocup-3, has also encountered problems with their tyre supplier this year. However, Peebles said he hadn’t experienced these issues during collective testing or the following round in Portimão.

“I believe they are trying to do something to fix it or try and sort this problem out,” he said. “It just kind of sprung up a little bit in the tests in [Jarama]. My teammate went like one second faster between the two sets that we ran in the single qualifying session.”

Peebles’ ‘real’ pace was immediately evident in Portugal. Despite having to miss the pre-event test for school activities, he went on to finish inside the top 10 in both free practice sessions.

He qualified eighth and seventh for races one and three respectively in Portimão and secured himself a second-place start with his second-fastest lap in the first qualifying session. He then finished ninth, third, and eighth in the weekend’s races, securing his first podium in Spanish F4. It was also the first time the Australian achieved a top 10 finish in consecutive races in the series, which he said marked a “big step” from Jarama.

“In Portimão, we were really close,” Peebles told Feeder Series. “We were like one, two tenths away from pole and we didn’t have any slipstream on my lap. In the races, we were quite strong on pace, and we were able to bring a podium from race two.”

Part of the answer to Peebles’ contrasting results may also lie in pre-season testing. The MP driver logged significantly less mileage than his peers in the collective test at Jarama, and he was 0.743s slower than the fastest driver in the overall results, Jan Przyrowski. It was a different picture to the Portimão test, in which he was only 0.004s off the fastest overall lap set by Lucas Fluxá.

A theme from both rounds, according to Peebles, was a tendency for the top portion of the field to “run away” with the race, making qualifying all the more important.

“It’s so much easier to be starting at the front and being able to run your own pace as you’re not in a big fight sort of in the mid-pack. So qualifying seems to be really important for these kinds of tracks,” the MP driver said.

“Maybe [qualifying at] Paul Ricard won’t be as important as there’s quite long straights and it might be more on slipstream, but it still really, really helps for the entire weekend. Like in Portimão, we were really quick in the collective test, and we should be able to do just as good there.”

Peebles’ Portimão weekend marked a boost in performance in a season when he is expected to battle at the front. The Australian driver, managed by Pro Racing Motorsport, said he had not set a formal target in the standings but believed he had “the speed and the skills to be able to put it in the top three”.

“Obviously, we’re in a better position than last year. I have more experience and we’re in a better team,” he said. “We still have a long way to go. It’s only been two rounds. If we can just keep having consistent good results, we should be able to move up in the championship.”

His next chance to do so comes this weekend at Paul Ricard, which hosts Spanish F4’s third round of 2024.

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency