The GB3 Championship arrived at Donington Park earlier in September with three new faces on the grid: Freddie Slater, Max Taylor and Alexandros Kattoulas. Feeder Series spoke with them about their experiences.

By George Sanderson

Whilst the main storyline from the penultimate round of the 2024 GB3 season 7–8 September will have been the commanding performances of championship leader Louis Sharp, the three newcomers for the round added an exciting subplot.

Feeder Series spoke to Rodin Motorsport’s Slater, Arden Motorsport’s Taylor and Fortec Motorsport’s Kattoulas to find out how they felt their first taste of GB3 went.

Slater hits the ground running

Arguably the biggest name of the three to make a cameo was Freddie Slater, who joined forces with Rodin Motorsport for the weekend.

The British teenager has been a dominant force in Italian Formula 4 this season, winning a staggering 11 out of 15 races thus far. He had previously won the F4 UAE title in the winter as well as the 2023 Ginetta Junior Championship.

At Donington Park, he joined a long list of high-achieving prospects who have made appearances in GB3 this season, including Martinius Stenshorne, Ugo Ugochukwu and James Wharton. Slater, however, came into the championship with very little track time and no race experience above the F4 level.

“I think I did about four days, five days [of testing] before I got into the car, before I got into the race weekend, and only half a day in the wet,” he told Feeder Series. “So when it did rain on Saturday morning [in qualifying], it was a bit of an unexpected result to be fighting in the top three.”

Slater qualified sixth for race one, while his second-best lap time put him fourth on the grid for race two. He said that hitting traffic before a red flag came out as the track dried meant he “missed the peak performance of the track”, which cost him the opportunity to put his Rodin Motorsport car higher on the grid.

Still, the 16-year-old said he was pleased with his performances at Donington Park.

“It was a super strong weekend in relative terms of pace,” he said. “There were a few mistakes that I made, like in race three. Obviously, the start of race two was just a bit aggressive from my side, a bit of a mistake.”

Slater crossed the line third in that second race but received a one-place penalty after the race for forcing VRD by Arden driver Noah Ping off the track entering the first corner on the opening lap.

“It’s quite nice to come across the line P3, but then when it gets taken away it’s obviously frustrating,” he said. “I didn’t think he was going to be there, when I checked and he wasn’t there, but then I think he just had such a good start that it caught me a bit off guard. It was just a mistake on my side.”

Then, in the final race of the weekend, Slater said he “just got a bit caught out” while trying to pass Will Macintyre around the outside of the Melbourne Hairpin on the opening lap, causing him to lose an additional position to fellow newcomer Taylor.

“I was going for an overtake,” he told Feeder Series. “[Macintyre] left the door open for [Taylor], and when it is three into one, the guy on the outside is normally going to lose most positions.”

Slater explained that results were not the priority for his weekend at Donington. Because it was his first race weekend with the Tatuus MSV-022 car, his focus was on adjustment.

“Thursday was tough,” he admitted. “I definitely wasn’t on the pace. There was some things that I needed to sort out compared to the F4 [car], a few things I had to undo and switch into GB3 mode.”

He said that watching an onboard lap in preparation for the weekend was eye-opening.

“I watched the onboard of whatever the reference lap was, and I was like, ‘That was fast!’” he said. “And then I was like, ‘Okay, right, I’ve got to drive that fast to get around the track.’

“I think the biggest thing for me was you drive faster and harder to create more downforce. To tell your mind when you first get in the car, when you’re not sure what it’s going to do [and] you don’t trust it because you’re not experienced in that category, it’s very hard to go, ‘Right, push harder to create more grip’, which means taking more risk but it’s actually not because you’re creating more grip. Because otherwise, when you’re driving slower, you create [for] yourself a false limit.”

Slater had to change his mindset for driving the GB3 car in “quite a weird way,” he said.

“You can attack it a little bit more compared to the F4. The F4 is very exit focused because obviously it’s not got that much power. Also, the open [differential] doesn’t help anything on the exit of corners in the F4 compared to the GB3.”

Slater’s dominance in Italy naturally brought attention to his cameo in GB3, but he told Feeder Series that he felt no pressure coming into the Donington Park weekend. Instead, he was simply “looking for pace and what we were going to be like compared to everybody”.

It was also a chance for Slater to enjoy a weekend back home in the United Kingdom with an England-based team in Rodin that “felt like family” to the West Midlands driver.

Sixth-, fourth- and fifth-place finishes in the three races demonstrated Slater’s pace. He told Feeder Series he was encouraged by his performances and how quickly he adjusted over the weekend.

“To jump in with only two rounds to go and be there already fighting the top boys, I think it was quite a good weekend to prove what I have as well.”

Taylor makes solid UK debut

Fresh from claiming the USF Juniors title over in his native United States, Max Taylor linked up with Arden Motorsport for Donington Park.

Taylor had raced solely stateside until then in his two years of single-seaters, but his weekend at Donington wasn’t his first time in the GB3 car.

“I tested the GB3 car last year with VRD Arden,” Taylor said. “I tested over the winter. We went to quite a few tracks, so I got some understanding of the car there. But since then, I hadn’t driven the car at all, so I’d been about 10 months out of the car and 10 months out of a car that fast!”

Velocity Racing Development (VRD) have run Max in USF Juniors and USF2000 this season, and he has picked up a total of seven wins and 17 podiums across the two campaigns.

While at Donington, the 16-year-old stayed with VRD team principal Dan Mitchell, who helped acclimatise his driver to British culture – including by taking him to Derby County’s 31 August English Football League match against Bristol City, which the Rams won 3–0.

His strong form and quick adaptation surfaced on track in GB3 too. As Thursday’s testing session showed, the 16-year-old didn’t take long to be on the pace despite the big difference in machinery he was driving.

“It was definitely a big adjustment, but I was right on the pace from the get-go from the test the week before. Even session one [in testing], I was right there. So I was really happy with that and honestly quite surprised with myself,” Taylor said.

“I pulled into the pits and thought I was going to be two or three seconds off, and Dan showed me and I was eight tenths off.”

Similar to Slater, Taylor also faced a step up in car performance at Donington Park.

“It’s a hell of a lot faster!” Taylor exclaimed. “The engine’s quick. There’s so much downforce on the car, so it’s definitely a big adjustment. You have to change your driving style; you have to change a lot of things to get that car in a good window and get it going really fast.

“But I really enjoyed it. I love driving that car, it’s just exhilarating when you get it on the limit, and it just feels awesome!”

At Donington, Taylor claimed consistently solid results, with 11th-place finishes in the first two races and 14th in the final race of the weekend.

Taylor recounted a piece of tongue-in-cheek feedback from Mitchell – that keeping the car on the track showed he “hadn’t been pushing enough – and joked that he might have to push a bit harder next time. But for now, he’s simply seeking another chance in the car.

“The GB3 championship is amazing,” Taylor said. “It’s a blast, and it teaches you really good things. So I think coming over and doing it, considering the partnership with VRD and Arden and all that, it was a no-brainer almost. We were planning it even at the start of last year.”

Taylor said he was unlikely to appear this weekend at Brands Hatch but was eyeing returning for some races in 2025, when he is set to step up to USF Pro 2000.

“I’m really happy that I got to do it,” he continued. “I hope I’m going to be able to race there next year. We’re going to do some more testing in the off-season [to] prepare for the US season in USF Pro.”

Kattoulas looking to make university deferral count

The final newcomer to the GB3 field for Donington Park was Singaporean driver Kattoulas.

Aged 19, Kattoulas is the most senior of the three new drivers, and he endured the most difficult weekend in terms of results, with two 20th-place finishes bookending a 17th-place result in race two. Still, Kattoulas was still happy with his progress.

“I knew that it was going to be challenging,” Kattoulas said. “I don’t have so much experience in cars in general, so I did testing with Fortec leading up to it. If I didn’t do those days then I’d have been screwed, so it really helped!”

Kattoulas was born in Japan, where he fell in love with motorsport after watching the 2011 Japanese Grand Prix on television at his cousin’s house. Wanting to get into motorsport made him the “first crazy one in the family”, Kattoulas said, but it was only after having moved to Singapore as a child that he began to race seriously.

Early on, Kattoulas regularly visited the Plentong International Karting Circuit in Malaysia, where he also ran into current World Endurance Championship driver Earl Bamber.

At age 15, two years after moving to Europe, Kattoulas took a break from racing to finish school. In 2023, as he began a mathematics course at the University of Nottingham, he realised he could return to racing. He has since deferred the second year of his studies to focus on racing.

Donington Park marked the 19-year-old’s first race weekend in a championship after a year of preparation. He told Feeder Series that considering the circumstances, he was happy with his pace in his GB3 debut.

“My pace during practice, in the dry especially, was good. I think I was maybe six to eight tenths off usually, and I think that’s a good place to be after not so much time in the car and having been away from racing a little bit as well.”

The rain on Saturday also handed Kattoulas valuable wet-weather experience that he had lacked.

“That was my first time driving a formula car in the rain, so I got thrown pretty deep in,” he said.

“I just tried to follow others and see what they were doing and try to figure it out along the way. Although I was last in the end, I don’t think it was such a bad session.”

It was this first experience of wet weather running that aided Kattoulas in securing his best result of the weekend, 17^th, in race two. By comparison, he said that the “half dry, half wet” race one was more of a challenge.

“I got a little bit of everything this weekend,” he said. “[It was] a little bit stressful because if it was just dry, it would have made it a lot more straightforward. But it wasn’t, so it was interesting. It was fun.”

Kattoulas said that his cameo appearance was a “good place to benchmark myself for next year” among strong competition and in a car that “translates to most other things”.

“I was catching the cars in front of me every lap, but then … I would make a mistake every two laps or something and I would lose the progress I’d made,” he said. “It could’ve gone better, but I think it just shows me that experience matters.”

Kattoulas said that GB3 was unlikely to be his 2025 destination and that he would rather focus his attention further down the ladder in hopes of reaping the long-term benefits.

“Next year, I’m going to be focusing more on GB4,” he said. “The Donington race weekend showed me that I think I have the skill to run at the front, but I just don’t have enough time in the car. I think if I go to do GB3 next year, I am really on the back foot and trying to catch up the whole year, and that’s usually not a recipe for a good result.

“[GB4 is] not as expensive, so it kind of saves some budget as well. And I think doing GB4, you can learn 90% of what you need to learn in a GB4 car for GB3. So I think that’s the idea.”

And with GB4 set to adopt a modified version of the GB3’s current chassis for next year, Kattoulas’ extra weekend of experience could prove even more crucial.

Header photo credit: Artie C Photo