The rise of young Polish racing drivers Tymek Kucharczyk in GB3 and Kacper Sztuka in Formula 3 has rekindled interest in single-seater motorsport among the European nation of 38 million people. But in what has been a turbulent year for them on and off track amid the presence of a new national government, questions mount over whether they, and other Polish single-seater talents, will ever be able to realise their potential.

By Michael McClure

It’s a cold, cloudy Sunday morning at Brands Hatch, an hour’s drive southeast of London, when GB3’s penultimate race of 2024 concludes in late September. A small crowd comprising mostly team personnel and drivers’ family members stands below the podium, waiting for the top three finishers to emerge.

First to appear is third-place finisher Tymek Kucharczyk, greeted by loud cheers and chants of ‘Tymek, Tymek, Tymek!’ The voices, however, are not those of family or team members but of a few dozen fans, assembled with an assortment of Polish flags, banners and home-made posters bearing Kucharczyk’s name.

Kucharczyk has just been eliminated from the title race of GB3, formerly British F3. Only the two drivers who follow him onto the podium – second-place finisher John Bennett and race winner Louis Sharp – remain in mathematical contention, yet that fact and its implications mean little to the crowd below. After the podium ceremony, they wander over to the Hitech awning for autographs and pictures with Kucharczyk, who has seen this group of fans at several races this year. Many have travelled hundreds of kilometres during the year to support the driver they believe can become the next Polish F1 star after Robert Kubica.

As they return home, optimism gives way to a brutal and insidious reality. Kucharczyk does not have a racing seat for 2025. With little budget of his own, he may not find one.

“In the end I got the good results, top three in a championship such as British F3,” Kucharczyk says, “which should allow you to get some funding to get some sponsors. And it’s not happening and that’s what’s frustrating.

“Last year, okay, I could understand that I should have performed a bit better. Seventh in the championship was not the maximum I could do. Being in top three, being able to win races, to be super quick, and nothing changes that. That’s what’s frustrating.

“And I just hope that something in Poland will finally change, will click, because since Robert Kubica, nothing has changed. That’s a bit disappointing.

“It’s been quite noisy around me, especially on X. There was a huge following with hashtags and whatever about me going [up to F3],” he continues. “It was a lot of hype and I think it helped a bit with promoting myself. We are able to speak to more sponsors, which is obviously good. And thanks to all the fans in Poland, I just got the bigger name. So that’s really good. That’s probably very helpful. And I hope that something will work out after this.”

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When Kubica made his F1 debut in 2006 at the Hungaroring, five months after Kucharczyk was born, the sport surged in popularity in Poland. For years afterward, the Hungarian Grand Prix became a popular holiday spot for Polish motorsport fans, who turned out in the thousands to support the country’s first-ever F1 driver. Those who couldn’t make the journey became among the millions who watched Kubica on television throughout the year.

By the end of 2010, his fourth full season in F1, Kubica was a grand prix winner viewed as one of the sport’s most promising talents, capable of hauling an underperforming Renault to places it shouldn’t have been. He had signed a pre-contract with Ferrari over the winter, with the intention of replacing the struggling Felipe Massa for the 2012 season and beyond.

It never came to be; in February 2011, Kubica had a major accident while participating in a rally event – the discipline in which Poles traditionally enjoyed more success – and suffered serious injuries to his right arm. He didn’t race for years and, upon returning to the cockpit, remained in rallying and sports cars. F1 remained in his sights and he made a heroic return with Williams in 2019, but his performance level had evidently dropped. He left the team after only one year.

In some ways, Kubica’s success is inseparable from his nation’s sporting history; he is one of the country’s foremost stars and certainly its most widely known racing driver. His F1 return, announced 100 years to the month after Poland regained its independence in November 1918, reenergised Polish fans and contributed to the 570 per cent surge in F1 viewership.

Before Kubica arrived on the scene, Poland had a rich racing history via the Rally Poland, which stretches back almost to the country’s founding, though single-seater competition was scarce. There was never any momentum to justify strengthening it until 1974, the year Emerson Fittipaldi, a Brazilian driver of Polish descent won his second F1 world title – and the year the plans to develop the country’s first permanent racetrack became public.

The Polish entrepreneur Mieczysław Biliński designed the Circuit Tor Poznań using roads and runways from the edge of the local airport of Poland’s fifth-largest city. The venue opened in 1977 and primarily held local and regional racing events. The 4.083-kilometre track gained FIA Grade 3 certification in 2006. Even after the construction of the Silesia Ring in 2016, it remains the only venue to have FIA grading or certification.

Tor Poznań is the home of Polish motorsport, hosting track days, drifting events and the occasional race. In 2023 it held a round of the European Truck Racing Championship, its biggest event yet. But junior single-seaters have rarely appeared at the circuit, and though Poland is the second-largest country in the CEZ behind Italy, it has never featured on the F4 CEZ calendar.

Other events also face challenges. The FIA Central European Zone championships visited annually until this year, when infrastructure problems forced the cancellation of the local rounds. Noise complaints from nearby residents limit what races can be held there, even forcing the 2018 edition of the circuit’s signature Gran Turismo Polonia event to be cancelled.

“Compared to our neighbour countries like Hungary, like Czech Republic, like Germany, we don’t have many racing facilities in Poland,” Kucharczyk laments. “We’re not able to make young drivers … evolve, experience new things, new stuff to live up into the big world of motorsport.”

Kucharczyk competed in European karting from 2018 to 2021 before winning a fully supported seat in Spanish F4 with MP Motorsport through the Richard Mille Young Talent Academy shootout. Those like him who leave the Polish scene as youngsters compete in countries far from their homes, away from the eyes of potential national sponsors and with substantially higher expenses of their own.

“The life of a racing driver is usually a struggle for the budget,” says Kacper Sztuka, a longtime rival of Kucharczyk’s who raced in F3 this year. “You don’t really only think about the driving as a sport, but it’s also about the budget at all times. This is difficult. 

“I’m glad I have the opportunity to drive in F3, to complete the whole season, which is great for me. As I had struggled already in F4, I thought it would be impossible to get to F3 level, but we made it.” 

In 2021, Sztuka, then 15 and a fresh graduate from Europe’s karting scene, stepped up to single-seater racing on a race-by-race contract with AS Motorsport, a low-budget, single-car Italian F4 outfit based in Slovenia.

The season as a whole yielded little in the way of results; Sztuka scored no points and finished 36th, the lowest placement for a full-time driver. Fellow Polish driver Piotr Wiśnicki, in his second season at Jenzer Motorsport, scored 15 and finished 23rd.

Sztuka returned for a second year in F4 with US Racing in 2022 and started in spectacular fashion with a podium and a win in the opening round. But his results tailed off as Andrea Kimi Antonelli hit his stride; he took two more podiums in the series, including a win at the Red Bull Ring, but lost his chance at fourth in the points after retiring from three of the season’s last four races.

Better-funded rivals might have moved up to FRegional after that year, but Sztuka remained in F4 with US for another year.

The decision paid off handsomely. Sztuka won the inaugural edition of the F4-level Formula Winter Series in such dominant fashion that he skipped the fourth and final round, having already clinched the title. Later in the year, he was a regular frontrunner in Italian F4, but in the second half of the season, he became the series’ dominant force.

Sztuka overturned Arvid Lindblad’s 113.5-point advantage in three rounds and ultimately claimed the title with a race to spare after taking his seventh win from eight races.

That day, 14 October, was among the most significant in Sztuka’s career. It was also a milestone for Poland, which had not had a driver win a junior single-seater championship since Kubica in FRenault 3.5 in 2005. His come-from-behind title charge ranks among the most remarkable in the discipline in recent memory.

But an even more significant day for Poland was the one after. The results of parliamentary elections held 15 October delivered a blow to the ruling Law and Justice party, known domestically as PiS. Though the United Right coalition housing PiS had the most votes, it lost the majority in the Sejm, the lower house of Poland’s bicameral parliament and the organ in which much of the country’s political power is vested. Instead, a coalition of opposition parties led by the liberal-conservative Civic Platform instead earned a 54 per cent majority.

Over the next two months, as Sztuka earned the support of the Red Bull Junior Team and lined up a jump to F3 with MP Motorsport, Poland’s government faced a period of transition. By December, president Andrzej Duda and prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki, both of PiS, were out of power after the government they attempted to form failed to pass a vote. Civic Platform leader Donald Tusk was sworn in as Poland’s next prime minister, and the first from outside of PiS in eight years, on 13 December 2023.

A number of political analysts viewed the change in national leadership as the reversal of a years-long trend of democratic backsliding. Tusk’s government brought in a new group of leaders in state-owned organisations, including a new supervisory board at oil company Orlen, half of which is owned by the Polish state treasury.

Orlen is one of the largest employers in the country and among its wealthiest corporations. The company played a significant part in securing the 2019 F1 return of Kubica, whom it has sponsored since, but it has also parlayed Kubica’s fame into a wider push to support Polish talent further down the ladder.

Sztuka had begun negotiations with Orlen in 2022. Kucharczyk had enjoyed support since joining an Orlen-aligned karting team in 2020. New Eurocup-3 driver Maciej Gładysz has been affiliated with Orlen’s karting teams since 2017 and was sponsored by the company this year, his first in single-seaters, in Formula Winter Series and Spanish F4.

This year, Orlen has reported substantial financial losses year on year, with hundreds of millions of Euros lost from unfulfilled transactions under the previous leadership as well as drops in profit as high as 95 per cent relative to the same point in 2023. These financial hits have affected the company’s ability to bankroll up-and-coming talents in motorsport.

Having been supported by Orlen through his first single-seater season in Spanish F4 in 2022 and his first GB3 campaign last year, Kucharczyk lost the energy giant’s support in July. The company’s red-and-white logos, present on his car and overalls at the Hungaroring, had been covered up or removed by the series’ fifth round at Zandvoort, a crucial juncture in the championship battle.

The downstream effect of the new government on funding Polish motorsport is a sensitive topic for those involved. One source approached by Feeder Series declined to discuss the topic. Others respond with understandable reticence.

“I don’t want to, let’s say, get inside of it because that’s just making trouble,” Kucharczyk says. “But it’s true what happened with the new government. Quite a lot of backing has been cut off. Not only me, but quite a lot of drivers or events or whatever has stopped [being] sponsored. It’s true. Let’s see how it will be in the next few years. But it’s not looking very promising.”

“At the same time,” he adds, “Polish fans were amazing for the season and the amount of them, the amount of Polish flags around the track was absolutely amazing. It was just a pleasure to see them to see them cheering for me for us, and obviously the only way we could thank them was to give a bit of a show. It was crazy. It was madness and [I] can’t be thankful enough.

“And thanks to them as well, I hope that something will change in Poland, that somebody will finally see that if none of the Polish drivers will get some backing from the government from our country, then we might not be able to see the next driver in F1 for many more years.”

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Kucharczyk finished the 2024 GB3 season third with 443 points, four wins and 11 total podiums from 23 races contested. It was unquestionably his strongest season in single-seaters and one that – for many drivers – would have been enough to merit a step up to F3 for the 2025 season.

But nine days after his GB3 campaign ended, when F3’s 10 teams went to Jerez for post-season testing, Kucharczyk did not appear. A week later in Barcelona, he was again absent from the entry lists.

When asked if he has racing plans for next year – in F3 or otherwise – Kucharczyk demurs.

“I don’t know,” he answers. “It is looking quite tough. We’re still trying to find a budget for next year, so it’s not easy. We’re struggling a bit for that, for pretty much always. It’s not that simple here in Poland and in our case as well.

“I wish I was on a test already for the FIA F3 to learn a car, to learn the environment, but the financial issues keeps us away from that. I hope that, in the end, we will find the budget for the season because our main goal is to do the FIA F3. But if it will work out, I don’t know yet.”

Kucharczyk said he was putting “maximum effort” towards doing an F3 season “until we see that it’s not possible”, but he admitted that time was ticking. At the time of writing, 25 of 30 spots on the grid are confirmed to have been filled – one of them by Polish-British driver Roman Bilinski – and Feeder Series understands that the chances one remains open are slim. As time passes, fewer places remain available for Kucharczyk and Sztuka.

“We are talking about bigger money as it’s F3, not F4, but also a lot bigger media support where you get more in exchange for the money you put in,” Sztuka says. “It’s a different talk about the higher series, bigger money, but in the end, we managed to do it this season. So again, I’m grateful to everyone who supported this journey and could do it.”

Sztuka’s path to remaining in single-seaters has narrowed after an F3 season that was, by his own admission, “not what we were aiming for”. He scored points on only one occasion – the sprint race in Imola – and finished the season 27th in the standings, far behind MP Motorsport teammates Tim Tramnitz and Alex Dunne. His poor form also cost him the backing of Red Bull, which funded part of the cost of his F3 campaign but dropped him from its junior programme in June.

Still, balancing career and financial opportunities meant that a jump to F2, at least over the summer, appeared a possibility alongside remaining in F3. But having not tested in either series, the chances he will actually race in either are low.

“With the change of the car, It’s not impossible for me to do F2,” he said. “We are seriously thinking about doing F2, but of course there is even more budget needed, so this will be tricky. If not F2, then we will focus on F3 where the money is also not very small. You need a lot of budget still. We’ll try to do F2, but I think more likely is that we will stay in F3.”

Rumours had swirled for months about whether Kucharczyk would have the financial resources to make the expected step up. As they spread, his Polish fanbase amplified them. He was among the most widely trending names in Poland on social media in October 2024. Even now, with F3 falling out of reach, many fans still cling to hope.

“That’s what fans can do to promote us – then it’s easier, getting us sold as a drivers in a sponsor’s eyes. But at the same time, we try to get their contact, we try to find some similar language with them to find some solutions to get a sponsor.

“Every sponsor works a bit different. They have different expectations from us. We just need to get a bit more promoted as British F3. The [viewership] there is not very high, so it was quite tough. But in FIA F3, it’s probably over 20 million people that watch it throughout the year.

“That’s quite a number, and it’s probably easier, but it’s still quite hard to make people understand that sponsoring young drivers is more like an investment that you put into them and that if the young driver actually do something right in their career, reach some really good levels, maybe F1, then it will return, the money will return. It’s quite tough, but at the same time, Polish mentality is a bit awkward. We’re not evolved yet in motorsport more.

“So it’s not easy. I hope that some big people, let’s say, will understand how it really works and [that] investing in young drivers actually might be worth it.”

The marketing appeal Kucharczyk references is that a sponsor of a professionally successful driver can get their investment repaid either via increased exposure or by taking a portion of the athlete’s eventual earnings. In junior single-seaters, however, there are almost never immediate earnings, meaning sponsorship is largely a matter of charity if not extreme faith in a driver.

For Kucharczyk – who, unlike Sztuka, has never been part of an F1 team’s junior academy – this struggle for budget began already before the 2024 season and intensified after he lost Orlen’s backing in July.

“I think my one is even worse because Kacper, obviously, got some funding from Red Bull this year, so that helped him quite a lot. But in my case, I’ve been struggling to find the budget for whole year, even this year,” Kucharczyk says.

“At some point, I was driving round by round, race by race, because I didn’t know if I’ll be able to compete in the next event. But Hitech and Oli Oakes were really kind to me too, and … I was able to continue on and finish the season with them, which I’m really grateful for.

“But yeah, it was not easy. In some of the rounds, it was the issue, and for the driver, it’s not ideal to have that kind of problems midway or start way for the season. You always have that thing on the back of your mind that this might be your last race.”

With a lower budget and a relatively late deal for 2024 announced in February, Kucharczyk had less time for pre-season testing. And even with receiving “amazing” support from Hitech both on and off track since the day he signed, he said the persistent budget shortfalls had “quite a lot” of an effect on his mindset.

“When I was driving, there’s no time to think about that kind of stuff. For sure, in some ways it will be much better for me to just be more chill, to focus on a job I had to do, to put on the maximum attention to it. But I didn’t. I couldn’t really do that because of that.

“I knew what was going on around me, around the funding issues, around the lack of budget, so it was not easy. But I think I just showed that, even with higher pressure, with issues that I had throughout the season, I can hold on, I can perform really well, so I’m glad to just do that and be on the top.”

In the absence of direct financial support, gaining visibility toward potential sponsors is one of the only paths left for Kucharczyk and others in his shoes.

Since the end of the GB3 season, he has made numerous Polish-language television, radio and media appearances “to promote not only [himself] but all the Polish drivers” in need of funding. When Feeder Series speaks with him, he is seated at home, carrying out a rare English-language interview to share the story of Polish motorsport with the world.

“I just hope that something finally changed and the young drivers will get the backing they deserve to,” Kucharczyk tells us. “I have a lot of colleagues, a lot of friends, older friends from Poland that have potential to even reach to F1, but because of lack of funding, lack of budget, they were not able to. They stopped their career or, I don’t know, start to work as a mechanic in karting or whatever.

“There’s quite a chance that in a few months, I will join them. As I used to say, motorsport remembers [only] your last race.”

George Sanderson, Francesca Brusa, Tori Turner, Finjo Muschlien and Maciej Jackiewicz contributed reporting.

Header photo credit: Jakob Ebrey