His grandfather was a multiple European rallycross champion, his father a Formula 1 driver and his brother a recent champion in both FRegional and F4 series. Now, 17-year-old Oscar Wurz – the youngest member of the Wurz racing dynasty – is forging a path of his own after winning the F4 CEZ title in 2024.

By Marco Albertini

Wurz dabbled in four F4 series in 2024 as he sought to gain single-seater experience, but he left the biggest mark on the F4 Central European Zone championship.

Despite taking only two wins all year – a markedly lower total than those of his title rivals, 2023 FIA Karting OK world champion Kirill Kutskov and teammate Max Karhan – Wurz won the title through consistency.

“I set my own goals, but I was very happy to win the championship,” Wurz told Feeder Series. “Obviously I would’ve liked to have won more, but maybe if I didn’t win all 18 races, I still got 14 podiums. I was very consistent throughout the entire season.”

A title charge in F4 already seemed possible at the tail end of 2023, albeit not necessarily in Europe. Wurz won the inaugural exhibition race of Saudi Arabia’s new F4 series and took another podium and victory on the second day of racing. 

At the time, he had only two previous rounds of F4 experience in the first-generation Mygale car in Danish F4, so he said his victory on debut in the second-generation Tatuus F4 car “was quite a surprise”. But even with four podiums and fifth in the standings in the main season, Wurz characterised his campaign as “quite frustrating”.

“Expectations are high for a lot of people, especially the favourites,” Wurz said. “I came into the Bahrain round as a rookie and immediately won and shocked some people, and I think that set the expectations.”

Wurz failed to finish three of the four races on the first weekend of the series proper. He returned in the second round with second place in race one – a round retroactively downgraded to a non-championship event – but took only three more podiums in the final 13 races. And while the top three in the standings had only one non-score each from the 17 points-paying events, Wurz racked up six, five from accidents.

His season’s weaknesses provided him with a hard lesson as he prepared for his next chance at title glory in F4 CEZ. 

“As a percentage, it was a huge difference to go from 3 out of 4 [75%] to 4 out of 21 [19%], and it felt disappointing. I felt like I could’ve performed a lot better,” he said. “Given what I learned from Saudi Arabia, where I crashed too many times, the goal was to not have any DNFs.” 

Wurz, the youngest of three brothers, was linking up with reigning F4 CEZ champions Jenzer Motorsport for his first full campaign in Europe.

“Because my brother was going to be racing with Jenzer, I started doing some tests with them in F4,” Wurz said, referencing middle brother Charlie Wurz, one of the team’s 2024 F3 drivers.

Family connections had already helped Wurz find his place in Saudi F4, centrally run by Meritus.GP. Organiser Peter Thompson knew his father – Alex Wurz, who raced in F1 from 1997 to 2007 and heads the Grand Prix Drivers’ Association – and “explained how the championship was going to be” in an interview with the family.

Once he got behind the wheel, 17-year-old Wurz’s destiny was his. At the first F4 CEZ round at Balaton Park, Wurz finished second in all three races but was awarded the win twice. Teammate and 2023 F4 CEZ champion Ethan Ischer, who won both races on the road, was entered as a guest driver and was ineligible for points.

“It was easier for me knowing there were less risks because I knew I could finish P2 and still get 25 points,” Wurz said.

Less than a month later, the championship headed to Austria for the next round at the Red Bull Ring – the only one at an F1 track – where Wurz faced stiff competition as 25 cars were entered for the round. After finishing fifth in race one, Wurz had an “underwhelming” race two with eighth place but rebounded in race three to finish second behind PHM Racing’s Kamal Mrad.

Round three was held at the Slovakiaring, where Wurz topped all the practice sessions, took pole and won the first two races with the fastest lap to boot. Wurz’s perfect weekend was spoiled in race three, however; despite leading the race, he was overtaken by teammate Max Karhan, who went on to take his maiden win in the championship.

Two months later, as the championship headed to Most for the first of two rounds in Czechia, Wurz held a 67-point lead.

“Most is quite difficult to overtake on and there were few practice sessions, only four practice sessions,” Wurz said. “In all of them, conditions were changing, going from a dry track to a wet track or it was raining and then it dried. So [there was]  14 minutes of driving before qualifying and it was very difficult, but I managed to qualify P3.”

Wurz finished on the podium twice, taking third place on both occasions. Yet while running second towards the end of race two, he made contact with Miroslav Mikeš and had his first and only retirement of the season. He was classified eighth.

“It was raining and I was very fast in the wet but then it started drying and I was involved in an incident,” he said. “Even if I got two podiums, it wasn’t one of my best weekends.”

At the penultimate round of the season in Brno, Wurz opened the weekend with a fifth-place finish and subsequently finished runner-up twice, but it wasn’t a straightforward weekend.

“In the first race I stalled, but it wasn’t only me,” Wurz said. “Five drivers stalled at the start and it was really strange. Then not only that, but after having stalled and coming back, I was pushed off into a spin [on lap three]. I managed to come back and finish P5, right behind P4, and that was frustrating. If I had been calmer, maybe I would have assessed the risk versus the reward, and if I didn’t have that off, I could’ve finished on the podium.

“In race two I finished second. There was a crash in front of me, so I jumped up to second, and then race three I finished second again and that’s the race we were really focusing on. We saved our best tyres and put them on for race three and I was leading.” Race one polesitter Kutskov, who started sixth, then passed Wurz for the lead on lap five and won the race.

Ahead of the final round of the season at the Salzburgring, only three drivers were in contention for the title. Wurz led on 250 points, followed by Kutskov on 201 and Karhan on 194.

“Salzburgring is a nice track, but it only has a few corners, so it’s more of a slipstream battle,” he said. “I knew that if I finished second in every race I was going to win the championship, just playing it smart. I didn’t need to do anything unnecessary even if, as a competitor, you always want to win. You get to fight your battles to win the war.”

Wurz qualified second and finished there, 0.282 seconds behind Kutskov, after a race-long battle.

“In race one, there was a delayed start and the sun was setting, so they decided to abort the start and do a rolling one behind the safety car, which turned out to be useful because in the next two races, with the standing start, I stalled both times.”

Wurz found out after the season that he had gotten a new clutch for the last two rounds, which had been the apparent cause of his stalls.

“Me and my engineer weren’t told, and with the new clutch, I had a different feeling. You could sort of burn the clutch to make it softer, and that’s what we would’ve done if we had known,” Wurz said.

“The bite point was very short and very aggressive and very different compared to the previous clutch, so I tried to find the bite point, but given how short it was, I would pretty much go past it every time even if I was super smooth, which is very strange. At the time, I was very confused and I was trying many things to make sure I would find the bite point so I wouldn’t stall, but it wasn’t working.”

The 17-year-old won the championship with a race to spare after taking another second-place finish. He closed out the season by finishing third in race three.

Maffi Racing’s Kutskov finished only 25 points behind him after winning all three races in Salzburg. In the final three rounds, the Kyrgyz-licenced driver won five of the last nine races and had only one non-score.

“After the summer break, he really bounced back and then got a ton of podiums and wins. Luckily I didn’t do that badly so I managed to keep the championship lead, but he didn’t make it easy for me. In the last few rounds, he kept getting better and better and making it more challenging for me. He beat me in Saudi Arabia, so I wasn’t letting him beat me twice.”

Kutskov and Wurz also competed in one round each of Italian F4 in 2024. While Kutskov, who is continuing in F4 in 2025, finished seventh in race two at the season finale at Monza and scored Maffi’s only points of the season, Jenzer’s Wurz scored a best result of 21st in race two on his lone appearance in Mugello.

Citing the limited testing prior to the event compared with Italian F4 regulars, Wurz found the weekend “disappointing” and felt it wasn’t a “good showing of [his] level or the level of the CEZ championship”.

A few months after his standalone Italian F4 appearance, Wurz represented Austria in the FIA Motorsport Games’ F4 Cup with technical support from Tecnicar Motorsport.

His brother Charlie had previously represented Austria in 2022, when the F4 Cup was centrally run by Hitech GP and used the hybrid KC-MG01 F4 car.

In preparation, he raced in the Valencia round of Spanish F4 with Drivex, with Charlie coaching him. His best finish was 13th in race one.

“We knew we were going to do the MSG early in the season,” Wurz explained. “We did a test in Valencia with Drivex and we got a very good deal from Drivex to do the Valencia round because one of their drivers [Mikkel Gaarde Pedersen] dropped out.”

A major difference was the fact he raced on Hankook tyres in Spanish F4 rather than the various  Pirelli compounds he drove in other series.

“In CEZ we drove the DMA compound, while in the Motorsport Games we drove the DM compound, which is the same used in Italian F4,” he said.

“It’s a race weekend so you get to learn where the overtaking points are, where slipstream was effective, where the brake bias should be and how you do the starts there. It gave me an opportunity to get more experience with the track, and that was the main thing that helped me in preparation for the Motorsport Games.”

But when the event rolled around a month later, Wurz had a difficult time. After qualifying 15th, he finished the qualifying race 13th but rose to 11th after post-race penalties were applied. The Austrian’s main race ended at the end of lap one after a collision with Tosei Moriyama at the final corner broke his rear-left suspension.

“It was my mistake,” he said. “I should’ve left him more space at the apex. He continued on fine, but my suspension was broken so I had to retire immediately, which is a shame. I had built up for this race for a while and it ended in not even a lap.”

Wurz also noted the high number of track-limit violations, which also affected the Formula Winter Series round in Valencia earlier in the year.

“Valencia is a nice track, but its problem is the track limits in any category there and in the Motorsport Games specifically,” Wurz said.

“For some corners they had cameras, which makes the offence obvious, but for other corners you had marshals looking and they aren’t as consistent as a camera. It’s not against the marshals but it’s just a fact – there’s human error.

“They told us quite late about track limits. They called in an emergency briefing, which was called after practice two. They were appalled at us because we did such a horrible job with track limits and they had never seen something like that.” Drivers accumulated 206 track-limits violations in the 45-minute session.

“They have a list of every track-limit incident that happened, but they were only really monitoring four corners,” Wurz continued. “Then they said, ‘We’re checking everywhere’, so me and the other drivers saw that they were monitoring only four specific corners. [The communication] was confusing and it wasn’t clear, and those were monitored by cameras and the others were monitored by marshals, so it was very inconsistent. I got a penalty in the quali race, a lot of other drivers did too.”

Wurz made one final F4 appearance in 2024 two weeks later with Saintéloc Racing in the final round of that year’s championship in preparation. He scored a best result of 22nd in a weekend that “wasn’t very good”.

By this point, Wurz was considering offers from various teams for 2025, including one from Saintéloc to return to Spanish F4.

Despite the French team’s offering a Eurocup-3 drive, Wurz changed plans and joined Drivex for the upcoming Eurocup-3 season and its winter series starting later this week.

“We also had an offer from Saintéloc to do Eurocup-3,” Wurz said. “We had the choice between F4 and Eurocup-3, but at the same time, we got an offer from Drivex also for Eurocup-3. I had already done testing with Drivex, so I felt more at home with them.

“My very first Spanish F4 test was with them. My brother also tested for them, so we knew them very well and we got along very well.” 

As he prepares for his step up, Wurz is keeping his expectations in check.

“I wouldn’t say my expectations are the same as before. I’m a rookie. Getting experience is one of the most important things in motorsport and I think it shows,” he said. 

“Every driver wants to win, but I think you have to set realistic goals and achievable expectations. Hopefully I can get a few podiums this season and hopefully a win too. If we get more, I won’t complain! If you’re happy with how you perform, I think that’s the main thing – not only in racing but in life as well.”

Header photo credit: Harald Lindtner