The Formula 3 championship standings closed up dramatically in Monaco as points leader Rafael Câmara scored minimal points across the two races. Feeder Series sums up the main takeaways from the fourth round of the 2025 championship.

By Tori Turner

After topping practice on Thursday and taking his maiden pole position during Friday’s split qualifying session, Campos Racing’s Nikola Tsolov set a new record by winning his fifth race in the series on Sunday. The Bulgarian driver led all laps of the feature race, with Roman Bilinski and teammate Mari Boya joining him on the podium. In Saturday’s sprint race, McLaren junior Martinius Stenshorne won his second race in F3 ahead of the ART Grand Prix pair of Tuukka Taponen and Laurens van Hoepen.

• Qualifying report and quotes: Tsolov shines in Monaco to claim dominant maiden F3 pole
• Sprint race report and quotes: Stenshorne ‘got it right’ at the start to win Monaco F3 sprint
• Feature race report and quotes: Tsolov says he ‘couldn’t feel any better’ after breaking F3 win record

1. Nobody’s perfect – not even Câmara

Rafael Câmara entered the weekend with a 21-point lead in the championship standings. By the end of the fourth round, the Brazilian’s gap decreased to 13 after he only scored four points in Monaco. 

In qualifying on Friday, Câmara took to the track in the second of the two groups and struggled to recapture the form he displayed in his previous three performances. With a time of 1:25.484, he placed fourth in his group, missing out on taking his fourth pole position in a row. To add to his misfortune, he received a three-place grid penalty for both races for failing to respect the minimum delta time during the red flag in his group.

Câmara started Sunday’s feature race down in 11th and could not make up positions on his own. Things went from bad to worse for Câmara at the end of lap 23, when his right-rear tyre detached from the car out of nowhere at Rascasse. While he managed to pit immediately after and avoid causing another safety car, his race still ended prematurely when he was ninth and in position to earn two valuable championship points. 

The silver lining for Câmara came the day before, when he scored his first sprint race points of the season. Sprint races had seemingly been his major weakness in his title campaign so far, and his title rivals had gained points on him whilst he failed to score. 

Starting from eighth on the grid, Câmara overtook Prema’s Noel León heading into Mirabeau for seventh on the opening lap. The Brazilian driver remained there for the rest of the race, bringing home four points. 

2. Rodin’s best weekend shows evolution from 2024

Rodin Motorsport had their most successful race weekend of the 2025 F3 season in Monaco, scoring the second-most points among the teams.

Roman Bilinski was responsible for 18 of their 35 points thanks to a strong performance all weekend. The Polish-British driver had his best qualifying of his rookie season on Friday, topping Group B and taking second overall with a 1:25.332, and he held the position for all 27 laps of the feature race.

In fact, during Sunday’s feature race, all three Rodin drivers scored points for the first time in F3. Voisin finished in fourth, 0.671 seconds shy of the podium, whilst Sharp placed ninth. Voisin and Sharp also managed to finish in the points-paying positions in the sprint with ninth and 10th respectively, with Bilinski falling just one position short.

Rodin now have 89 points, more than the 85 they scored in the entirety of 2024 or any year-end total from any of their five seasons as Carlin – showing just how far the team have come.

“I’d say it’s a very positive thing. Callum and Louis are also two really great drivers, and we’re pushing each other very, very hard,” Bilinski told Feeder Series in the post–feature race press conference.

“The teams made some changes internally in the off-season, and with how hard we’ve all worked in all of these things, I think it’s nice to see those results now happening. I’d say there’s been a lot of hard work, there’s been some changes made, and for sure now those results are showing, so it’s all a good thing.”

Having earned his second podium of the season, Bilinski now sits seventh in the championship standings on 38 points, with teammate Callum Voisin just two points ahead. Rodin now sit fourth in the teams’ championship, just 11 points behind third-placed MP Motorsport, heading into the last of three back-to-back race weekends at Barcelona.

3. What’s going wrong at Prema?

Prema Racing are a powerhouse in F3. As the series’ most successful team, they have won the teams’ championship five times and the drivers’ championship three times since the series’ inception in 2019. Trident dethroned Prema in 2021 by a narrow margin of three points, but Prema bounced back the next year to take back the title.

In 2024, Prema stormed to the teams’ championship once again, winning by a hefty margin of 71 points as their drivers finished second, fourth and sixth in the standings and fought for the title until the very end. This year, however, has been a drastic contrast to their former glory.

After four rounds of the 2025 championship, Prema sits last in the standings with just seven points from their three drivers. Noel León and Ugo Ugochukwu are the two drivers responsible for those points, with Brando Badoer failing to notch any so far this season.

Monaco proved to be a continuation of their struggles, and the team missed out on points again. León initially showed pace during qualifying, finishing third in Group A. That put him in position to score points in both races, but his weekend proved to be a disaster. Contact with Voisin on the opening lap of the sprint put him in the barrier at Mirabeau Bas. On Sunday, he crashed out at the same spot once again, this time on lap 18 while running sixth.

Three laps after León’s incident, Badoer’s feature race ended at Portier just a few metres later after he made contact with Nicola Marinangeli. He was 20th of 24 finishers in the sprint race.

Ugochukwu’s weekend was also unremarkable, but the American driver at least managed to make up one position in the sprint race to finish 13th overall. He finished 16th in the feature after losing eight positions on the first safety car restart lap in a battle at the hairpin.

Results and standings after round 4 at Monaco

Results	P1	P2	P3
Qualifying (Group A)	Nikola Tsolov, 1:24.882	Mari Boya, +0.127s	Noel León, +0.504s
Qualifying (Group B)	Roman Bilinski, 1:25.332	Callum Voisin, +0.027s	Tim Tramnitz, +0.093s
Sprint race (23 laps)	Martinius Stenshorne, 38:25.135	Tuukka Taponen, +2.253s	Laurens van Hoepen, +4.770s
Feature race (27 laps)	Nikola Tsolov, 42:16.874	Roman Bilinski, +7.243s	Mari Boya, +7.737s

Standings	Drivers	Teams
P1	Rafael Câmara, 77	Trident, 144
P2	Tim Tramnitz, 64	Campos Racing, 106
P3	Nikola Tsolov, 61	MP Motorsport, 100
P4	Noah Strømsted, 52	Rodin Motorsport, 89
P5	Tuukka Taponen, 51	ART Grand Prix, 68
P6	Callum Voisin, 40	Van Amersfoort Racing, 54
P7	Roman Bilinski, 38	Hitech, 35
P8	Santiago Ramos, 35	AIX Racing, 27
P9	Martinius Stenshorne, 35	DAMS, 10
P10	Mari Boya, 32	Prema Racing, 7

Read our takeaways from the previous round here.

Additional reporting by Daniele Spadi

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency