GB3 is a series typically dominated by British and European drivers, but a quartet of Australian drivers have made their mark in 2025 by all sitting in the top eight positions overall heading into round four. Feeder Series gets to know the four drivers from Down Under flying their country’s flag halfway around the world.

By George Sanderson

GB3 is, by heritage, the most prestigious national-level championship on the European single-seater ladder. The series held all its rounds in one nation as recently as 2020, its final season under the British F3 name, and still retains a distinctly British flavour even in its more cosmopolitan guise as GB3, its name since August 2021.

With an eight-round calendar split between England’s most famous racing venues and iconic Formula 1 circuits in mainland Europe, it is a series often contested by – and dominated by – drivers from Europe, especially Great Britain.

Since rebranding to GB3, three of the four drivers to have won the title hailed from England, and of the 17 different drivers to have finished in the top five overall since then, 10 have run under the British flag. Only four have represented non-European nations, and only one of those – British-born New Zealander Louis Sharp – has actively fought for and won the title.

This year, the landscape is vastly different, and a different country – a former British colony – has left its mark on the series. From the current championship top five, three hail from Australia, as does the driver in eighth.

At the top, Rodin Motorsport’s Alex Ninovic leads the way on 165 points. Xcel Motorsport’s Patrick Heuzenroeder is second on 157, 24 points clear of the highest-placed Briton, Deagen Fairclough, in third. JHR Developments’ Noah Lisle is fifth on 128 points, while Gianmarco Pradel is eighth on 116.

Of the four Australians, only Heuzenroeder had prior GB3 experience, having placed 12th in the championship last year with JHR Developments. He scored a podium and three more top-five finishes, but he had yet to win – until he delivered a crushing display in race one at Zandvoort to win by 6.573 seconds.

“My management was really good then,” Heuzenroeder told Feeder Series afterwards. “I set out at a hot pace and could keep it for most of the race.”

Over the winter, Heuzenroeder switched teams to newcomers Xcel Motorsport, who had only begun racing in Europe last year in British F4. Their move into GB3 for 2025 was their first step above the F4 level, where they had thrived in their native United Arab Emirates, and Sydney’s Heuzenroeder was tasked with leading their charge as their only driver with GB3 experience.

The 19-year-old had gotten off to a decent start at Silverstone, capping off the weekend with a career-best second in the reverse-grid race, but Zandvoort marked a breakthrough. The victory launched Heuzenroder from fifth to the championship lead, which he took from Freddie Slater, and made Xcel the first GB3 or British F3 team to win within their first four races. 

Behind Heuzenroeder in third, just 0.263 seconds behind Fairclough, was Rodin Motorsport’s Pradel. The 19-year-old rookie from Sydney also finished third in his debut race at Silverstone, where he had been the lead Rodin throughout the weekend despite never having raced in the UK.

Pradel finished third and fourth in the opening two races, with teammates Ninovic and Abbi Pulling directly behind him both times. In the reverse-grid final race, he was collected in an incident involving Freddie Slater and Nikita Johnson and was forced to retire. Race one in Zandvoort represented his comeback performance, but he still recognised he had room to improve.

“There’s definitely been some places where I haven’t maximised points,” Pradel told Feeder Series. “You can see [in] all my race threes, definitely in Silverstone and Zandvoort, [there were] really good opportunities to bag some good points there.”

By the fourth race of the season, six of 12 podium slots had been taken by Australians, with Lisle finishing second in the first two races at Silverstone. Only Ninovic, who finished fourth behind Pradel in that opening race at Zandvoort, had failed to do so, but from there, the momentum within Rodin – and the intra-nation rivalry – swung his way.

As Pradel finished seventh, Ninovic won race two for his first GB3 podium ahead of Heuzenroeder. Pradel then retired from race three following an incident with Kai Daryanani and Yuanpu Cui, receiving a three-place grid drop for his next race for causing the collision, as Ninovic finished ninth.

Those results put Ninovic 14 points off Heuzenroeder’s lead, and he quickly overhauled him two weeks later at Spa. Ninovic had enjoyed his strongest day of the season there on Saturday, picking up his second victory in race one and finishing third in race two. The Sydneysider said he ‘struggled a little bit with pace’ in race two but was still ‘really happy with the job [he] did at the start to lead for about five laps’.

With those results, he led the drivers’ championship by 21 points coming into race three, but changing weather conditions caused chaos. The grid was split between slicks and wet tyres, and Ninovic started on the wet compound before pitting mid-race.

“As we were at the front, we decided to go onto slicks,” Ninovic told Feeder Series. “[We] came in, put slicks on and then went back out and were a lot faster, so it was looking promising. But then, unfortunately, we had an issue with the car at the end. I’m not sure what really happened, but I had to pull into the pit lane.”

A tyre came off Ninovic’s car as he went through Blanchimont at full speed. The 18-year-old managed to keep his car under control and return to the pit lane but had to pull over in the pit entrance to retire the car. Rodin Motorsport were fined £2,000 for the incident after accepting the stewards’ judgment that the car had been released from a pit stop in an unsafe condition.

Ninovic’s retirement from the reverse-grid race presented Heuzenroeder with a chance to make up ground. Having been set to start from third, he took a big gamble by pitting at the end of the formation lap to change from wet to slick tyres. The decision ultimately paid off as the track dried and Heuzenroeder charged through the field to finish fourth, earning 13 crucial points.

“It was a difficult decision to come in and box to put slicks on when you’re that far up the grid,” Heuzenroeder said to Feeder Series. “But then [I] really just put my head down and tried to find as much grip as I can. I really love these changing conditions and fought my way back through the field, got past even those who started on slicks.”

JHR Developments driver Lisle was to start alongside Heuzenroeder on the second row of the grid, but he stayed on wets. Despite having track position early on, he dropped to 14th by the chequered flag as the track dried up.

Lisle had also finished 14th in race two after opting to use a worn set of tyres and save his final set of fresh slicks for race three, which he would start from fourth. But he ended up never using that extra set of slicks because of the unpredictable conditions.

“I’m not unhappy with the decisions we made given the information available and where we were starting at the time,” Lisle said. “[It was] just very unfortunate that we couldn’t really capitalise on the situation because I think we could’ve scored a lot more points.”

“We were looking to go with the majority given we were starting at the front of the field, given the fact there was still spray on the track and there was a high probability of a shortened race, red flag or multiple safety cars,” he continued. “It was probably the logical decision to stay on the wets, but it didn’t play out that way, and unfortunately we lost out.”

Still, with fourth in race one, Lisle secured his sixth top-10 finish of the season and his best result since his two second-place finishes in the opening round at Silverstone. 

“There’s been a lot of positives, a lot of negatives – I’d say mainly the negatives coming from this round,” Lisle told Feeder Series. “It didn’t feel like we did a hell of a lot wrong, so I’m confident in the team that we’ve got. Everyone’s doing a really good job to move forward.”

Pradel also got caught out by the changing weather conditions too and missed out on points in a reverse-grid race for the third time

“[It was] just a bit unfortunate with the strategy,” said Pradel, who stayed on the wet compound at the start before pitting mid-race. “We thought it was going to stay a bit wetter than it was. [We] just rolled the dice and it didn’t go our way.”

With sixth, seventh and 16th in the three races, Pradel told Feeder Series that the Spa round ‘wasn’t the best weekend overall’. His 16th-place finish dropped him from fourth to eighth in the drivers’ standings as Fairclough, Slater, Kanato Le and Will Macintyre all overtook him. Slater performed a remarkable last-to-first drive after starting on the slick tyres, with his Hillspeed teammate Le finishing second to complete his hat-trick of podiums at Spa.

This weekend at the Hungaroring, Slater and Le are both competing in FR Europe rather than GB3. That means Lisle and Pradel have a golden opportunity to close the gap to their compatriots out front and make their mark on a series where their country has a strong foothold – even on the other side of the world.

The presence of drivers from Oceania in European championships directly correlates with the lack of high-level single-seater motorsport in their home nations. The cancellation of AU3 and the introduction of two generations of car in AU4, which led to the loss of FIA certification for the series and a break from the Australian F4 name, have strained the legitimacy of the championships.

For his part, Lisle said it was ‘quite cool’ to see so many Australians towards the sharp end considering the nation’s small market for single-seaters.

“It’s a bit of a different dynamic in Australian motorsport compared to European and British motorsport,” he said. 

“It’s really not quite as professional, so it’s really awesome to see us punching above our weight and really taking it to these guys.”

He added that as a driver, ‘you always want to be the person leading the championship, and below that, the best from your country’. But for Xcel’s Heuzenroeder, nationality makes no difference on track.

“It’s just another driver, to be honest,” he told Feeder Series. “[I] just want to beat them all! Whether they’re Australian or English or European or whatever, a driver’s a driver and once the helmet’s on, the visor’s down, [I] just want to beat everyone!”

“The patriot in me [is] pretty happy,” Pradel said, adding that whilst there was ‘a little bit’ of a rivalry between the Australians, they all had ‘different experience levels, different stages in [their] careers’.

“The way which I view it,” he said, “I’m just racing against myself and those other Australians. I don’t really see an extra competitiveness between them. I just see I’m this position in the championship, and I want to be first.”

As for championship leader Ninovic, he recognised that despite being in a championship fight with Heuzenroeder, Lisle and Pradel, he hadn’t battled with them extensively on the circuit.

“I haven’t really had much competition with any of them yet,” Ninovic said. “In the last three rounds, I haven’t really done much racing with many people on the track. I’ve been quite lucky to be either out on my own or just in the pack, not really doing much. It’ll be cool to see how it all unfolds during the year.”

All four will be hoping to win the GB3 drivers’ championship and progress into F3 and beyond, as series alumni Zak O’Sullivan, Luke Browning, Callum Voisin and Sharp have done in recent years.

And long-term, they have one Australian F1 championship leader to emulate by becoming successful at the highest level.

“It’s good to put Australia on the map,” Heuzenroeder said. “We’re definitely churning out some good drivers at the moment so it’s quite nice, and hopefully we can just follow in the footsteps of Oscar [Piastri] because he’s doing alright, isn’t he?”

Header photo credit: Jakob Ebrey Photography