Campos Racing’s Mari Boya currently sits fourth in the Formula 3 drivers’ championship standings after taking three back-to-back podiums. Feeder Series spoke to Boya ahead of the eighth round of 2025 in Belgium to find out what valuable lessons he’s learned throughout his three seasons in the series. 

By Tori Turner

Boya failed to score points during the first three races of the 2025 season, but he turned his campaign around and accumulated results that eventually turned him into a title contender.

Since the Bahrain feature race, the 21-year-old has finished in the points-paying positions nine times, with four of those results being podiums. The undisputed highlight of his third season so far and second with Campos came during the last round in Silverstone, where he took his second victory in F3.

The Aston Martin junior made the wise decision to switch to wet tyres before the start of the feature race given the high chance that rain would fall.

The strategy immediately played into his hands when the race began as he launched from fourth on the grid to first heading into Turn 1. As forecast, heavy rain fell throughout the race, causing multiple incidents before proceedings were halted after just 14 laps.

“The last races have been really good for us,” Boya told Feeder Series at a virtual media roundtable ahead of the Spa round. “The speed and the dynamic we work with have been pretty similar to the past, so I just keep doing the same. The only [difference] is that the luck has been a bit more on our side. At the beginning of the season, we had some races where we couldn’t maximise all our potential because there were situations completely outside of our control, and now, things are starting to go our way.”

Having taken his first victory of the season, Boya sits fourth in the standings with 85 points, 35 points away from championship leader Rafael Câmara. Like his teammate and now championship rival, Nikola Tsolov, Boya is one of the most experienced drivers on the 2025 grid, with three years in F3 under his belt.

Despite having his best and most consistent campaign in the series this year, Boya believes that his experiences in his first two seasons contributed to his performances in 2025.

“Last year, it was just a super tricky year for me when things were really not going our way,” he said. “There were many weekends where we really don’t understand what happened still. Sometimes it’s better to forget, but I’ve kept working the same as I did last year. It’s better to sometimes just follow your instinct. I have good experience in cars and in racing, so normally your first instinct and the natural thing that comes to you is the best thing.”

Boya scored his first F3 podium at the end of his rookie season in 2023 in the sprint race in Monza. He carried that momentum into the start of his second season after switching teams from MP Motorsport to Campos Racing. The Spaniard finished in the points consistently in the first half of his campaign and achieved his first win at his home race in Barcelona, but he only scored five points in the aftermath of his win. 

Boya said that he learned the most during his first F3 season and that he still applies those lessons when he’s racing today. 

“What I learned from the first year is that it’s a championship that doesn’t pay off when you always risk 100 per cent,” he said. “I was getting thousands of laps deleted and my weekend was always compromised despite the pace being there since day one in the category. I was starting really far back because I was always overpushing or had track limits. I never had a lap to be fighting for or being in the top 10. The pure pace was more than possible, but I wasn’t able to maximise that.

“This year, it is one of the things that I am better at and I am clearly still trying to work on to be consistent.”

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency