Hitech’s Keanu Al Azhari claimed his first victory in the GB3 Championship in race two at Silverstone. After the achievement, he told Feeder Series about how his recent run of form is spurring a surprise title charge heading into the final three rounds of the 2025 season.

By George Sanderson

Keanu Al Azhari could have been a two-time single-seater champion last year.

In both the 2024 F4 UAE and Spanish F4 championships, the Emirati-licenced driver led the way heading into the season finales, only to finish the campaigns in third and second respectively. Failing to finish on the podium at F4 UAE’s finale at the Dubai Autodrome meant that Freddie Slater and Kean Nakamura-Berta leapfrogged him in the standings, whilst four wins in the final six Spanish F4 races helped Mattia Colnaghi steal the title by 10 points as Al Azhari’s early advantage faded.

Those defeats mean Al Azhari is still pursuing his maiden single-seater title. This year, he’s on a mission to take it with a come-from-behind triumph.

Al Azhari is currently fourth in the 2025 GB3 Championship drivers’ standings, some 68 points behind overall leader Alex Ninovic of Rodin Motorsport. With nine races remaining, the Hitech driver is certainly an outside bet for the title. But form is on his side.

Only Rodin’s Gianmarco Pradel has outscored Al Azhari since GB3 arrived in Budapest at the start of July. With four podiums from his last six races and a seventh-place finish in the Budapest reverse-grid race – in which he picked up an additional four points for positions gained – Al Azhari seems firmly like the driver to beat.

It could have been an even more impressive points record if not for a mistake at the start of race one in Budapest. Al Azhari started from pole, having secured pole position in the first qualifying session, but dropped back to fourth on the opening lap. 

“It was quite clear that it was not a great start,” he told Feeder Series at the time. “Nothing really went right in the whole clutch-release phase. It happens, but I’m obviously very disappointed in myself for that.”

He recovered to third by the chequered flag after taking advantage of a poor safety car restart from Ninovic with an overtake into Turn 1.

“I planned that out pretty well and I was happy to get back up on to the podium,” Al Azhari said. “The pace was definitely there to have an easy win. I’m not very happy with myself, but mostly happy for the team that all the hard work they’ve done, they get some result out of it.”

Al Azhari demonstrated boldness and high confidence on the brakes at the Hungaroring’s first corner throughout the weekend, as he did with the overtake on Ninovic. But it was this confidence that cost him in the reverse-grid third race at Silverstone. Running in 10th place, Al Azhari lost his front wing after appearing to run into the back of Michael Shin on the pit straight at the start of the final lap, forcing him to finish the race in pit lane.

“[Some] wrong decisions happened down the pit straight,” he told Feeder Series. “We take what we can learn and move on. It was very lucky to come away from it with no injuries and not much damage. We always have to remember how dangerous it is.”

Al Azhari had also lost one of his mirrors on the penultimate lap, explaining that ‘a little bit of debris’ had hit his front suspension and bounced into the air, knocking it off. Despite joking that people should ‘ignore race three’, he was pleased with his performances as a whole, having secured third in race one and his first GB3 victory in race two.

Starting from third in that race, Al Azhari again dropped back at the start and fell behind Patrick Heuzenroeder at Maggotts. He began to put pressure on the Xcel Motorsport driver after a short safety car intervention to recover Abbi Pulling’s damaged Rodin, but Heuzenroeder successfully defended his third place until lap seven of 12.

That lap, as the leading pair of Ninovic and Deagen Fairclough came together at Brooklands, Al Azhari snuck down the inside of Heuzenroeder at the same corner. As teammate Fairclough limped through Luffield with a damaged front wing, Al Azhari then went around the outside to steal the race lead.

He briefly lost the lead to Heuzenroeder on lap nine through the Arena complex but regained it at Brooklands the following lap. From there, he went on to win by 1.588 seconds.

“[The team] did a great job to get the car sorted throughout testing and I think our pace immediately reflected it in qualifying,” he told Feeder Series. “It was a relief to get the P1, obviously a big check mark gone in the books.”

Combined with his third-, second- and seventh-place finishes in Budapest, Al Azhari has seen a big upturn in form over the past two rounds. The opening nine races yielded just two results inside the top five, but he said that his ‘struggling’ at the start of the season may have been out of his control after the team found ‘something significant’ before round four that was costing him performance from the car.

The Budapest and Silverstone rounds have since shown that Hitech’s changes, whatever they were, had certainly paid off.

“We were finally able to show our pace,” he said. “I felt how strong our race pace was in race one [at Silverstone], and I told the team afterwards: ‘We need to start winning.’ And first thing the next morning, we got it done!”

Al Azhari said he was ‘very happy’ with the car heading into the closing rounds of the season at Brands Hatch, Donington Park and Monza. Seeing his own progress over the season has also boosted the 17-year-old’s self-confidence after what was a tough start to life in GB3.

“I’ve shown my mental strengths at many points of the season and also my development as a driver,” he told Feeder Series. “To start off on the back foot and halfway through the season come and start to win races, it’s obviously a good sign of strength [and] development from my side and the team’s. I’m very happy and, as I say, more motivated than ever to do better.”

His improved form has also helped Hitech stay in the fight with the ever-consistent Rodin in the teams’ championship this season. With teammate Nikita Johnson missing the last two rounds to race for DAMS and Hitech in F3, Al Azhari and Fairclough have been the sole drivers bringing in points for the Silverstone-based team. Johnson is expected to return to GB3 for the last three rounds.

Arriving at Silverstone 15 points behind their rivals, Hitech had closed the gap in the teams’ standings to just 10 points prior to race three. Al Azhari and Fairclough’s double retirement in the final race, coupled with Pradel’s win and Ninovic’s fourth place, then reopened that gap to 50 points – the biggest it has been all season.

“[Rodin] definitely did some good things over the winter to get on the front foot for the first couple of rounds,” Al Azhari told Feeder Series. “We’ve really started to turn it around, like I said before. Me and Deagen have been solidly quick everywhere we go, and just finishing those races is exactly what we need.”

Al Azhari has five podiums to his name this season, tying him with championship leader Ninovic as having the second most behind Pradel with six. As the two drivers in the richest vein of form in the series, Al Azhari and Pradel remain outside bets in the race for the drivers’ title. But, having climbed from 12th to fourth in the drivers’ standings in just two rounds, Al Azhari is just focusing on continuing to improve wherever he can.

“In this championship, there [are] so many things at play. The most important is to keep bringing in those points and finishing races,” he said. “That’s my main aim, to stay consistently within the top five and bring home those results for the team.”

Header photo credit: Jakob Ebrey Photography