Ever since he won the ROKiT Racing Star Competition UK in May 2022, Deagen Fairclough has gone from strength to strength in his racing career. An impressive debut GB3 season has followed his record-breaking British F4 title charge in 2024, and now he has driven a Formula 1 car for the first time. Feeder Series joined selected media in a press conference to speak with him about the experience.

By George Sanderson

Deagen Fairclough is living the dream of every young motorsport fan.

The 19-year-old does not come from your typical racing background. Hailing from a working-class family, he overcame financial barriers to pursue a career in motorsport. With the support of his father, and spare parts borrowed from other teams, he competed in karts from the age of five until he moved into the Junior Saloon Car Championship with Orex Competition at 14 years old.

After a sixth-place finish in the series’ 2020 season, Fairclough took on a part-time season with Ciceley Motorsport in the 2021 Fiesta Junior Championship, winning eight of the 14 races in which he competed and finishing fifth in the drivers’ standings. He planned to race the next season too but competed in just two races as a new opportunity arose.

Alongside racing Fiestas, he was back competing on his sim racing setup at his home in Surrey, which he describes as ‘right under the pathway of the rumble strip’ of London Gatwick Airport. It was from his sim that Fairclough found a pathway into single-seaters, through the ROKiT Racing Star competition in the UK.

“The biggest thing in motorsport is money,” he said. “When there’s competitions like what ROKiT set up, they’re able to find the true talent. But then it is obviously trying to extract the pace from the sim into real life with physical training.”

He did just that.

Winning the ROKiT Racing Star competition earned Fairclough a fully funded seat in British F4 for the 2023 season. The seat was originally to be with the Hitech-run ROKiT F4 Racing entity, but he eventually took up a full-time seat with JHR Developments with ROKiT backing. In his debut season, he achieved a third-place finish in the drivers’ championship, taking three victories and five further podiums.

Fairclough remained in British F4 for 2024 but moved to Hitech, also competing with the team in F4 UAE as preparation for the year. The teenager produced a record-breaking British F4 campaign, securing the most victories in a single season with 14 while also taking 15 pole positions, a total of 22 podiums and 579.5 points. 

He claimed the title with five races to spare and finished the season 222.5 points ahead of his nearest rival, Alex Ninovic. Eight days after the season ended, the Briton was announced to be making the step up to the GB3 Championship for 2025, remaining with Hitech for consecutive years and with ROKiT’s support once more.

Another equally pivotal development had occurred just weeks before. In September, Fairclough was revealed as one of the four finalists under consideration for that year’s Silverstone Autosport BRDC Young Driver of the Year Award. Seven of the 34 prior winners found places in F1 – including Lando Norris, George Russell and Jenson Button – while many more went on to professional racing careers in other categories.

Fairclough and the other finalists – Italian F4 and F4 UAE champion Freddie Slater, F3 title contender and Red Bull junior Arvid Lindblad and GB3 champion Louis Sharp – went through an assessment process in which they drove a MotorSport Vision Formula Two car, an RLR M Sport Ligier LMP3 car and a Beechdean AMR Aston Martin Vantage GT3.

Fairclough was announced as the winner of the award in January 2025 and is, at present, the last recipient of the accolade. The BRDC announced in August that the award would go ‘on hiatus for 2025’, ahead of a ‘re-evaluation’ of the competition. For winning the 2024 award, Fairclough secured himself a £200,000 cash prize and a test in an Aston Martin F1 car, which he completed on 28 August 2025.

“It is a dream come true,” he told Feeder Series. “I’ve dreamt of driving a Formula 1 car since the young age of four years old, five years old, when I would watch Lewis Hamilton on the TV and Ayrton Senna, dreaming to be like them.”

The test took place at Silverstone in Fernando Alonso’s AMR23, which he drove to eight podiums in the 2023 season, making it the most successful Aston Martin car in the championship to date. Fairclough embarked on a simulator day prior as preparation, saying the experience was ‘really beneficial’ and that he ‘learnt so much technique-wise for the Formula 1 car’. In the months leading up to the test, he also took on extra neck training to prepare him for the physicality of the car.

“There were a lot of days where we’d done a lot of neck training and core,” Fairclough said. “Waking up the next day, you felt like you were hit by a bus!”

Fairclough said the moment he went out on the track inside an F1 car for the first time ‘didn’t feel real’, calling it ‘phenomenal’. He was quickly brought back to reality, though, by the braking power of the AMR23.

“I remember just hitting the brakes and it just stopped,” he said with a laugh. “I was like, ‘Right, we’re going to have to really trust it today!’”

It wasn’t just the braking power that took Fairclough by surprise, for he was also impressed by the performance of the AMR23 in the higher-speed sections of the Silverstone circuit. In qualifying for the most recent GB3 round at Silverstone, Fairclough set a 1:52.634 lap time in his Tatuus MSV GB3-025. Now, he was driving a car with which Fernando Alonso set a 1:27.659 in qualifying for the 2023 British Grand Prix.

“The trust and capabilities of it at high speeds is ridiculous,” Fairclough said. “You can’t get your head around it to do Copse flat-out, to have the confidence [when] you’re going from a GB3 – where you’re braking or doing a half-lift – to just saying ‘screw it, let’s go flat-out’ and you’re going twice the speed.”

It was at Copse that his test ultimately came to a premature end. Feeder Series learned from multiple independent sources that Fairclough crashed at the corner in the afternoon while on a push run and did not return to the circuit. The Briton was unhurt in the incident, requiring only ‘precautionary checks’ from the on-site medical team.

The day after the test, Fairclough went to Aston Martin’s workshop at Silverstone to pass on his thanks to the team members who were involved in making the day happen. He also spoke of his gratitude towards his parents, Gaz and Sian Fairclough, for the ‘amount of sacrifices there have been’ to get him to this point in his career. 

“I’m so thankful to them,” Fairclough said. “They’re the biggest people in my life and they’ve brought me up so well, and I’m ever so thankful to them.”

Experiencing an F1 car for the first time has made Fairclough hungrier than ever to continue his upwards momentum through the motorsports ladder. He said that whilst he ‘can’t describe the actual sensation and feeling of the car’, the test day has shown him where he wants his career to lead.

“To actually drive the car was just another level,” he told Feeder Series. “It has really strived and motivated me to make it to the top step. We’ve got two more rounds of GB3 this year, so I’ve really got to maximise the best out of those two final rounds and hopefully we can progress up the ladder with ROKiT and Hitech.”

Whilst he said he was unsure where his immediate future would lie for 2026, Fairclough said that ‘the next step that would be quite nice would be to step into FIA [championships]’ but that a second year of GB3 ‘wouldn’t harm’ his career either.

For now, he returns to the GB3 Championship ‘[needing] a miracle’ if he is to finish the season as drivers’ champion. He sits fourth in the standings with six races to go but is 111 points behind championship leader and former British F4 rival Ninovic.

“We’ve just been a bit unfortunate,” Fairclough told Feeder Series. “I’ve had a few mistakes on my behalf that have set us back. It just hasn’t been the smoothest of rides and there’s been a lot that I’ve taken onboard this year and learnt myself.”

Despite this, the adjustment to GB3 was a challenge that he expected to face as he transitioned to a higher level of motorsport.

“We’ve come off such a high [with] the end of British F4 last year. To then try and keep that high is incredibly tough,” he told Feeder Series. “The setbacks and challenges, they’re only going to make you better in the long run.”

When Fairclough next races at Donington Park on 4 and 5 October, it will mark nearly a year to the day since the last time he took to the top step of the podium: the final race of the 2024 British F4 season, held at Brands Hatch on 6 October. Whilst he has enjoyed four podium finishes in GB3 so far this season – two at Zandvoort and two at Brands Hatch – he admits that ‘it sucks at the moment’ to face challenges like being the only driver in the top seven of the championship yet to win a race.

“We’re slowly building on the journey,” he told Feeder Series. “With Donington Park next, we had such strong results there last year, and hopefully we can get back on that top step.”

Header photo credit: ROKiT