Just a few months after testing F1 machinery as a prize for winning the 2023 Aston Martin Autosport BRDC Young Driver of the Year Award, Joseph Loake left the single-seater world to chase a career in sports cars. Earlier this year, Feeder Series caught up with Loake in the GT World Challenge Europe paddock at Monza to find out why.

By Marco Albertini

Less than two years ago, Joseph Loake was announced as the 2023 Aston Martin Autosport BRDC Young Driver of the Year Award winner off the back of a breakthrough GB3 season. As his prize, he earned a test with a two-year-old F1 car in the midst of his only season of F3 – an opportunity generally reserved for those on the path to single-seater greatness.

Loake, however, was already pivoting towards another trajectory. Saddled with a limited personal budget and mired in a difficult F3 campaign with only two points finishes, Loake began looking beyond the F1 ladder – first to the IndyCar pipeline and then to sports cars with McLaren in the GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup.

“I think I did the best I could and I learned so much,” he told Feeder Series on reflection. “Now, I can go into my professional career having learned all of that and already be one step ahead of a lot of the other guys jumping to GTs in a couple of years’ time.”

Loake began karting in 2016 aged 10 at a local track near his hometown of Macclesfield, England. He mainly raced in the NatSKA series, coming second in the Class 15 standings in his final year of karting in 2018.

Loake then stepped up to cars the following year, joining the BRSCC Fiesta Junior Championship. Loake was the runner-up in points in his rookie year before taking the overall title in 2020.

After testing F4 machinery in late 2020, Loake made his single-seater debut the following year in British F4. That was the start of his long-term relationship with JHR Developments – the team that carried him through the ranks in the United Kingdom – and the foundation for his later single-seater success.

“The best thing I ever did was to be with JHR for that long,” Loake said. “They properly put their hand around my shoulder for all three of those years.

“They definitely brought me up tough, put it that way. When I got into single-seaters, I was quite shy, quite naïve, quite reserved, let’s say. But they definitely brought me [out of] my shell a lot.

“Steve Hunter, the guy that runs the team, all he did was just batter me down because he knew that I’d get back up stronger. At the time I couldn’t see it, but I look back now, and I know how much of a better driver it made me.

“And it really unlocked the potential in me as well, which is what I still to this day give back to him. I still talk to him every now and then. He’s a good guy. We don’t always agree on everything, but he definitely did right by me, and I’ll forever be grateful for what he did for me.”

That potential was evident from his opening-round victory in the wet in his rookie British F4 season, and it only grew from there. In his two British F4 campaigns, Loake amassed a total of seven wins and finished sixth and fifth in the standings. 

When he stepped up to GB3 for 2023, he won on debut at Oulton Park before taking three more wins in the other seven rounds to end the season third in points, behind only Hitech’s Alex Dunne and champion Callum Voisin of Rodin Carlin.

Despite showing strong pace throughout the season, Loake said his year didn’t get off to the best of starts, with differential issues hampering him in pre-season testing.

“It was a surprise,” Loake said. “I didn’t expect to be pole and win at my first race. That was not expected, but I felt strong. All the way through pre-season, I’d felt pretty good. I’d had an issue with my differential for the whole of pre-season, so it had looked a bit tricky. I was P12, P15, that region and I was going, ‘This is not going great. I’m struggling.’ 

“Then we found the issue, and we found it about a test day before round one, so then we fixed the issue during that test day. I got out for a few laps, and instantly it was like, ‘Wow, this is great.’ And then I turned up at round one and straight away it was quick – P3 in the first practice and then kept getting quicker. I had the car in a really good place.

“Like I say, JHR, they did everything they could for me, so the car was quick, and I just had to do a good job. And that’s what I did that weekend.

“I had my fair share of good luck that year as well, I will say. I got quite lucky at Silverstone. But I’m a believer that you don’t just get lucky. You have to make your own luck a little bit and I still put myself in the place for that to happen that year.

“To fight for the title was not expected. Even round three, four, I was leading the standings, but I didn’t really think I was going to stay there in my head. It was weird. But it was a really good year. It was a year that I proved to myself that I am good enough to be there. And if it wasn’t for my GB3 year, I wouldn’t have gotten the [Autosport BRDC] award. I wouldn’t have done F3 and all of that.” 

The 2023 GB3 title protagonists all moved up to F3 in 2024 as three highly regarded rookies, with Loake joining Voisin and returning driver Piotr Wiśnicki at Rodin Motorsport. Yet while Voisin finished 12th with 67 points and Dunne 14th with 50 points, Loake only scored eight points on his way to 26th in the drivers’ standings and last among the Rodin cars. Wiśnicki’s fifth place at Silverstone put him ahead of Loake in the standings even though the British driver outqualified him 9–1.

All of Loake’s points, meanwhile, came at Monaco, one of two street circuits on the F3 calendar. Having qualified fourth in Group B, he started fifth and eighth for the races and finished fifth and ninth on his first visit to the circuit.

“A lot of drivers have done the jump and made it work,” Loake said. “Going into the season, I was already on the back foot. I’d had no testing beforehand. The first time I drove the F3 car or anything that speed was in Bahrain [in pre-season testing], so I was turning up to tracks not knowing where I was going. Imola I’d never driven beforehand.

“There were a lot of things that weren’t playing into my hands before we even started. A few mishaps from my end, I made a few mistakes throughout the year. But the main thing is I learned from them, and while I didn’t get that second year of F3 that I feel maybe I should have got, I still think I learned so much that I would go and do that year a million times over, just because I learned so much. 

“I can tell my experience from that has really helped push me into a better driver, and I’m definitely performing at a much higher level now than I was last year.”

Loake’s struggles in his rookie year in F3 were due to a difference in tyre behavior, as he put it. The Tatuus MSV-022 he drove in GB3 had eight-inch front and 10-inch rear tyres, whereas last year’s F3 car had much bigger tyres, which measured 13 inches in diameter. F3’s Pirelli tyres also degraded much more quickly than did GB3’s, which made less of a difference on circuits such as Monaco and much more on higher-degradation tracks such as Silverstone.

“In terms of just pushing on one lap, the actual car is not much different,” Loake said. “It’s just quicker. It’s got more aero, but you drove it in a very similar way.

“The biggest thing was obviously you’ve got a lot more aero and more power, and also the tyres were a pretty big one. You could struggle to even get one push lap out of an F3 tyre, whereas GB3, you could pound around, do eight laps, and you’d still be getting quicker by the end if you did a good lap.

“I think that was the biggest thing for me and I definitely struggled with that in F3. That was where I fell down a little bit. There was just so much to do with the tyres.”

In August, during Loake’s only season in F3, he also got to test the Aston Martin AMR22 F1 car as a prize for winning the BRDC Autosport Award the previous December. He also earned a £200,000 cash prize to put towards his future career.

“I don’t think anything is comparable to a Formula 1 car,” Loake said. “It was just incredible. Every single second of driving that car was just mind-blowing. The power, the brakes, the aero, everything about it was just ridiculous. So the fact I even got to drive one was incredible to start with. To have done it in the way that I did after winning the award was also very special.

“I look back at my single-seater racing and to a point wish I’d have had a couple more years of trying to get to Formula 1. At the same time, I achieved a lot with a very limited budget, and it’s very rare nowadays that you see a driver make it that far on the budget that I had, so I can be really proud of what I’ve done.”

Before his jump to GT racing, Loake still looked to single-seater racing – albeit outside of Europe. At the end of 2024, Loake tested USF Pro 2000 machinery several times for Turn 3 Motorsport. His first test came at the series’ only oval in Indianapolis Raceway Park, where he said he was ‘spending a lot of time scared’. 

Even after testing the same car at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course, where he led two of the six sessions and finished in the top four in the other, Loake forwent the opportunity to continue his career in single-seaters, citing budget limitations.

“The main thing was the money aspect,” Loake said. “If I was to try and go over to the US, obviously the goal would be IndyCar. To be able to do that, I’ve got to pay for at least a season in USF Pro. Ideally, I then win the scholarship to be able to do Indy NXT, but then I’d have to go and win Indy NXT first year, and then I’d have to jump in and find an IndyCar seat that isn’t paid for by me.

“Most of these guys going into IndyCar, they’re still paying for their seat. It’s almost impossible for me to get to IndyCar on the budget that I had, so we decided the safer slash more sensible route would be to jump to the GTs and make a career out of this. That’s what I always hoped for, and McLaren have given me that way in.”

A year on from his F1 test, Loake is now aligned with the marque that served as the award’s original naming partner from 1989 to 2019, albeit firmly on the sports car path.

Halfway through his maiden campaign in GT World Challenge Europe Endurance Cup, Loake has taken one podium at round two in Monza as part of McLaren’s Garage 59 entry.  He and his teammates, former single-seater drivers Marvin Kirchhöfer and Benjamin Goethe, sit sixth in the overall standings.

“Our pace has been really strong, myself as well. I’ve come on leaps and bounds since the start of the year,” Loake said. “The main thing about this year is just learning, getting up to speed. I’ve got some very good teammates, Marvin being one of them. So for him to be in the same car and I have all of his data, all of his onboards, I can learn a lot, which is what I’m doing.

“So far I think the pace has been a lot stronger than I almost expected. … In Paul Ricard, we had the gearbox issue so early in the race, but I think the pace that we’ve shown that weekend showed that we can fight for podiums and maybe wins. We’ve just got to put ourselves in a good place to do that.”

“[McLaren have] given me a really good deal this year,” Loake added. “They’ve taken me under their wing really nicely. They’re giving me loads of work behind the scenes, trying to help me get up to speed, and it’s just the first time that I’ve properly felt really valued within not just a team but also just a company in general. Being a part of the factory team is big at my age, so it was a deal I couldn’t really turn down. I thought I’d go to GTs and see what I’m made of out here.”

Header photo credit: GT World Challenge Europe