It’s rare for established sports car teams to move into the high-cost world of junior single-seaters, but Nielsen Racing have done exactly that with their Euroformula Open squad launched earlier this year. Edward Pearson has been the keystone of their campaign with two wins, and Feeder Series caught up with the Briton to find out more about his season and the team’s transition to single-seaters.

By Marco Albertini

Few would have expected single-seater newcomers Nielsen Racing to win on their Euroformula Open debut. After all, their competition was Motopark, Euroformula Open’s longtime dominators, and BVM Racing, who had taken the fight to the German juggernaut over the years and looked set to do so again with former GB3 frontrunner Tymek Kucharczyk.

With Edward Pearson at the season opener in Portimão, Nielsen defied expectations and defeated their competition on merit

The 18-year-old started third, but he fell to sixth midway through the opening lap after being caught off guard by Diego de la Torre and Yevan David, who pulled off late moves on him at Turn 5.

Pearson then passed Everett Stack on the same lap, De la Torre on lap four and returned to third by lap six as he passed José Garfias, before passing David for second five laps later. At the time, at the beginning of lap 12, he was 4.050 seconds behind leader Michael Shin. From there, Pearson was the fastest car on track as he inched closer to Shin, only being 1.658s behind him at the end of lap 15.

At the start of the following lap, Shin spun at Turn 1 and surrendered the lead to Pearson.

The Nielsen Racing driver led only two full laps – but he led the one that counted, defeating Shin by a margin of 2.824s to take his and the team’s first win in Euroformula Open competition.

“It was an interesting race,” Pearson recalls. “Not the best start because Tymek stalled, so I had to go around him, and then I had a small mistake into Turn 5, so I got dive-bombed, pushed back to P6.

“And then it was one of those things – you get in the groove. The car was on rails the whole race, very consistent pace, and I just started going, going, going and the car just carried on building and building and building.

“I remember I was about 10 minutes left and I had probably a three-, four-second gap to Shin and I was like, ’Okay, give me the lap times of Shin.’ [My engineer] was like, ’What do you mean?’ I said, ’We will catch him, I believe.’ So we carried on catching, catching, catching.

“Of course, some people say it’s luck that he spun, but I don’t say it’s luck. I think we would have overtaken him anyway. We had such incredible pace that race. We were catching him at half a second a lap at the end and we really showed that weekend that we were a force to be reckoned with. For example, race three, as soon as I got out of traffic, I did my fastest lap on the last lap, really showed the pace of the car and our race car, which is great.

“So no, it was harder than it probably should have been, my first-ever single-seater win. Which is scary for me to even say that that was my first single-seater win, but it was done the best way possible and I couldn’t imagine it with anyone else.”

Prior to this season, Pearson spent one and a half years in GB3 with Fortec Motorsport, scoring two reverse-grid podiums in his rookie year and finishing 19th in points. His sophomore season didn’t pan out as he hoped, and he took a best result of only eighth at Zandvoort before departing the team with two rounds left to join Motopark to race in Euroformula Open.

“We decided halfway through that it would be a better suit for me to move,” Pearson explained. “We didn’t think we were in the right place for me to improve as a driver, and also the results weren’t there as we should have expected. We weren’t as competitive as we thought we would be. We expected [to be] fighting for the championship, but we were more fighting for tenth and ninth place, which for me wasn’t where I believed I could be.

“We took the move to Motopark more for the fact that they’re a great team, very well respected and really got my confidence back because I lost a bit of confidence in GB3 and struggled with that. So Motopark did a great job of really building up my confidence, and that was the main reason we moved.”

Competing in Euroformula Open’s Red Bull Ring and Barcelona rounds, Pearson finished second on debut before taking two more podiums in the following five races. Though the grid was significantly smaller than GB3’s, Pearson’s worst result was seventh – still better than his best result in the British championship.

“The way that they set up things here with the pre-events is great,” Pearson said. “I really understood the car as soon as I got in it. Testing was fast and, obviously, in the wet, first race was P2 from P6. [I] was overall really happy. And the transition was hard, but once I got my head around the car, it was a beautiful car to drive, and that’s also what spurred me on to do another year.”

Three months after the round in Barcelona in late September, Pearson was contacted by Nielsen Racing owner David ’Sven’ Thompson, who was building the foundations of his newest venture in motorsports. A mainstay in sports car competitions throughout their 11-year history, Nielsen Racing decided to add a single-seater campaign on top of their existing sports car commitments for 2025, with Pearson as the centerpiece of the programme alongside Finley Green and Shawn Rashid.

“Sven came to me probably February, January, and he said, ‘I’m thinking about starting this Euroformula team.’ He spoke to my manager and the manager spoke to me and then I had to sit down with Sven, and he was straight up with me. He said, ‘We’re new with this. We’re going to be new and it’s going to be hard, but we believe we can do it.’

“I trust Sven totally. He’s been great. He tells you how it is and it’s always bang on. This year has been great. We’ve really evolved the car well and it’s been in a good position.

“Obviously, you have up and downs as a new team and everyone has ups and downs. It hasn’t been a perfect ride for everyone on this grid, but it was a move that I’m happy I made because as great as Motorpark is, you have to be outside your comfort zone at some point in your life.”

At Nielsen Racing, Pearson is coached by 2021 GB3 runner-up Ayrton Simmons, who had previous experience in Euroformula Open from part-time campaigns in both 2020 and 2022 for Double R Racing and Drivex.

“It’s quite funny because my old driver coach, Kieran Vernon, used to coach Ayrton when I was in Ginettas, when he was coaching me, so I’ve known of Ayrton for a long time,” Pearson said. “Some driver coaches mess around. They don’t tell you exactly what you want to know, [but he] tells you how it is, and that’s why he’s so good. And he’s been a really great help. I don’t think we’d be where we are without him. So he’s been a great bonus to the team throughout the year.”

Switching from the Dallara 320 to the series’ new Dallara 324 chassis for 2025, Pearson had to adapt to a heavier but more powerful package along with different tyres, as Pirelli introduced the F4-spec DMA compound for this year.

“You had to learn a couple of different things,” Pearson said. “There’s going to be different balances because it’s heavier and [turbocharged], but as a driver, you naturally adapt. I adapted well at [the pre-season test in] Barcelona, and then obviously we have done a decent job this season. It’s been a bit up and down, but it’s been good. With the new team as well, on top of that, it’s a lot, but I think me and the team have done a good job, and they’ve helped me adapt to the car as well as I could have.”

After his maiden win and a subsequent third-place finish in race two at Portimão, Pearson scored three podiums in the following three rounds, but he took only one top-five finish across the Le Castellet and Spielberg weekends and slipped firmly out of the title race.

Two weeks ago at Barcelona, the season’s penultimate round, Pearson led all 17 laps in race two to take his second win of the season, 2.221 seconds ahead of Yevan David, before new teammate Theo Micouris’ second place in race three made it the best weekend for the team since Portimão. Having made good on his desire to fight for podiums again after the summer break, Pearson enters Monza fifth with 214 points, 107 points off leader Kucharczyk before dropped points are applied.

“It’s a hard thing for them,” he said. “We’ve got a great engineering group that have experienced these tracks, who have been on Dallaras in the past. My engineer, Ruggero [Cafagna], is very experienced. So me and him have worked really hard together and really close to really get the car in the right window.

“Of course, you’re going to have moments. Spa was one of them. We really didn’t have the pace in quali. It was more my job. We still got a podium on the weekend, but pace-wise, we shouldn’t have been there. It was a little bit of luck, a little bit of right placement of car, and we were there. And then Paul Ricard looked pretty bad, but actually on paper, we were pretty fast and it was annoying that we didn’t maximise that. A couple of issues with just traffic and little things, but these things happen in a championship.”

Header photo credit: Euroformula Open Championship