Ary Bansal only led the GB4 Championship for one day this year – but it was the day it mattered. He sat down with Feeder Series to reflect on the dramatic Donington Park season finale that earned him the title and his successful 2025 in racing as a whole.

By George Sanderson

Every championship has its big moments across the season – the ones that define legacies and decide titles. 

This year in GB4, one of those moments happened on the final day of the season. Not when the title was claimed, of course – instead, it took place away from the cameras on an overcast October morning in Donington Park sometime between races two and three.

GB4 was in its final round of the 2025 season, and the second race of the weekend proved to be a crucial moment in deciding the fate of the drivers’ championship.

Going into race two of four that weekend, Daniel Guinchard of Hillspeed led the GB4 drivers’ title fight on 350 points. The British-Polish driver was five and 18 points ahead of Elite Motorsport duo Ary Bansal and Isaac Phelps respectively, having led the championship since the end of April.

Phelps took the win on the road after 12 laps but received a five-second track limits penalty on the final lap that initially dropped him to second. This gave Arden Motorsport’s Leon Wilson his second win of the season instead. Bansal had finished third on the road, a result that kept him squarely in the title hunt.

Then came the first twist. Bansal was driving towards parc fermé for the podium ceremony when a marshal stopped him.

“One of the officials jumped in front of me to say ‘You can’t go in here’,” the 16-year-old told Feeder Series. “I was extremely confused. There was nothing working at the time, no marshalling system on the steering wheels telling you warning flags.”

What he didn’t know was that he and Guinchard had also both received time penalties – five seconds for Guinchard and 15 for Bansal, dropping them to seventh and 14th respectively. With his teammate still sitting pretty on the podium, Bansal would have been 10 points behind Phelps, then still second overall and in the race. 

“That was when I thought the championship was over,” Bansal explained. “The moods kept changing and, at the very end, I think it was about two or three hours later after, we finally found [out] the results.”

A further 17 penalties were applied after the race, turning the results on their head and having a huge impact on the drivers’ championship. Drivers who finished outside the top 10 suddenly ended up on the podium. Phelps received an additional 15 seconds of track-limits penalties but, because of harsher penalties for other drivers, only dropped to fourth. Bansal, who received no further penalties, moved back up to ninth. 

Guinchard was handed an extra 40 seconds’ worth of penalties for separate track limits violations, dropping him from seventh to 21st. Suddenly, he went from maintaining the championship lead at the halfway point of the weekend to being third, his fate seemingly out of his hands.

When all was said and done, Bansal now led the drivers’ championship for the first time on 357 points, having turned what was a 25-point deficit at the start of the weekend into a four-point advantage. Phelps climbed to second on 353 points with Guinchard now third, three further back. Bansal now looked to be the shock favourite for the title, having been the underdog just two races before.

“The mindset was ‘whatever happens, happens’ because the gap to P4 [Kattoulas] was huge at the time,” Bansal said. “There wasn’t much to lose… so I could definitely take some more risks and be a bit more relaxed.”

The weekend had not started as Bansal hoped. He qualified down in ninth and seventh respectively for races one and two of the weekend. By comparison, teammate Phelps took double pole – his fifth and sixth poles of the season – with Guinchard alongside him for both races. A title fight seemed less likely than ever.

Yet in the races, Bansal came alive. He was helped from the start by his title rivals’ collision on the opening lap of race one, with Guinchard nudging the rear of Phelps in the Old Hairpin when challenging for the lead. While they recovered from near the rear of the field to ninth for Phelps and 12th respectively, Bansal completed an excellent drive from ninth to second, his first of three podiums that weekend.

“I was also able to help clean for the entire weekend, no crashes, which I think helped me get the edge,” Bansal explained to Feeder Series.

A fourth victory of the season in race three gave Bansal a six-point lead over teammate Phelps heading into the final race, for which Bansal started 10th, Guinchard ninth and Phelps 11th. Knowing the gaps, the Indian driver reined in his characteristic opportunism and opted simply to bring the car home.

“I was leading by only a few points, but I knew that as long as I didn’t make any mistakes and stayed with the drivers, [I’d win],” Bansal said. “I stayed with Guinchard… because there was no need to overtake him, and also Isaac was the next closest to me. As long as I was in the fight, I didn’t really have to beat them in that race.”

Guinchard’s teammate, Leandro Juncos, took his maiden GB4 victory in the final race, with Guinchard charging through the field to finish second. Bansal, sticking with his title rival throughout, took the final spot on the podium and the title with it. Phelps finished fifth in the race, leaving him 11 points behind Bansal in the championship – level with Guinchard on total points but ahead on countback by having two more race wins.

“There was a lot of relief,” Bansal told Feeder Series. “The scenes afterwards were also quite happy, quite joyful [with] all the celebrations. For the team also, it was a really good result – two of the three drivers finishing P1 and P2 and also having P4 in the championship with Alex [Kattoulas].”

It capped off a strong second half of the season for Bansal, who had taken three wins and a further five podiums in the final 12 races of the season.

“I wouldn’t call it a resurgence. I would just say a return to form because in [the] mid-season we had quite a few setbacks,” he explained. “In Silverstone, we didn’t have the best performance in the car, and then also Oulton Park [was] just very wet conditions, so we weren’t able to maximise [results].”

Oulton Park produced two rain-affected races that gave shock results, particularly for the four championship protagonists.

After finishing 16th in a wet race one and eighth in a dry race two, Bansal faced changeable conditions in a dramatic and bizarre race three.

Initially, Bansal lined up on the grid to start race three on slick tyres. But with rain falling and a delayed start caused by an accident on the formation lap, Bansal joined the rest of the slick runners in coming into the pits to swap to the wet compound, leaving just five drivers on the grid.

“My grid slot was maybe a metre before the pit entry, so I managed to just get in when I decided to box,” Bansal said. “But because I decided to box later, I had to start last – or very close to last in the pit lane – and then it turned out the track was completely dry because the rain had completely stopped by then.”

Bansal explained that because GB4 drivers do not have radio communication to their team, he had to make the choice to pit himself. With the track drying, only one driver was left on the slick tyres: Graham Brunton Racing’s Callum Baxter, who had switched to wets in the pits before gambling and returning to slicks just before the race start.

As Baxter charged through the field to third and Guinchard finished fourth, taking an extra eight points for positions gained during the race, Bansal finished 10th – his only weekend with no podiums. Kattoulas and Phelps opted to pit during the race to return to slicks, but the damage was already done as they finished 21st and 22nd respectively.

“We were just trying to be as variable as possible, being very adaptive, but I think, in that particular condition, Dan and his team had managed to maximise [their results],” Bansal said. Guinchard’s lead was 36 points over Kattoulas and 42 over fourth-placed Bansal.

After the disappointment of Oulton Park, the following round at Snetterton offered Bansal the perfect opportunity to respond. In the middle of a Norfolk heatwave, he took double pole – his first poles of the season – ahead of teammate Phelps, both times by margins under half a tenth of a second. The Indian then converted both poles into race wins, leading Phelps home by 0.642s in race one and Guinchard by 0.438s in race two.

“[It] was quite a different weekend because it was hot, very hot,” Bansal told Feeder Series. “The grip difference was quite massive because all the GT cars were going around so [I] just had to adapt to the very high-grip situations, and I was able to maximise that also and have the edge in qualifying.”

After the high of two victories, his weekend then turned to the low of a retirement in the reverse-grid final race after he was collected by Luke Hilton at Oggies on the opening lap. Regardless, the Snetterton round was a confidence boost for Bansal, who then took six podiums in the following nine races to end the season.

For Bansal, 2025 was his first full year racing in single-seaters. Having begun karting back home in 2021, the Bengaluru resident brought his talent to Europe in 2022, spending two years competing in British Karting Championship events.

His single-seater debut came in November 2024, when he competed in the final round of the Spanish F4 Championship with Rodin Motorsport at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya. He then entered the three-round Formula Trophy UAE championship at the end of the year and finished 14th, scoring in four of seven races. 

Alongside his main campaign with Elite in GB4 this season, Bansal also competed in six rounds of the British F4 season with Fortec Motorsport as well as the non-championship round at Silverstone. He took one victory at Zandvoort and claimed three further podiums, including two during his final British F4 race weekend at Silverstone in September.

“The first few weekends [in British F4] were a bit of a struggle, getting used to that championship, getting used to the team, the car again,” Bansal said. “Then, [I was] getting better and better with each race weekend, learning.”

His strong form propelled him to the Challenge Cup title for drivers who enter no more than seven of 10 championship rounds across the season. In this classification, Bansal took 280 points, 21.5 ahead of F1 Academy competitor Ella Lloyd, even though he competed in one fewer round than her. (Challenge Cup points awarded from the opening seven rounds were not recalculated after Tommy Harfield, who scored 317.5 points, was excluded from the rankings after seven rounds for staying for the full season.)

Bansal told Feeder Series that he ‘learned a lot’ in British F4 but that racing in two separate championships with distinctly different cars had its challenges.

“Switching back and forth, it was difficult because it took me a few sessions to get used to it every time we made the switch,” he said. “The GB4 car was lighter, so that made it more nimble compared to the F4. Also, the type of power they had was different, so how you apply the power was quite a different thing.”

He then drove a third different car, the Ligier JS F422, to end 2025, having been selected to represent India at the inaugural FIA F4 World Cup in Macau. For that event, he faced the notoriously challenging 6.120-kilometre Guia Circuit – a street track ‘completely different’ to what he had experienced in his single-seater career until then.

“The most different thing was the grip levels because it’s a street circuit,” he explained to Feeder Series. “The first few sessions were very low grip because of the dust and then, once the grip caught up, you could really feel the bumps, how the bumps unsettled the car. Because they unsettle the car, then you realise how close the barriers are!”

Bansal impressed in Macau, claiming fourth in the qualification race and fifth in the final race.

“It was a good, strong weekend where the potential was there,” he said. “I [was] slightly disappointed but also slightly pleased with the performance.”

He also impressed in a partial campaign in Saudi F4, claiming one win, two further podiums and a fourth place from his four races to place seventh overall, ahead of six full-time competitors.

Bansal has already begun his preparations for 2026, regularly testing with Italian F4 team US Racing as he looks set to join the ‘really competitive’ championship next year. He competed with the team in the series’ 2025 season finale as well as in its three-round sister series E4, which spanned from July to October.

Whilst some may have expected him to step up to a championship at the FRegional level, such as GB4’s parent series GB3, Bansal asserted that a year in Italian F4 was the correct move for him at this stage of his career.

“The main thing for Italian F4 would be to do more learning because stepping up [to] a completely different category is quite an ask,” he said. “The advantage of Italian F4 is that it does more of the European circuits that are more like what you [will] drive in the future.

“[It’s good] to also get prepared for GB3 or a similar championship like FRECA, maybe next year.”

Header photo credit: Jakob Ebrey Photography