Just four days after the curtain fell on the 2025 GB3 season in Monza, Alex Ninovic was announced to be remaining with Rodin Motorsport for his first Formula Regional Europe campaign next year. Whilst it may not be the step up to F3 some expected, the Australian told Feeder Series why he believes it is the right move for him.

By George Sanderson

Speaking from his home in Sydney, Australia, Alex Ninovic was still beaming as he thought about his successes in Europe over the previous months.

The 18-year-old claimed the 2025 GB3 drivers’ championship in style, setting new records for the most victories and pole positions in a single season along the way, with nine and 10 respectively.

“It’s something to be super proud of,” he said. “To go into the championship, I wasn’t really expecting that to happen.”

Despite wrapping up the title at Donington Park with a round to spare, Ninovic has not yet been able to relax. Instead, following the season finale at Monza, he was back in the car to help his potential Rodin replacement, Martin Molnár, with testing in the UK.

“We went out to Snetterton in the GB3 car a week after Monza, which was cool to get another couple of days in the old GB3 car,” Ninovic told Feeder Series. “After that, we flew back home. I’ve been here since and just doing the same old sort of thing – training and getting prepared for the next challenge.”

Because of his commitments, Ninovic has not even been able to have a ‘proper party’ to celebrate his title victory, instead opting to keep things low-key with his family.

“Our family did have a little barbecue lunch a couple days after we got back,” he said. “A lot of people were there, so I guess you could call that a little bit of a celebration.”

There was plenty to celebrate too, as Ninovic took poles and victories in all but the opening event of the eight-round GB3 season. He led home an Australian 1-2 in the standings with Xcel Motorsport’s Patrick Heuzenroeder finishing as the runner-up. Hitech’s Deagen Fairclough ended the year third as the series’ highest-ranked British driver, while Ninovic’s Rodin Motorsport teammate Gianmarco Pradel, another Australian, finished fourth.

It was in the reverse-grid race three at Donington Park, the series’ penultimate round, that Ninovic was crowned champion. While he came into the weekend with an outside chance of wrapping it up come Sunday, a seventh-place finish in race three proved to be enough as all three of the other title protagonists faced issues.

Both Heuzenroeder and Pradel were involved in collisions with the Racelab car of Max Taylor. Heuzenroeder was collected in an opening-lap collision at the Esses chicane after Taylor touched the rear of Reza Seewooruthun, sending the Argenti with Prema driver into the Xcel’s path.

Seven laps later, Pradel retired in the gravel trap at Coppice following contact with Taylor, who received separate three-place grid penalties for causing the two incidents.

Fairclough, who was already out of the title fight by this stage, faced mechanical issues in the latter stages and took the chequered flag in 15th, having almost been lapped.

“It just happened all really fast,” he told Feeder Series. “[It] probably didn’t get to sink in as much as maybe you would like to, or you would expect.”

It wasn’t his crowning race that Ninovic found most enjoyable, however. Instead, that designation went to his victory in race two earlier that day, when he overcame a 10-second time penalty for a jump start to still take victory.

“It was probably quite nerve-wracking for everyone else,” Ninovic said. “My engineer came over the radio and told me that we’ve got a penalty. He didn’t tell me how much time the penalty was, so I didn’t really know what we had.”

Unaware of the extent of his penalty, Ninovic pushed his hardest to build up enough of a gap over second-placed Seewooruthun to secure the victory.

“I would say there was maybe a tenth [of a second] left in it for every lap,” Ninovic admitted. “I was pretty close to maximum out there.”

His pace was phenomenal, and he mastered the gusty conditions to stretch out a lead of 11.131 seconds as he crossed the line for his eighth victory of the season. Seewooruthun and Fairclough completed the podium.

Once the title was all wrapped up, the pressure was lifted from Ninovic’s shoulders in Monza, at least in terms of the drivers’ championship. But Rodin Motorsport still had a second consecutive teams’ championship to secure – which they did after the opening race of the weekend.

“Going into Monza, there was no pressure on having to win the championship there, but at the same time, you still want to do the best you can,” Ninovic said. “[I] got double pole, which was amazing. From there, we did our best to try and be at the front and race hard, which was cool not having any pressure but still having to go out there and do the job.”

Ninovic took victory in race one at Monza and finished behind first-time winner Fairclough in race two. The reverse-grid format for race three put Ninovic 12th on the grid, and he fell to 18th in a chaotic opening three laps before recovering to seventh.

That quiet comeback completed a remarkable season of nine wins and 11 total podiums from 24 races for Ninovic, who also finished all but four races inside the top 10. He put his successes down to his strong relationship with the Rodin team.

“Having the car and [the team] gelling with me so well obviously gives the team and myself the confidence that you can go out there and put a lap down, or a series of laps in races, that are super consistent and fast,” he explained. “It’s just a culmination of everything coming together which gives you that ultimate performance over everyone else.”

Ninovic has spent his entire single-seater racing career with Rodin Motorsport, formerly Rodin Carlin, and has received significant sponsorship from parent company Rodin Cars, a New Zealand high-performance automobile manufacturer. After their partnership began in late 2022, Ninovic contested his first campaign in Spanish F4 in 2023, taking one podium en route to 10th in the championship. 

He then moved across to British F4 for 2024 and secured five victories and 13 further podiums. That was good enough for second in the standings, though he finished a staggering 222.5 points behind dominant champion Fairclough after 30 races.

For 2025, the tables turned. Both Ninovic and Fairclough were newcomers to the regional level – neither raced in a winter series – but the Australian secured the GB3 title with a sublime season of his own, stretching out a 148-point gap over Heuzenroeder and 151 over Fairclough after 24 races.

Ninovic demonstrated the kind of dominance that can only come from a team and driver in perfect harmony. And it’s why the Sydneysider is sticking with the team for 2026, albeit in FRegional Europe, one of GB3’s rival championships.

“To keep working with Rodin and the team there will be nice, knowing everyone and being able to continue that path,” Ninovic said. “I’ve worked with most of them in tests or one-off races through the last couple of years, so I know them all, and when I go into the factory, I speak to all of them. It’s basically like a second home.”

The 2025 FR Europe title went the way of Prema Racing’s Freddie Slater, who also competed in three GB3 rounds this season. In those three rounds, Slater and Ninovic took three wins each, with Slater outscoring Ninovic 203-173. The Australian retired twice across those nine races, neither time through his own fault.

With Slater and most of his fellow FR Europe frontrunners moving to F3 next year, many expected Ninovic to pursue a 2026 seat in the series too. But he said he did not believe F3 would have been the right destination for him next year.

“In conjunction with myself and Rodin, we made the decision that [FR Europe] would probably be the best thing for me at the current moment,” he explained. “I don’t think F3 would have been the right step for a few reasons. Not so much me not being able to handle the car or the level of racing, but doing Formula Regional next year – and the Middle East championship – should give me a really nice opportunity to drive on some of the future racing tracks that I might be on.”

Ninovic joins FR Europe as it enters a new era. Having split with title partner Alpine and switched from the Tatuus F3-T318 chassis to the Tatuus T-326, the series will run as an FIA championship for the first time. It is new ground for not only the championship but also Rodin, who are set to compete in FR Europe for the first time.

Though their inexperience may seem to be a drawback, they – and Ninovic – join the series with a critical advantage: the new FR chassis is fundamentally the same as GB3’s Tatuus MSV-025.

F3 was never realistically an option for Ninovic. In fact, the day after he had clinched his GB3 drivers’ title, Rodin announced the completion of their 2026 F3 line-up with the signing of Pedro Clerot, who finished fourth in FR Europe last season. Ninovic’s 2026 options were therefore reduced to two: FR Europe or F2.

“F2 was probably like a 1 per cent sort of thing, and then FREC was 99 per cent the option [for me],” he told Feeder Series. “There’s nothing wrong with that. Realistically, looking at it now, it gives you the opportunity to race on probably half the circuits you go to with F1 or F2 or F3.”

Ninovic could have followed a similar path to 2024 GB3 runner-up John Bennett or 2023 FR Europe champion Andrea Kimi Antonelli by moving straight to F2. Whilst Antonelli impressed by finishing sixth with Prema Racing in 2024, Van Amersfoort Racing’s Bennett struggled in his debut F2 season this year, picking up a single point in the Monza feature race and finishing 22nd overall.

In the long term, Ninovic is not ruling out such a move, but doing so after just one year wouldn’t have set him up for success, he explained.

“[I can] have another year of really getting a lot of development on the simulator and all that sort of stuff for the future,” Ninovic said. “You’d rather have a strong campaign in FREC and then move up into a higher category than maybe move up and then not have the best opportunity to perform at the highest level and probably not shine very brightly in people’s eyes.”

Ninovic sees a season in FR Europe as a ‘nice challenge’ and further opportunity for him to develop. Whilst some may argue it is a sideways step, the Australian doesn’t see it that way, nor does he believe he faces added pressure to perform in order to move up the ladder for 2027 and beyond.

“I just try and approach it the same way that I did this year,” Ninovic told Feeder Series, “which was just to follow all the right things and don’t overthink anything. Just go and do it yourself, and trust your instincts.”

The Australian is confident he can get strong results with the team in 2026, saying that they ‘shouldn’t have a problem with being somewhere at the front’. It’s what he needs in order to reach his goals in racing.

“Anything’s possible,” he said. “Sometimes things happen in a couple of days and you’re on a different path, but it’d be nice in the next three years or so to be knocking on the door [of F1].”

Header photo credit: Jakob Ebrey Photography