Alexander Sims has one of the most eclectic careers in modern motorsport. Having stepped off the F1 ladder at GP3 level in 2011, Sims has since raced at Macau, in GTs, at Le Mans, in Formula E and in the IMSA SportsCar Championship. He sat down with Feeder Series to discuss a junior career that pitted him against future F1 stars and the path he took to find a satisfying professional career in motorsport.

By H. M. Gillard

When Sims, born in 1988, was a child, his father had a colleague who bought a kart. The elder Sims went along to watch him race and later bought a kart for his older son, which was then passed down to young Alexander. 

It sounds like the start of many a racing driver’s career – except that until he drove the kart, Sims had no real interest in motorsport.

“It was really by chance that I got involved in motor racing,” he tells Feeder Series in an interview last year. “I never watched Formula 1 on weekends growing up. I didn’t know much about motorsport at all, but I just enjoyed the feeling of driving a go-kart and the thrill of that, so it snowballed from there.”

Things progressed so far that, for a brief time back in 2011, it looked as though this unlikely racing driver could have ended up in the pinnacle of motorsport.

The year 2011 was Sims’ debut season in GP3. He had joined the championship from the F3 Euro Series, having finished fourth in consecutive seasons – both times one place behind Valtteri Bottas, who was Sims’ teammate at ART Grand Prix in 2010. Having joined Status Grand Prix, Sims won in his first GP3 weekend and took four further podiums in the next four rounds, meaning that after five of the eight rounds had been completed, he led the championship by six points over Lewis Williamson and Mitch Evans with Bottas nowhere in sight.

It was in the last three rounds of the championship that everything went wrong for Sims – and right for his old F3 team-mate.

Bottas won from pole in the Budapest feature race on Saturday, with Sims finishing fourth on the road. But floor damage meant that the Briton’s car did not pass scrutineering, so he was disqualified. A hectic sprint race saw several drivers make big moves through the field, among them Sims, who recovered from 30th and last on the grid to finish ninth. It was not enough to net him any points under the points system used then in GP3, and he left the round second in the standings, seven points in arrears of new championship leader Bottas of ART.

After that storming drive, Sims did not reach the flag once for the rest of the season, whilst Bottas knocked in two more feature race victories to claim the title. Sims slipped to sixth in points, 28 points behind champion Bottas. As the Finn grew from being a Williams test driver to a full-fledged reserve, the Briton was left to rue what might have been.

Since then, Sims has had a lot of time to reflect on his one full GP3 season. He steers clear of bitterness. “Every person’s got those stories,” he says about the last three rounds. He makes no bones of the fact that he was ‘pretty set on Formula 1’ throughout his time in F3 and GP3 but says that after 2011, he realised the F1 dream ‘was definitely not going to happen’.

“Towards the end of my year in GP3, the writing was on the wall,” he says. “Someone who comes fourth, fourth, and sixth in two seasons of Formula 3 and GP3 – they’re decent results, but it’s not setting the world alight.”

Sims departed the F1 ladder after 2011, admitting he had ‘no plan in mind’ for the future. His management team, Gravity, had close connections with Genii Capital, the then owners of the Lotus Renault F1 Team, which helped pave the way for Romain Grosjean and Esteban Ocon to enter F1. Sims says that when he left, Gravity treated him ‘too well’, even telling him that he could rip up the contract without owing the company any of his future earnings.

With that, mid-season GP3 leader Sims moved into endurance racing the next year, whilst eventual champion Bottas became Williams’ regular free practice one driver in 2012. The teammate Sims had overshadowed in 2011, Portugal’s António Félix da Costa, returned to GP3 with Red Bull Junior Team backing. Félix da Costa narrowly missed out – unfairly in the minds of many – on a Toro Rosso seat in 2014, so whilst Sims may assess his own junior results harshly, it was clear that he could compete with F1-level drivers.

In 2013, using contacts he had acquired at McLaren thanks to winning the McLaren Autosport Young Driver Award in 2008, Sims finally landed himself a seat in GTs. Though that became the primary focus of his career, Sims found himself occupying a role over the years as ‘the person that a few teams would call if they had a driver drop out in Formula 3’. This led to two race-winning cameos in both European F3 and GP3, and he also picked up an overall podium in the 2015 Macau Grand Prix while with Double R Racing.

“Every time I did it, I thought this might be the last time I drive a Formula 3 car, so of course I’m going to take the opportunity,” he says about his stand-in appearances. “Sometimes it honestly probably wasn’t a great situation for the team because they’d got a driver that wasn’t paying the bills, but from their point of view rather than allow that driver to continue knowing that they hadn’t paid, they’d rather run the car and have me in there. Generally, the results were better, so at least it proves that the team is operating at a high level and hopefully be able to entice some drivers in for the following season or later that season.”

These one-off outings served a greater purpose. In 2013, they helped put him on the radar of BMW, who signed him as a factory driver in 2014. Two seasons racing BMWs in the British GT Championship both resulted in top-three championship placings before he moved to the Blancpain GT Series Sprint Cup and Endurance Cup – now the GT World Challenge Europe – in 2016. The following year,  at the behest of the German manufacturer, he earned a promotion to BMW Team RLL in the IMSA SportsCar Championship. It was there that, after a decade of bouncing between championships in both single-seaters and sports car racing, Sims finally felt at home.

“As soon as I did a season in IMSA and experienced all the awesome tracks there are in America, the great format of racing, [I thought], ‘That’s the best form of racing I’ve ever done,’” Sims says. “I’ve always wanted to go back to IMSA every year if I could.

Motorsport is a strange beast, and seven years on from being GP3 teammates, Sims and Félix da Costa were re-united, this time at Andretti in Formula E. Once again, it was BMW, Andretti’s powertrain supplier at the time, who was responsible for Sims’ career move.

The Englishman admits that he does not understand the decision to put him in Formula E ‘to this day’, but he considers it an ‘awesome opportunity’ and ‘the highest-level championship’ in which he has ever raced. It’s a high compliment from a driver who has raced in more than 20 series across two decades.

After four seasons, one ePrix victory and a best championship finish of 13th, Sims left Formula E, having spent his final two seasons in the series with Mahindra Racing. Looking back, he admits he was ‘pleased [to be] out of it’. 

“It was a high-pressure environment, and the race weekends themselves were not the most enjoyable times, to be honest,” he says. “[There was] very little on-track driving and lots of work in the background.”

After leaving Formula E, Sims returned to the IMSA SportsCar Championship to race a Whelen Engineering Cadillac in 2023. He had won five races across 2017 and 2018 in the GTLM class while with BMW, but this time around, he won the GTP class title at the first attempt alongside Pipo Derani and Jack Aitken.

“It’s the biggest championship that I’ve won, but there are other moments, honestly, in my career that mean more to me,” he says. “Normally stand-alone events, but those where I realise that everything’s come together and where everything’s working in harmony, those are really beautiful moments in motorsport honestly, from a driver’s point of view anyway. 

“That GTP year, 2023, was awesome. The team did an amazing job, but I always felt it was a little bit that they were carrying me to the title rather than I was really the driving force behind the results, quite often. Whereas I think back to Spa 2016, where I won the 24 Hours there; Le Mans in 2022 with Corvette; a couple of races at the Nürburgring 24 Hours; winning the McLaren Autosport Young Driver Award – they’re sort of the real highlights that I look back on and think we were either performing at such a high level compared to the competition or made zero mistakes in a 24-hour race and the car was spotless and that’s what won it for us.”

Among the standout moments from his already brimming CV, Sims leaves out two items that take place after this interview – his second IMSA title in 2025 and his dominant class pole position at the 2026 24 Hours of Daytona last month. Both achievements came after he switched to the GTD Pro class with the Corvette Racing by Pratt Miller Motorsports outfit.

In view of his perspective on Formula E’s environment, perhaps it was for the best that he never ascended to the top level of motorsport as some of his GP3 rivals did. But looking back on his journey, Sims wouldn’t have wanted to reach any other destination.

“It’s completely the opposite nowadays for me, back in GTs with Corvette. [It’s] maximum driving and fun,” he says. “Now having experienced quite a lot in my career, I just want to go back and do IMSA as many times as possible.”

Interview by Sean McKean

Header photo credit: Sam Bagnall / LAT Images