French Formula 4’s traditional season opener at Nogaro is the only significant junior single-seater activity this weekend. Feeder Series previews the action and provides an update from our department heads on everything we did over the winter.

By Feeder Series

Every Easter weekend, the Coupes de Pâques welcomes French F4’s intrepid grid for a season opener that sets the tone for the season. This year, however, it enjoys special attention by being the only junior single-seater championship racing this weekend. The shifted schedule means that the final race will take place Monday afternoon, so our weekend review will be published that evening instead of that morning.

The motorsport world is enjoying a slower April than originally expected with F2, F3 and F1 Academy not heading to the Middle East. That means drivers may not be racking up quite as much mileage as they’d planned. Now, why does track time and track location actually matter, and who really gets the most out of it? You don’t have to wonder anymore – simply have a look at the data we put together from nearly 800 drivers who raced junior series machinery in 2025.

1. French F4: Round 1, Nogaro
2. Feeder Series quarterly review: Winter 2026
   1. Social media
   2. Broadcasting
   3. Editorial

French F4: Round 1, Nogaro

Circuit: Circuit Paul Armagnac, 3.636 km

Schedule: All times local (UTC+2)

Friday 3 April

• 09:00–09:25: Private practice 1
• 11:00–11:25: Private practice 2
• 14:00–14:25: Private practice 3
• 15:55–16:20: Private practice 4
• 17:50–18:15: Private practice 5

Saturday 4 April

• 09:35–10:05: Free practice
• 14:30–15:00: Qualifying

Sunday 5 April

• 10:50–11:20: Race 1
• 16:15–16:45: Race 2

Monday 6 April

• 14:00–14:30: Race 3

How to follow: All action can be followed on the official live timing on its-live.net. Races 2 and 3 will be live-streamed on YouTube on the FFSA TV channel.

Weather forecast: Unlike last year, rain is not expected this year in Nogaro. Partly cloudy on Friday, sunny on Saturday, mostly sunny on Sunday and sunny on Monday with temperatures up to 23°C expected for Race 3.

What to know: French F4 kicks off its 2026 season at Nogaro, where it held its first pre-season tests in late February. Thirty-two drivers will take part this weekend, which will represent French F4’s largest-ever grid. Alongside the 30 full-time drivers fighting for the overall title, F1 Academy drivers Lisa Billard and Jade Jacquet will also return to the series, having both finished in the top five in the Nogaro tests.

For the championship, Guillaume Bouzar, Thibaut Ramaekers and Hugo Herrouin will hope to transform their pre-season pace into championship campaigns. The opening race is often the most important of the year: since French F4 became a certified FIA series in 2018, the first race winner became champion on five out of eight occasions, and two other winners lost out on what were effectively technicalities. To find out more about famously low-cost, centrally run series, read our season guide here.

Report by Perceval Wolff-Taffus

From the press: Last year, champion Alexandre Munoz earned an increased €250,000 scholarship to support his 2026 racing plans. Among his possible successors are Feed Racing shootout winner Yuval Rosen, a software developer, and Kenyan trailblazer Shane Chandaria, Indian F4’s 2025 champion. We spoke to all of them during the off-season.

Feeder Series quarterly review: Winter 2026

The last three months have not been all that busy in racing terms; we never had more than six championships we cover racing at once, and we even had a weekend off a fortnight ago. But don’t let that fool you into thinking we rested. Across the social media, broadcasting and editorial teams, a number of structural and organisational shifts helped set us up for bigger and better things in 2026 than we’ve ever achieved before. Our department heads write in.

Social media

As winter turns into spring, many junior single-seater championships are coming out of hibernation. The social media side of things did not slow down in the meantime, however, as we diverted our attention to the many winter series taking place in the past three months.

Instagram saw several successful posts this winter. Stories driven by women in motorsport proved popular, with the appearance of two female drivers on a Formula Winter Series overall podium and an overview of F1 Academy graduates being some of our top posts this quarter. Furthermore, you interacted a lot with a list of Red Bull juniors graduating to F1 and the continuation of old rivalries in new series. Finally, you were once again very involved with pre-season Formula 2 and Formula 3 predictions.

Over on TikTok, we finished our series introducing all Formula 2 and Formula 3 drivers this season. The teams didn’t make it easy for us with late announcements and switches, but we managed to get through them all in time! You especially showed interest in F2’s Rafael Câmara and F3’s Fionn McLaughlin. Furthermore, we attended the Formula Winter Series round at Valencia and posted about it on TikTok, interviewing drivers such as Caitlyn McDaniel, Zoe Florescu and Aleksander Ruta.

This winter, we extended our coverage by hiring our first-ever exclusive social team member exclusively focused on Feeder Series Americas. Elektra Katsonis joined us in February, and in just two months, they’ve already made a big mark on the new direction we’re taking.

On the other hand, we had to say goodbye to our longstanding social media manager Grace Crispin, who left us last month for a full-time professional job in social media. While we’re saddened by her departure, we couldn’t be more proud of her as she gets to make a living out of one of her biggest interests. The Feeder Series Academy strikes again! Of course, this means we’ve been looking for new team members, and we’re happy to say we have two new people joining us this week!

Finally, our Feeder Series Live coverage returned last month after a hiatus of nearly three years. We started with two difficult weekends as F2 and F3 raced in Australia and F1 Academy in China, leaving most of our team needing to post in odd time zones, but they immediately proved their worth by making this work.

— Jordy van de Bunt, head of social media

Broadcasting

Over the winter, the broadcast team underwent the most significant change since its inception. Two new shows under the podcast umbrella have augmented the traditional Feeder Series Podcast offerings after I stood down from hosting, editing and production.

The changes have brought a host of new talent to the Feeder Series ranks as well as additional responsibilities for George Sanderson, our outgoing GB3 and GB4 editor. George has hosted Feeder Focus, a show that works in tandem with newcomer Thomas Groves’ Race Recap to detail the latest goings-on in junior single-seater racing. We’ve also recruited producer Cliona Sheerin, editor Elliot Royce, and producer-editor Katy Savage to work behind the scenes on polishing the shows, allowing for more frequent video updates as racing continues in 2026.

By pairing the hosts with series editors’ expertise, the shows have offered an alternative platform for receiving news and insights from junior racing. We’re also continuing the previous driver-interview focused episodes, too, giving you a broad range of options for consumption across YouTube and podcast platforms. In fact, our first such show of 2026, George’s podcast with GB3 driver Aurelia Nobels, premiered yesterday!

— Jim Kimberley, head of broadcasting

Editorial

You may notice a theme across our updates this quarter: unparalleled growth. While spring is generally the season for growth and winter a time of rest, it was anything but for us, and the editorial team played its own part in fuelling Feeder Series’ great expansion of 2026. As I write this update, we’ve just completed our latest round of hiring for series editors whose work you’ll come to see on our pages later this month.

Those new members have already made an impact on our team, especially on the Americas side. At the end of last year, Vincent van der Hoek took over fellow Dutchman Jeroen Demmendaal’s coverage duties for Indy NXT, USF Pro 2000 and USF2000, while Owen White, based stateside, joined us to cover Formula Regional Americas, F4 US and a bit of NACAM F4. Marco Albertini has taken his talents to Americas coverage too as our new USF Juniors, Ligier Junior Formula Championship and Brazilian F4 editor, with staff researcher Maciej Jackiewicz expanding to editorial to cover F4 CEZ in his place. And finally, Calla Kra-Caskey’s pivot to features at large created a vacancy for August Bamford to join us as F2 co-editor alongside Martin Lloyd.

In the meantime, routine operations continued through the winter with weekend previews, weekend reviews, and testing updates, which shifted from weekly to monthly at the end of February as the bigger championships began their 2026 seasons. The winter championships, however, evidently captured your attention, with our season guides for the UAE4 Series and FRegional Oceania Trophy – both of which featured new names and formats – bringing in the most views so far this year. 

Lest we forget that our last quarterly update came in mid-December, after which we devoted two weeks of coverage to everything that happened in 2025. Our editors’ rankings of the top 10 F4 and F2 drivers proved particularly popular, as was our review of the McLaren Driver Development Programme, the junior team of the reigning F1 constructors’ champions having undergone significant membership shifts mid-year. As always, we supplemented our web articles with e-books for the Feeder Series Hall of Fame and the driver-by-driver academy reviews, both of which showcased our team’s phenomenal cross-departmental collaboration.

Our team travelled to locations sunny, rainy, windy and snowy – yes, you read that right – to cover junior single-seaters over the past few months. That variety came in part because there was only one championship we covered trackside on two separate occasions this winter. You could say the atmosphere we found in Miami and Madrid was quite a bit more electric than we’re used to…

— Michael McClure, head of editorial

All times and forecasts listed above are subject to change. For the most up-to-date information, follow each series’ websites or social media pages.

Header photo credit: Elwynn Staerker