MP Motorsport’s 2022 season is one of the great success stories of the second tier of single-seater motorsport. Team manager Jeremy Cotterill spoke to Feeder Series about that year and much more as he reflects on a decade of Formula 2 in a continuation of our series interviewing those who have been there since the beginning.

By Cliona Sheerin

Cotterill is no stranger to the F2 paddock, having been with MP Motorsport since 2012 during the days of its GP2 predecessor. In 2020, he moved to his current role of team manager, something he notes as the most obvious change in his 10-year tenure in the sport.

“When I became team manager in 2020, I was already with MP in a different role [and] adapting to being team manager was a challenge,” Cotterill told Feeder Series. “Just taking on the varying scopes and roles that that actually entails. The sort of challenges that it brings up is very different when you’re actually doing the job to what you imagine the job to be. Consequently, that was quite a difficult challenge to start with. I’m better at it now, I’m not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m always trying to improve what I can do to help everybody else to be the best that they can be.”

Naturally, there were big differences between his expectations of the team manager role and the reality of it.

“You can imagine being the team manager where everything is running [smoothly] and you’re looking at drivers for the next season and you think, ‘Oh, that would be nice. I’ll just nip out for dinner and have a bit of a chat with them’,” Cotterill said. “When, actually, the reality of it is, there are a list of jobs that need to be done, of which lots of people take responsibilities for those jobs.

“All the difficult jobs, the hard-to-have discussions, the difficult decisions, I don’t do alone. But there’s a lot of those to take and so in your mind, or certainly in my mind when I took the job…was ‘that’d be nice’.

“But actually it’s 24/7. It is non-stop. There have been times where I’ve been answering emails on Christmas Day. It is non-stop. Fourteen rounds a year. Sounds like a lot, but the amount of work that goes into it… I’m halfway through planning what we’re going to do until about June next year at the moment. So it’s about all the forward planning… which I did not envisage would be the job, but I suppose that was a bit of naïveté on my point of view.

“But everything is about planning to make sure every individual within the team can function to the best of their ability. A lot of the tough decisions that need to be made I don’t make alone, but they have to be taken at some point. [It’s] easy to deliver good news, but it’s not so easy when you need to deliver bad news… Sometimes you have to do some things that you know are not going to be popular but are for the better of the team going forward.”

As team manager, Cotterill must constantly balance departments’ wishes with the needs of the organisation, making difficult decisions when necessary for the best interests of the team.

“I basically try to balance between accommodating what the engineering team wants to do and what’s feasible for us to do [at] any given time,” Cotterill explained. “Most of the engineers want to do things now and probably even yesterday, but sometimes you’ve got to be realistic and say ‘Okay, perhaps we need to schedule this over a slightly longer period’.

Finding that balance is of the utmost importance in a championship as competitive as F2, the level of which has increased year on year. While Campos Racing and Invicta Racing currently boast a combined 64 per cent of victories so far this season, such dominance is rare. The last time two teams took more than 50 per cent of the wins on offer was 2021. In 2024, Invicta and Campos scored only 28.6 per cent of wins as all 11 teams scored at least one victory.

The growing competitiveness of F2 is what Cotterill sees as the championship’s most notable feature of the past decade.

“The biggest [change is] the level of competitiveness between all the teams,” Cotterill said. “Going back some years, there used to be a bigger deficit between the quickest and some others. But now it just seems that anybody from any team can really put in a performance at any given weekend.”

“F2 is extremely competitive,” he continued. “Of course, we’ve only won the championship once, which is more than some teams have done, so that’s a good thing. Winning that championship in [2022] was great. There was a lot of uncharted territory for us as a team and there had to be a lot of management of the situations, which as a group we did well, obviously, because we won, we didn’t drop it.”

A key figure that year was Paolo Angilella, who joined the team in 2020 as director of engineering. ‘Everything Paolo has done at MP has been positive,’ Cotterill added.

In Angilella’s first season as chief engineer – and Cotterill’s first as team manager – MP enjoyed their best season to date in the championship, taking four wins, three of which came courtesy of rookie Felipe Drugovich. Before then, the Dutch outfit had only finished on the top step once in three years.

Drugovich then returned to the team in 2022, and the pair combined for both the drivers’ and teams’ championship. Guided by Angilella, the Brazilian took five victories and six further podiums to claim the title with a margin of 101 points over nearest rival Théo Pourchaire. Meanwhile, in the teams’ standings, MP took their first and only title so far, edging out former champions Carlin despite having one less win to their name.

A highlight for Cotterill that season was Drugovich’s doing the double at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, the first driver to achieve the feat in the modern era of F2. However, he also recognises that reminiscing does not return results, preferring to look to the future rather than resting on the laurels of past championships.

“If you look at it, as a whole 2022 is an easy one to talk about,” Cotterill said. “You can talk about Barcelona that year, winning both races, et cetera and all that. But that was 2022, which is a lifetime ago in Formula 2. So we can’t look back at the past and say, ‘Weren’t we great then?’. It’s ‘What are we going to do to be great tomorrow?’ And that’s what we push for all the time.”

“As a team, we have evolved. We have improved. Our attention to detail is absolutely on it. We try to be very accurate about things we are doing and planning for the future, trying to build in an evolution of the team. That’s continuously ongoing. That’s the biggest thing. We’re always looking forward, and as team manager, trying to adjust what’s happening now is very difficult. But trying to adjust what’s happening in the future is something you stand a better chance at, and that’s probably what we do better now than we did in the past.”

MP have followed up their championship-winning season with 10 victories in the intervening years, including two this season for championship contender Gabriele Minì. The first of those victories was an important achievement not just for the driver, who went to second in the standings as a result, but for the team as a whole as the field took on an unfamiliar Miami circuit in unfavourable conditions with only a few weeks’ notice.

“Since [2022], there’s been many other individual victories within the team on track that have given me immense pride,” Cotterill said. “This year, for instance, we went to Miami, which was an unplanned event. To go there and to win it, in the rain, first time there, was a great race.… The research, the work that goes into getting there, being on track, performing on track, everybody doing what they need to do, shows that, as a team, we can adapt quickly to new situations, which is a quality that is needed. That gives me great pride, that we were able to go there and do that.”

MP’s quick adaption to the Miami International Circuit bodes well for the future, with the 2027 calendar adding two new locations to the schedule in Mexico and Turkey.

“New venues are always exciting to go have a look at,” Cotterill said. “Turkey, Mexico, great, let’s go have a look, see how we get on and see how we do. It sounds crazy, it’s a worldwide championship almost, F2. It’s nice for us and the guys as a team to go experience new places and new cultures, which is something you don’t get a lot of time to do.

“At least you’re going to see something different rather than [it] being, ‘We go to this circuit, this circuit, this circuit, this is where we stay.’ There’s something a bit new and more novel about the situation, which keeps [the] interest of all the people involved, mechanics, engineers, everybody – keeps [them] on their toes a little bit more because it’s somewhere new. It’s also good for the drivers where they’re going to do even more F1 tracks, which is great.”

Spreading out the calendar, with the Turkey and Mexico rounds both falling in October next year, limits the opportunity for an early championship coronation.

“Compliments to the F2 management in that they’ve looked at it and added venues further into the year, as in Mexico, which is going to prolong the championship towards the end of the season. In the past we’ve had situations where, before Qatar was put on the calendar, we were going for a long break before we do Abu Dhabi, and quite often the championship had already been decided at that point,” Cotterill said. “F2 have recognised that and are extending the championship, spreading [it] over a longer period, which means the championship is likely to go… towards the end of the year rather than it all being over and done with just after the summer break.”

The updated car will add a further dimension to preparations for 2027 as the team looks to get the jump on their competitors from the outset.

“It’s always exciting when you’ve got new parts,” Cotterill said. “It’s always exciting to see who’s going to get their head around it better than the others to start with. There’s always a bit of a race on from a technical side, which is always exciting especially if you come out well. If you come out scratching your head it’s a little bit more difficult.”

Looking further into the future, Cotterill is confident in the direction F2 is taking, his hope being that its upward trajectory can continue into the coming seasons.

“At the moment, the championship looks incredibly strong,” he said. “The F2 personnel, Bruno Michel and his team, they’ve done a great job in securing the position of the championship. It’s held in high esteem by Formula 1, so from that point of view, F2 can go from strength to strength. It already is, but it can be even better than it currently is.”

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency