Race Incident » Valtteri Bottas

Bottas is the Master of Formula 3

admin — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:20:00 +0000

Finnish racing sensation Valtteri Bottas, ART Grand Prix, took his maiden Formula 3 win at Zandvoort on Sunday in the highly prestigious Masters of Formula 3. Bottas, who is doing his first season of Formula 3, started in pole position and dominated the race. Second was his fellow countryman Mika Mäki, ahead of Stefano Coletti in third.

Valtteri Bottas is only in his third season in cars but has already managed to win no less than 23 races in his 53 race starts. Last year he won both the Formula Renault 2.0 Eurocup and the Northen European Cup.

Full race results of the Masters of Formula 3.

Formula Renault 2.0 NEC at Zandvoort

admin — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:54:47 +0000

The Northen European Formula Renault 2.0 Cup started its fourth season this weekend at Zandvoort. The championship has so been won every year by the German Motopark team with Filipe Albuquerque in 2006, Frank Kechele in 2007 and Valtteri Bottas last year. This year will most likely see yet another Motopark driver as champion as the team lined up with eight cars on the Zandvoort grid.

After the qualifying sesson was over the Motopark drivers occupied the top five positions with British driver Adrian Quaife-Hobbs grabbing the pole position, 3 tenths ahead of Antonio Felix da Costa from Portugal. Best non-Motopark driver in qualifying was Daniel Aho for Koiranen Bros who ended up in seventh of the grid, but no less than 1.681 seconds off the pace of the pole sitter.

21 cars line up for race one and it ended up being a lights to flag victory for Quaife-Hobbs who was 8 seconds ahead of Felix da Costa in second and Kevin Magnussen in third after the 16 laps were completed.

The second race of the weekend had more drama as the top eight from race one started in reversed order on the grid. Race one winner Quaife-Hobbs misjudged the early braking of the slightly slower cars ahead of him and ran into the back of his team mate Kevin Magnussen in the first corner damaging his front wing and dropping to ninth. Depsite a lack of downforce from the damaged wing he fought his way up to fifth before a tyre burst and forced a pitstop for a new tyre and a new nose. At the front it was last year’s championship runner up Antonio Felix da Costa who took the win in front of the two Danes Kevin Magnussen and Marco Sørensen.

Antonio Felix da Costa leads the championship after the Zandvoort round ahead of Kevin Magnussen, Marco Sørensen, Adrian Quaife-Hobbs and Toomas Heikkinen.

The next two races are at Hockenheim at the end of April.

Atte Mustonen to drive for Motopark during debut season

admin — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:33:16 +0000

The successful Formula Renault 2.0 team Motopark Academy will move up the ranks this year and race in Formula 3 for the first time. The team has won the Eurocup three times with Scott Speed, Filipe Albuquerque and Valtteri Bottas. The new Formula 3 challenge will be headed by Atte Mustonen, who also will be making his F3 Euro Series debut but has two seasons in the British Formula 3 championship with Räikkönen Robertson Racing behind him.

Motopark Academy will also field a second car for a so-far unannounced driver.

The ART Grand Prix 2009 super line-up

admin — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:42:03 +0000

Earlier today I wrote about the signing of Esteban Gutierrez for the ART Grand Prix Formula 3 Euro Series team. The team’s fourth driver has now been confirmed and it is no other than Finnish mega-talent Valtteri Bottas. This means the ART line-up for 2009 is filled to the brim with insane amounts of talent. How about the following:

Jules Bianchi, France
Jules Bianchi – the “old guy” of the team. 19-year-old Jules made his Formula 3 debut last year and ended up third in the Euro Series and won the F3 Masters at Zolder. His first single seater season was in 2007 when he won the French Formula Renault 2.0 championship. In 2006, during his final karting year he finished second in the World Cup in Formula A and was the WKS International champion in the ICC class.

Adrien Tambay, France
Patrick Tambay’s son Adrien Tambay will make his F3 debut this year. He’s been racing Formula BMW exclusively since he left karting and was fourth in his rookie season in 2007 in the German ADAC championship. This year he finished third in the European Formula BMW championship.

Esteban Gutierrez, Mexico
Esteban Gutierrez comes also from the Formula BMW domains where he became the 2008 European Formula BMW champion.

Valtteri Bottas, Finland
Bottas was a winning machine in 2008 where he raced in both the Formula Renault 2.0 Eurocup and in the Northern European Cup. In the NEC he won 12 of 14 races and in the Eurocup he won another five races on his way to become champion in both championships. Valtteri Bottas win record to date is at an impressive 22 wins in 48 career races.

My money is on an ART driver as 2009 F3 Euro Series champion…