It will have been almost two months since the season opener in Saudi Arabia when F1 Academy returns for its second round in Miami next weekend. Former F1 Academy driver Chloe Chong told the Feeder Series Podcast that extended breaks between races can be beneficial to the drivers.
By George Sanderson
The 2024 F1 Academy season got underway back in early March at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit, with Doriane Pin crossing the line first in both races. But she ended the weekend with only one victory after being penalised for taking the chequered flag twice in race two.
This handed Abbi Pulling victory and consequently the championship lead heading into the second round of the season at the Miami International Autodrome next weekend. However, the young Briton will have had to wait nearly two months to defend her lead.
Chong, who drove for reigining teams’ champions Prema Racing in the inaugural F1 Academy season last year, told the Feeder Series Podcast that such longer gaps between races would have been beneficial for her.
“I think it would have been much more useful for me to have those sorts of gaps between last year’s races. I got called up to Prema quite late, so one, I wasn’t physically prepared, and two, I’d just had no testing.
The 2023 F1 Academy calendar saw the series’ 15 drivers take on six of the seven rounds in five countries in just 14 weeks between the end of April and the end of July.
Chong, who had only turned 16 a month before the first round, said the tightness of the schedule had a big effect on her debut season in single-seaters.
“It was very, very difficult for me to kind of find my footing. You know, it was like one race, damn, next race is coming up next week. How am I going to prepare myself for that?
“It can be a good thing because then you can kind of take all those things that you want to learn and implement it straight away, but on a physical side, going to a track like Valencia or Zandvoort, it is so, so difficult to physically get up to that level that all the other drivers are at,” Chong explained.
Following the sixth round at Le Castellet in France, the all-female F4 series then took a break of just under three months before returning for the season finale at Austin’s Circuit of The Americas in the United States. This break during the season helped Chong catch up to the rest of the field.
“For me, between Paul Ricard and COTA, it was so much preparation,” she said. “I felt so bad this first half of the season. I was losing so much time just because I literally couldn’t steer the steering wheel.”
In the weeks between the final two rounds of the season, Chong said she “put everything into it” in order to prepare herself properly for the season finale. This even included going against some advice given by her Prema team earlier in the season.
“At the beginning of the year, Prema discouraged us from buying a sim because they said it wasn’t going to help. They didn’t want it to distract me from their team sim. But we finally decided during the summer break to invest and try renting one out. So we did that and it helped so, so much.”
Her routine during this break was “sim every day, training every day” and working on the “little things like mindset” to improve the psychological side on her racing. This hard work translated into better on-track performance.
At the season finale in Texas, Chong took a season-best seventh in both qualifying sessions and scored seventh-, sixth- and eighth-place finishes in the three races.
It was the only weekend that she achieved multiple points-scoring finishes after she had only finished in the top 10 in three of the previous 18 races. She also equalled her personal best finish of sixth place, which she had previously achieved at the season-opening race in Spielberg and the second race in Valencia.
“All of that put together just shows how strong my performance was in COTA.”
After Miami next weekend, F1 Academy will visit Barcelona in June, Zandvoort in August and Singapore in September before rounding out the year with a double-header in Qatar and Abu Dhabi in late November and early December.
Chong said that having these bigger gaps between races this season in F1 Academy should help the drivers.
“I think for these drivers this year, having these big gaps between the races means they can thoroughly reflect on how the race went, how the crashes went, how they could’ve changed that.”
In particular, Chong said the less experienced drivers on this season’s grid, such as single-seater newcomer Lia Block, will benefit the most, as she did last year. The big gaps provide such drivers with the opportunity to be better prepared for later rounds in the season.
“It also means that they can have testing, they can train, they can work on stuff that they were weak on, and when they come back, maybe we’ll see a completely different driver,” she said.
“I think it is very useful in a championship like this, especially so high-profile, to give them time to develop, especially as young drivers.”
Chong will compete in British F4 this season for JHR Developments. You can listen back to the rest of our discussion with her about the opening round of the 2024 F1 Academy season in a previous episode of the Feeder Series Podcast, hosted by Jim Kimberley and featuring F2 co-editors Martin Lloyd and Steven Walton and F1 Academy editor Calla Kra-Caskey.
Header photo credit: Prema Racing
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