The young driver Red Bull couldn't ignore

You could forgive Igor Fraga for not knowing which country he's in or even which language to communicate via when he wakes up every morning.

Fraga put his name to the forefront of the junior single-seater world early in 2020 when he unexpectedly vanquished reigning champion Liam Lawson to win New Zealand's Toyota Racing Series title as a rookie. And then, just as Lawson had done when he did the same to Marcus Armstrong in 2019, Fraga got signed up by Helmut Marko to the Red Bull Junior Team.

That means that the 21-year-old will line up for the fast-approaching opening round of the FIA Formula 3 Championship for Charouz Racing System with a career that has certainly been more circuitous than any other driver on the grid. It started in Japan, and has wended its way through Brazil, Mexico, the US, Italy and New Zealand before arriving on the Formula 1 support ladder.

In various parallel universes, Fraga could be on his way to the top in Japan's elite categories, IndyCar, or even Brazil's V8 Stock Car scene. But a unique set of circumstances has led him to where he is now - not to mention his status as one of the world's leading competitors in Esports, in which he is already a world champion.

But it was the TRS performance that really put him on the map in the world of real cars - and led to a summons from Marko.

Fraga just had time to celebrate winning the New Zealand Grand Prix at Manfeild to clinch the TRS title before flying from there to the Czech Republic, where the Charouz team is based.

"When I arrived in the Czech Republic I was waiting at the rental-car desk and I got a call from him," he says. "When I saw my cellphone with a number from Austria, of course you start to think something, and then it actually was him! I was quite nervous on the cellphone...

"He didn't give much detail, but he wanted to meet me at the end of the week, and during the weekend we were able to make the deal, and at the beginning of the next week it was confirmed that I was part of the Red Bull Junior Team."

It's a far cry from Fraga's early days. He's the son of a Brazilian father and Japanese-Brazilian mother, who decided life in Japan would be better than Brazil. He was born and grew up in Kanazawa, on the north side of Japan's main Honshu island, and entered his first kart race before he was five years old.

"There is a category called Kids Karting - the chassis and everything is very small," he says. "You can start with this age and apply for the licence, and there is a test to see if your parents and yourself have the capacity to go karting. I won seven titles in Japan, and in 2008 I won the Asian championship."

The global economic crash of the late 2000s sent the Fragas back to Brazil: "We were affected quite a lot in 2009. My mother wanted me to experience more of the Brazilian culture and get to stay closer with the family, so they decided to come back to Brazil when I was 12.

"My family had to start to sell stuff, and I didn't have the full budget. So the maintenance of the car was not great, and it broke quite a lot of times. Because of that I was not able to finish a lot of races and that compromised my championship" Igor Fraga

"Even in Japan, inside the home she made Brazilian food, she always talked in Portuguese, and when I was in the school I was talking in Japanese. I could speak both, so it was really good."

This would prove crucial to Fraga in later years, when the top brass from Gran Turismo came calling, but in the meantime there was a career to be pursued. The problem was, the family was based out in the sticks in Ipatinga, over 300 miles north of Rio de Janeiro, and a national karting budget was too expensive.

"I still had the go-kart, which my dad had sent from Japan," he recalls. "In Brazil things are harder to get, especially because I live more in the countryside. I was only practising, not racing, and as soon as we got the chance to get the sponsorship, we looked at which category I could race. We thought that national karting was very, very expensive, and actually Formula 1600 was cheaper to race in. I was getting towards 15, and we decided to wait just a little bit and apply for the single-seater licence, and then I did seven races [in 2014]."

Fraga cut his teeth in the basic F1600 (above), plus a couple of Formula Vee outings, and was looking good by the end of the year: "In the last race I was able to do the track record and win the race at Interlagos. It was a really good experience."

For 2015, the family decided on an assault on the B-class of the Brazilian F3 Championship. While the top division was using the long-in-the-tooth 2008-11 generation of the Dallara chassis, the B-class was effectively historic racing, using the 2001 model, all powered by the series' bespoke Berta spec engine.

Even so, it was a big step up for Fraga, who was beginning a three-year partnership with veteran F3 team PropCar, the squad run by Rubens Barrichello's uncle Darcio dos Santos.

"I felt a lot [the step up in performance] on the testing, but I was able to get used to it very quickly," he says. "But the thing is it was not a big step only on the power, but on the budget side too. My family had to start to sell stuff, and I didn't have the full budget. So the maintenance of the car was not great, and it broke quite a lot of times. Because of that I was not able to finish a lot of races and that compromised my championship."

Fraga stepped up to the top class in 2016, but the budget only covered the first round and the finale, before returning to the 'B' division for 2017, when he cleaned up and romped to the title.

By this time, he was already making great progress in Esport competition.

"I started around 2014 when I was doing Formula Vee and Formula 1600," he recalls. "At that time GT Academy [the scheme that launched Jann Mardenborough's career] was expanding globally, and I thought that with all the difficulties that we were facing to become a professional driver to get sponsorship and everything, that's where I should really start to focus."

Because he was still only 15 and unable to race internationally, Fraga decided "that I have to keep practising [at Gran Turismo] to really get better and stay on the top, because once I get the chance I wanted to grab it. That was a turning point where it went from a hobby to a really serious thing."

PropCar also entered a team in the 2017-18 NACAM Formula 4 Championship - based in Mexico and using the same Mygale chassis and Ford EcoBoost engine as the UK equivalent. He was a winner out of the blocks, triumphing at the Mexican Grand Prix support round (above). Former Indycar star Roberto Moreno was watching, and taking notice.

"I met Roberto when I was in Formula 1600," says Fraga. "But then I met him again at the Mexican GP, and when I was able to do well on the track he had more curiosity about me and since then he has been helping me a lot. After that race, he helped me do the transition to USF2000."

Fraga finished runner-up in NACAM F4, after a date clash with the Formula 1 Esport finals forced him to miss an early-season round, without which he could have posed a threat to title winner Moises de la Vara. But by the time that campaign finished in the summer of 2018, he was already on the Road To Indy ladder in USF2000 (below) - with hardly any budget. While Kyle Kirkwood dominated the championship, Fraga's best results were a pair of seconds on the St Petersburg and Toronto street circuits.

"On the financial side it was probably the most difficult year for me," he reflects. "My dad was my mechanic and I was helping him as an assistant to prepare the car and everything. It was really hard working there, but at least I managed to finish fourth in my rookie year, so it wasn't too bad. I think if we had a bit more time there we could have some better results.

"The next year we could move to Europe after winning the Gran Turismo world championship, and then things really started to happen for me."

Fraga was still just one of legions of aspiring young talents in single-seaters, so his triumph in the World Final of the Gran Turismo Nations Cup in Monaco in late 2018 meant he was considerably more famous in the virtual world. But it also set him on the path to redressing that in real cars.

"After winning I was able to meet more the Japanese people from Gran Turismo, and I built a really good relationship and they started to support me, so I was able to get the budget to race in the Formula Regional European Championship (below).

"It was the first time in a long time that I had equal conditions, although my confirmation in the championship was quite late. The car arrived two or three days before we headed to the first round at Paul Ricard, so we did the shakedown of the car there and started to work on the set-up and everything, so especially in the first half of the season it was a little difficult."

The car was run by long-time Italian single-seater squad RP Motorsport, which also operates a Road to Indy programme, so Fraga already knew the team. Ranged against the might of Prema Powerteam, which had prepared to its usual meticulous standards and was running talented Dane Frederik Vesti alongside Enzo Fittipaldi and Olli Caldwell, it was always going to be tough for Fraga. But a mid-season turnaround led to a win apiece at the Red Bull Ring and Imola, plus two victories in the Monza finale on his way to third in the points.

"The sim racing side really helped me develop abilities. The difficulties are a little bit different to the real life, because the environment is also a little bit different" Igor Fraga

While Regional rivals Vesti, Fittipaldi, Caldwell, David Schumacher and Sophia Florsch all stepped up into FIA F3 cars and contested the Macau Grand Prix, Fraga was left frustrated watching trackside. He'd already taken part in the preceding FIA F3 test at Valencia, driving one day with Carlin and another with Charouz, and was in Macau to try to sort out his 2020 deal.

"With the result that we had in Regional we were starting to think, 'The next category would be great to take a look at. Although it's quite expensive let's try to pick up the budget and do at least the testing, and then we see what we can do.' So we did the testing in Valencia and it felt good to be in that car definitely. It's really fast!"

As a warm-up to that prospective campaign, he went to New Zealand to contest the TRS in the colours of Gran Turismo - and as team-mate at M2 Competition to Red Bull Juniors Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda.

Fraga did have the theoretical advantage in that the new-for-2020 TRS car is the same Tatuus chassis deployed in FRegional, as well as the Formula Renault Eurocup. But, as M2 chief Jonathan 'Flex' Moury pointed out in a recent Autosport feature, that made little difference as all the teams had engineering expertise from the Renault category. Besides, Lawson knew all the circuits. As Moury states, Fraga used his intelligence to take on board everything he could from Lawson's data.

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"I've always had this kind of approach," Fraga admits, "because you can always learn more and become better, otherwise the others will overtake you and you'll start to lose. When I went there, I knew that my team-mate was last year's champion [Lawson] so I would try to learn everything from him, try to see where I was losing, and keep working on that. And I think that it went quite well."

It rather did, with two wins each at Hampton Downs and Manfeild the basis for pipping Lawson to the title - and prompting that phone call from a certain Austrian...

With his colourful background, Fraga is an intriguing package, and he is convinced that his real-world racing and virtual exploits complement each other.

"The sim racing side really helped me develop abilities," he recognises. "The difficulties are a little bit different to the real life, because the environment is also a little bit different. In real life you are just by yourself, inside the cockpit, and the engine noise covers everything, but on the sim you are in a normal environment - your mother can call you and a lot of things can happen, so your concentration has to be very high!

"Even on the big events where the thing is getting intense, the guys come with the camera in front of you, and it makes you more and more nervous.

"Also, you feel much less on the simulator compared to real life, but with that information you have to push the car all the way to the limit, and if you transition to real life properly you can feel much better the car, and it makes it easier to feel any set-up differences or when the track condition changes - I at least feel for me that it's easier to adapt to those conditions."

In FIA F3, it's not so much track conditions as tyres that change. Fraga is happy to go up at Charouz alongside Finn Niko Kari, a veteran - if something of an enigma - at this level, along with ex-Regional rival Schumacher.

"Niko is a very experienced driver, so I think I will have a good reference and I will try to learn a lot, especially because the tyre management in FIA F3 is very complicated," says Fraga.

"During the race at the beginning you are five to eight seconds slower, and when you go to quali the car is much quicker and you don't have much time to play around - you have just two laps and that's it. So it's going to be very difficult, but I'm very excited to race with Charouz and we'll be doing our best as usual."

"It was clear how I was losing and why, so it was good to have this in the beginning. During the year I can work a lot to improve this, and I still have time to do that" Igor Fraga

Although Charouz - where Fraga will be engineered by Martin Proc - is a Czech team, it has an international composition, with long-time Fortec Motorsport man Jamie Dye at the helm as F3 team manager. Under Sauber Junior Team nomenclature it had a tough 2019, with DTM-bound Fabio Scherer its best-placed driver in the rankings, in 17th.

But Fraga is optimistic that it's a good place to be "for my first year", and realises how much he has to learn following the three-day Bahrain test just before the coronavirus lockdown.

He says: "It was good that we started there in Bahrain because the Tarmac is quite aggressive and the tyre wear is aggressive, so to practice race pace and everything it was a good place to be, because at other circuits the difference would be smaller, and I think on the way that you drive [naturally] maybe I was going to lose a little bit at the end.

"But there, it was clear how I was losing and why, so it was good to have this in the beginning. During the year I can work a lot to improve this, and I still have time to do that."

In the meantime, it couldn't be better for Fraga that FIA F3 kicks off with two rounds at the Red Bull Ring - not only the circuit owned by his new mentors, but where he scored his breakthrough European win in 2019.

Remarkably, as he points out, he's never driven at Silverstone or Spa - and he must be in a minority of one in that respect - but for someone who's mastered Japanese kart tracks, out-of-the-way Brazilian circuits, Mexican autodromes, American street and road courses and the old-school New Zealand facilities, you somehow think that he'll get to grips with them pretty soon.

And surely no-one on the FIA F3 grid would hold a candle to Fraga around the Autumn Ring.