BMW’s Verstappen-like prodigy who may not make F1

"Don't make too many people aware of it!" laughs Jens Marquardt. Autosport has just told the BMW boss that we're writing an article to bring the talent of Joel Eriksson to people's attention, and the subtext of his throwaway remark about the Bavarian manufacturer's junior protege is clear.

Marquardt might as well have said: "Joel is our baby; we want to keep him from the limelight and make him our new superstar before anyone else realises and gets hold of him."

Want further proof of Eriksson's talent? Listen to Motopark boss Timo Rumpfkeil, who gave then-karting sensation Max Verstappen his first steps in a Formula 3 car at the end of 2013, and ran the Dutchman to Masters of F3 glory in '14.

His team carried Valtteri Bottas to the Formula Renault Eurocup title in 2008, and nurtured, among others, Kevin Magnussen, Scott Speed, Antonio Felix da Costa and Filipe Albuquerque in their early days. Rumpfkeil has masterminded Eriksson's single-seater career to the point that he currently sits third in the F3 European Championship standings, having led much of the first half of the season.

"Joel is in the same ballpark as a Bottas [below] and a Verstappen," declares Rumpfkeil. "Of course they are all different cases. Character-wise they are all very different, but from the raw talent and the way that translates into results I think he's on the same level, and I really hope he makes it in the same way."

By that, of course, Rumpfkeil means Formula 1 stardom rather than the BMW career that is surely Eriksson's best bet of a professional life in racing.

But while new F3 championship leader Lando Norris is firmly on the path to the sport's pinnacle, it seems like a further-fetched dream for his main rivals Eriksson, Maxi Gunther and Callum Ilott - and through no shortfall in their ability. You only have to look at Eriksson's compatriot, 2015 F3 champion Felix Rosenqvist, to learn that this sport doesn't necessarily reward everyone who deserves it - Rosenqvist is renowned as one of the best around, yet never even got a sniff of an F1 test.

Eriksson is a remarkably self-contained, self-assured, practical character for one who is just 19, and entirely lacking in bullshit. He has no formal management - although there is a small group of family and friends helping his career. He has no time for frills such as a trainer (no skipping or catching tennis balls before races for him) or mind-coaching. He'd rather be busy with his hands sorting out his visor.

Close followers of single-seater racing will know that Eriksson is the younger brother of Jimmy, 2012 German F3 champion and former GP3 and GP2 series racer now competing in his rookie Blancpain GT season in an HTP Motorsport Mercedes.

"Everything started in the garden at home," says Joel. "I was six or seven years old, my brother was 14. We got our first go-karts and we started to play around.

"Then we wanted to try a real track, so we went, and there was a guy who had done some karting before but was quite old, and he told my father that, 'These two guys here could be really quick in the future'. But my father was working a lot with his transport company so he said, 'I have no time'. But there was an older guy, a friend of my father, and he said, 'Well I could go racing with Jimmy and Joel'. So, everything started from there."

Jimmy (pictured below) moved into car racing with Motopark in Formula Renault NEC in 2009, at which point Joel was still 10. The younger sibling won Swedish championships at every level in karting, but trips abroad to the international scene were scarce: father Arne, while wealthy by most standards, isn't crazy-rich and funds had to be spent wisely.

"We decided with the father quite early," points out Rumpfkeil. "He came up and said, 'What are we going to do with Joel?', and we decided with him to put the money he had towards testing formula cars.

"On his 13th birthday he had his first test with us [in a Formel Masters car, the forerunner of German Formula 4], and we went to an airfield like we always did with the regular drivers, and after the day he was just sleeping because he was completely fucked!"

Two and a half years later came Eriksson's first season in car racing, with Motopark in Formel Masters. Throughout his preparation he was helped by big brother Jimmy, and the bond between the two brothers - as you often find with same-gender siblings of a similar age gap (seven years in their case) - endures and endears to this day.

"Jimmy has been my idol since I was really small," he admits. "He has always supported and taught me, like brothers do. All the mistakes he made in his career I don't need to do it, because now we know where to go and what to do as well."

With FMasters being scrapped for 2015 he moved to the new F4 series. He led the championship for a while, but was beaten by the more-experienced Marvin Dienst (now making a name for himself in World Endurance circles with Porsche) in an often-controversial season.

"What is important about a young guy like Joel is really to have him develop thoroughly and not do three steps at a time. He has gone up very quickly." BMW motorsport boss Jens Marquardt

There was a draconian one-race suspension for a very minor red-flag offence, a round where he missed most of free practice because his team-mate smashed into him under a red flag and destroyed the gearbox, and a drive-through penalty during the final round at Hockenheim after being deemed to have swerved at Dienst.

"Later on they [the officials] came and apologised because they saw he [Dienst] was completely behind," says Rumpfkeil, who, pulling no punches, adds: "I think the stewards were not really up to it - there were some shitty things."

Such driving transgressions (if, indeed, there were any) have been remarkably absent from Eriksson's F3 career since he entered the category at the beginning of last season. This is one of his notable skills: while Norris, Ilott and, to a far lesser extent, Gunther have all been involved in collisions, Eriksson is an intuitive racer and is most likely to have a clean weekend.

As usual for a rookie in F3, his 2016 season was one of getting the technique of qualifying right before challenging for wins. By mid-season he was a real contender, denied his maiden victory at the Norisring by an out-of-control Ilott, but putting that right a month later at Spa. He then claimed the Masters of F3 at Zandvoort and finished the season as the rookie champion and the most consistent challenger to overall title winner (and now Williams F1 driver) Lance Stroll.

That was no mean feat, bearing in mind he was partnered at Motopark by fellow F3 rookies Niko Kari and Guan Yu Zhou and by Sergio Sette Camara, who was in only his second full year of car racing.

"The DNA of Motopark is always working with young talents," points out Rumpfkeil. "It's not our market position to take somebody in their third or fourth year of F3 and fight for the title. And therefore we always enjoy working with talents - talent is the root of everything. Of course you take some setbacks and you make some mistakes, which is normal, but I think for his rookie campaign it was quite flawless."

Eriksson was hot property on the driver market for 2017 - Hitech GP is known to have made efforts to sign him - but the family stayed loyal to Motopark for an eighth season out of nine (across both brothers). That was after strong rumours had connected him with a move straight to the DTM with BMW, before the series' manufacturers slimmed down from eight cars each to six.

That story gained traction due to Eriksson's remarkable fast-tracking within the BMW junior programme. He smashed an assessment at Dijon, got announced as a junior just before the Norisring DTM round in summer last year, and instantly was given taxi-ride duties on the Nuremberg street circuit.

"We'd monitored him for quite some time," says BMW boss Marquardt. "We start pretty early with monitoring. We go from karting series, over all the feeder series, and we have a... I don't know what you want to call it, a screening list or something. He was on there for a bit of time already. At a certain time we approached him and his dad, and here we are."

Ask Marquardt whether Eriksson would have been in an eight-car DTM team for 2017, and he deftly steps past the question, without denying it: "I think what is important about a young guy like Joel is really to have him develop thoroughly and not do three steps at a time. He has anyway gone up very quickly, and I think looking at his season this year, based on last year, it's sometimes also important to rest on a level and not go step step step, and then realise that maybe that was a bit too quick."

What Eriksson has done this year has been all the more impressive because not only is Motopark the smallest of the five teams in F3, but he has not had the back-up from team-mates enjoyed by the other frontrunners.

Furthermore, he had never even driven on the first two circuits on the calendar - Silverstone (a planned December test was cancelled because he was on BMW DTM test duty in Spain) and Monza - before winning at both venues and taking an early championship lead.

Rumpfkeil points out that his Oschersleben-based team doesn't even operate at the newly FIA-mandated maximum headcount at events, while it's easy to imagine that inexperienced new team-mates Marino Sato and Keyvan Andres Soori won't have matched any of Eriksson's corner speeds as the teams knuckled down to developing the new Dallara aero package. David Beckmann arrived in June but, while fast, he is erratic.

Still, Eriksson has combined well with Motopark technical director Andy Kohler - who has been at the squad for several years, including when it ran the Russian Time operation to a debut GP2 teams' title success in 2013 - and race engineer Daniel Gratacos, who has returned to Motopark this year having also been part of the one-year GP2 exercise.

"For me it cannot be better on that side," points out Eriksson. "We are working well together I would say."

The respect is mutual, because not only is Eriksson an outstanding racing driver, but also a brilliant young mechanic - he spends his spare time at home hotting up, and tuning the turbo on, his increasingly lairy Volvo road car. Rumpfkeil adds that "he's the only driver in this paddock who could take his F3 car apart and put it back together again perfectly".

There's a story that, in his F4 days, the then-16-year-old was the first to cotton on to the fact that there's a tiny 100rpm band on the Abarth turbo engine that gives maximum acceleration and minimum lag: crucial for restarts.

"BMW is a nice, luxury Plan B but I really hope that his career continues in formula cars because I truly believe that he deserves it." Motopark boss Timo Rumpfkeil

Watch him at a heavy braking point, for example the Roggia chicane at Monza, and you'll notice that he completes most of his braking before changing down through the gears, minimising stress on the engine. And then you remember that, amid Motopark's Volkswagen reliability chaos of 2016, Eriksson was the only one not to need a powerplant change and take the subsequent grid penalties.

"It's hard to say how much of a benefit this is," says Rumpfkeil of Eriksson's mechanical skills and sympathy, "but it's no disadvantage. He knows the car inside and out, and only asks things from it which are possible. As well as this, he is very sensitive to any problems occurring, with the result that he stops before problems become vital and can direct the guys very well where they need to search."

Marquardt believes these skills are a plus: "If you understand what a race car is about, how it is built, how it is designed, what is affecting what, what actually makes it work, what makes it go fast, if you can combine that with your skill as a driver... there have been great drivers with that kind of combination that have had great success. You still have to be able to manage it right, because if you turn into an engineer behind the wheel I don't think it's going to work!"

Not that Eriksson is likely to be guilty of this; he's just not that kind of bloke. He knows when his job is done, and you're more likely to find him chatting with family and close friends or slumped in a comfy beanbag, noodling on his phone at the back of the Motopark awning, than outstaying his welcome in the engineering room. He's self-sufficient, relaxed, freeing up his mind for what's necessary.

What's necessary now is a charge back into title contention, because mid-season form in qualifying has slumped at Motopark and as a result he now lies 55 points adrift of Norris.

Of the top four in F3 this year, Eriksson has thrown away fewest points - you can possibly point to his broken suspension in Pau that resulted in a crash and his only non-finish of 2017 (if this came from hitting kerbs too hard earlier on), and getting his quickest lap disallowed in Q2 at Zandvoort for improving under yellow flags.

"Our screw-ups as a team are much more evident than his screw-ups," acknowledges Rumpfkeil.

"There are little hiccups here and there, which is normal. I mean, nobody in F3 has a season where you go through and have 10 out of 10 points all the time on the scoreboard. There's always some things to improve, but generally his error code is low, and if there's an error it's not an error like other people who throw the car off or whatever."

It's those qualities that those in the know in F3 have identified as proof of a special talent and, even if he doesn't even take the title fight to the final round, how you compete is as important as your results - just look at Verstappen (third in 2014) and Antonio Giovinazzi (runner-up to Rosenqvist in '15) for proof of that.

It's fair to say that he deserves the chance to prove himself in F1 circles, not that the elite has paid much attention to date. Without that, his future most likely lies with BMW, whether that's in the DTM or elsewhere.

Could he graduate there in 2018? "We're obviously working close with him," says Marquardt. "Decisions for next year we're going to make at the end of this year, but we are monitoring him. With Marco [Wittmann], with Maxime [Martin], with Tom [Blomqvist] our selection process has been so far successful and I'm confident we're going to continue with that."

But he adds: "If he has single-seater chances beyond where he is now we would definitely not stand in the way."

"It [BMW] is a nice, very, very luxury plan B for him," says Rumpfkeil, "but I really hope that his career continues in formula cars because I truly believe that he deserves it. But support is needed for him to make the next step."

And Eriksson? Ever-blunt, he states: "For the moment F1 is the dream, the goal still. But first of all I want to win this fucking championship!"

And you have to laugh, because that's typical of this streetwise, superfast, talented young guy. But be kind to Jens Marquardt: don't tell anyone else about it.