The Brazilian F2 driver hoping to return his country to motorsport's top tier

After one of “the most difficult years of my career” in 2021, Felipe Drugovich didn’t think he would be returning to Formula 2 in 2022.

A disappointing second season of F2 with Virtuosi Racing saw him finish eighth in the championship, with four podiums but no wins to his name, while team-mate Zhou Guanyu challenged for the title with four wins on his way to third place and an Alfa Romeo Formula 1 seat. Behind the scenes too, things were not all rosy, Drugovich finding “nothing really melted together” despite his acknowledgement that Virtuosi are “a really good team.”

He looked set to race elsewhere in 2022, until his mind was changed by a call came from MP Motorsport, the Dutch outfit who had brought him to F2 the previous year. Having won three races including the Bahrain feature with the team in 2020, Drugovich says MP “really wanted to have me in the team, especially helping me financially, which is a big thing for me as well, so we closed a deal together”.

Now after two rounds, Drugovich leads the F2 drivers’ standings – something he freely admits he “wasn’t expecting”. Though he was unhappy with the opening round in Bahrain, where he came away with sixth and fifth places from the sprint and feature races, he had a fantastic outing on the tricky streets of Saudi Arabia. There he came through to third in the sprint race, after Jake Hughes’ podium was stripped for an overly worn plank, before winning from pole in Sunday’s feature race.

“The weekend was pretty much perfect for me,” Drugovich tells Autosport. “We started out P1 in free practice and then I also managed to do a pole position in a chaotic quali, I would say.

“And then from there, I started P10, finished P4, and then ended up being P3 in the sprint race with the penalties for the guy in front [Hughes]. And then on Sunday, we just got the job done starting from pole and then just disappeared into the distance.

“So it was really nice, I think the car was perfect throughout the whole weekend. The team did amazing, so really happy. And also to top off everything, we're leading the championship, so amazing.”

Felipe Drugovich produced the dream Saudi Arabian round and now leads the early F2 standings

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

It could have been a very different picture in Jeddah, as Drugovich languished down in 13th with just five minutes remaining on the clock in qualifying. But a last-ditch attempt – “probably the lap of my life” – while others had run out of fuel following a third interruption to running put him top of the timings by over 0.2s.

It led him to a dominant feature race victory, resisting a challenge from Richard Verschoor at the start before breaking out of DRS range in the early stages. Having started on the soft tyres, a smooth pitstop on lap nine to switch to Pirelli’s medium compound returned him to the track still in a net race lead. Though a rapid Verschoor looked to be closing in on the last laps, the Brazilian held on to take his fourth series win – and his first since 2020.

Though he has the full support of MP, both financially and otherwise, Drugovich is one of the few drivers at the front of the grid without the backing of a Formula 1 team

Despite his difficult 2021 season, Drugovich says he still “learned a lot, for sure” and singles out the benefits in consistency that have resulted.

“It was one of the most difficult years of my career, but to be fair, that's when you learn the most,” he says. “I really learned a lot, especially how to be consistent because I knew I didn’t have the best pace or wasn’t the fastest but I was still trying to go for P1 in every race. Sometimes I just went over the top and risked too much. I think at least for the first two rounds already put it to work just to get the points, be consistent and try to be scoring every race.”

Returning to Sander Dorsman's MP squad is so far proving to be the move he had hoped it would be, rejoining a team he “really loves”, and previously helped him get back to winning ways following another difficult year – his underwhelming 2019 FIA Formula 3 campaign with Carlin.

Having cruised to the 2018 Euroformula Open title with RP Motorsport, his 14 wins and 16 podiums putting him 129 points clear of runner-up Bent Viscaal, Drugovich had hoped his step up to F3 would prove the next big step up in a career that had already seen him finish third to current F2 rivals Juri Vips and Marcus Armstrong (then Prema team-mates) in the 2017 ADAC Formula 4 series.

It wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Carlin entered 2019, the first of the new championship born out of the merger between GP3 Series and the FIA Formula 3 European Championship, as one of the top teams in the latter series having run Lando Norris to the 2017 title. But the storied squad struggled in the new-look F3, finishing Drugovich’s debut season second-last in the teams’ standings with 14 points – eight of which were scored by the Brazilian in Hungary.

Drugovich's first MP spell also came after he'd endured a tough season, this time in the 2019 FIA F3 championship with Carlin

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

His sixth place there was one of only two top 10 finishes Drugovich mustered all year alongside Logan Sargeant and Teppei Natori, as he finished the best of that trio in a lowly 16th. Reflecting on 2019, Drugovich says that season was “terrible for me”.

“Obviously, coming from an amazing year that I had in Euroformula to F3 I thought we at least could fight for it,” he says. “The whole team was a disaster that year.

“We didn't really get anything to work. We were not even close to one of the fastest cars, so it was a pretty much a disaster. But in the end, that's when you learn the most and I learned a lot as well, how to how to treat the team and try to bring them forward and try to bring the power.

“I think that's the most important thing to take away from that year, because results, I wouldn't say was a good thing that year. It was just at the back every time and I knew that wasn't where I should have been.”

Despite the woes of 2019, MP Motorsport took a chance on the then 19-year-old, signing him up to its 2020 F2 line-up. Drugovich says he “knew he had the potential to be in F2,” and though the “most logical step was to be one more year in F3,” he took his chance to step up when the call came ahead of testing.

Though he has the full support of MP, both financially and otherwise, Drugovich is one of the few drivers at the front of the grid without the backing of a Formula 1 team. The likes of Vips, Liam Lawson, Jehan Daruvala, Dennis Hauger and Ayumu Iwasa are members of Red Bull’s junior team, highest placed returning driver from 2021 Theo Pourchaire is part of the Sauber Academy, while Alpine, Williams and Mercedes are represented by Jack Doohan, Sargeant and Frederik Vesti respectively. 

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Drugovich doesn’t have the advantage that brings, which he puts down to a lack of opportunities rather than a choice. He says it gives him more drive to prove himself, though he says motivation “shouldn't come from external things, it should just come from you”.

“Of course, it helps a little bit to be in a position with the academy backing your work,” he says, “but from the other side I think it really gives me some anger to prove myself. I don't think it's a good thing to be out of it where I am right now.”

Drugovich takes on a vast number of F1 juniors in F2 this year, but has no such affiliations himself

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

In lieu of that, Drugovich’s main support network is his family - a bunch of avid motorsport fans hailing from Maringa, a small city 650km from Sao Paolo. His other key supporter is Amir Nasr, uncle of Porsche factory driver Felipe and owner of the eponymous championship-winning South American F3 and stock car team.

“My uncle and Felipe’s uncle have been friends for a long, long time,” he says. “He had a South American F3 team and my uncle used to help him out on it, and then they've been friends since then. Also my uncle supported a little bit Felipe in his early career, and now his uncle is helping me out as well. It's quite an exchange of favours, I would say.”

With its rich motorsport history producing some of the greatest names in F1 history, including Ayrton Senna, Nelson Piquet and Emerson Fittipaldi, it’s somewhat of a surprise that no Brazilian driver has lined up on the F1 grid since Felipe Massa’s retirement in 2017. The 2018 F1 season was the first since 1969 not to feature a Brazilian driver, although American-Brazilian driver Pietro Fittipaldi replaced Romain Grosjean in the final two races of 2020.

"If you think an investment to put a driver in F1, nowadays, which is more and more in Europe, for Brazil, I would say it's five times more or even six times more" Felipe Drugovich

Drugovich believes this is down to the spiralling costs of entering motorsport, combined with the poor conversion rate between the Brazilian real and Pounds or Euros, which makes it attractive for drivers to race in the domestic Stock Car series.

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“I think the situation in Brazil is not so good financially, and most of the people, I think, especially with the currency conversion rate from Brazil, it doesn't really help with the financial situation in Brazil,” he says.

“If you think an investment to put a driver in F1 nowadays, which is more and more in Europe, for Brazil, I would say it's five times more or even six times more, so it's quite difficult to find a company to have the money and to want to invest. I think that's the most difficult thing and that also translates to the lack of drivers that get into F3 or F2 even.”

If Drugovich can continue the rapid pace and consistency he’s shown so far this season and win the championship, F1 teams may wish to give him the look-in that hasn't been open to him thus far. And as one of just a handful of Brazilian drivers to break through onto the European ladder, Drugovich may be the country’s best hope of having a driver finally make it back to F1 after its five-year drought.

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Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images