The unheralded F1 talent factory moving into Europe

Two of its graduates are now in Formula 1; seven are going to line up on this year's Formula 2 grid. Five of them have manufacturer contracts in GT racing or the DTM, and another has raced in IndyCar. One is a DTM privateer, while two are Red Bull Juniors in Formula 3. Yet the team in question has never even come close to winning a race in Europe.

That team, M2 Competition, can rightly claim to be one of motorsport's premier talent factories, but as an adjunct of drivers' main programmes. It's the go-to destination for those seeking winter racing programmes in New Zealand's Toyota Racing Series, where it has run Toyota talisman Nick Cassidy, F1 youngsters Lance Stroll and Lando Norris, Ferrari protege Robert Shwartzman and Red Bull 'heifers' Liam Lawson and Igor Fraga to championship victories.

And that record in Europe? Well, M2 only entered the Formula Renault Eurocup in 2019. It's early days yet.

That was a move that was long overdue, for M2 has always been 50% European, and was set up in time for the 2011 season by Belgian Jonathan 'Flex' Moury and Kiwi Mark Pilcher. Each had worked at Super Nova Racing running the A1 Team New Zealand squad, with Moury as performance engineer and Pilcher as chief mechanic.

"Mark is 10 years older than me and he became like my big brother," says Moury. "When he came over to Europe his wife and six-month-old daughter came as well, and they were a bit lost in Europe so they came to live with us for a while at my parents' place in Belgium.

"I was mostly living on people's couches and stuff like that because I was having a bit of a pikey life, and we really bonded together. When A1 stopped in 2009, he went back to New Zealand. And then he sends me a message and in typical Mark fashion - he's a man of few words - he says, 'Do you want to start a team with me?' 'All right, how is that going to work because you're in New Zealand and I'm in Europe?'"

Pilcher had been working with TRS team Triple X Motorsport, running future Le Mans winner Earl Bamber to second in the standings in 2010. But when that squad shut up shop at season's end, Pilcher was persuaded by series manager Barrie Thomlinson to start his own operation.

"So that's how it all started," continues Moury. "When you're young and innocent you just go, 'Oh yeah, I'll do that.'

"I think we actually invested €2000 in the whole thing and we borrowed equipment everywhere from everyone. The first year we were seven people and three drivers, so 10 in total and it was just... fun. But everybody said, 'You're never going to make it work, you're based in Europe and Mark is in New Zealand.' The first year was not a disaster, but we had a long way to go, that's for sure."

M2's only win of 2011 came courtesy of Ivan Lukashevich in a reversed-grid race, and Moury would continue to engineer the Russian as his 'day job' at the time with Status Grand Prix in GP3. He also worked on Status's European Le Mans Series project, before joining Strakka Racing. In the meantime, Thomlinson had helped the team with driver recruitment, and for 2012 Ferrari protege Raffaele Marciello and Formula Renault 2.0 ace Jordan King were among the line-up.

"I thought, 'Right, I've got to step up here because the guys here are way more clever than I am,' and this kind of led to an improvement within M2 as well" Jonathan Moury

"At that time it was more of a cross between French F4 [ie centrally run] and a normal championship," says Moury in acknowledgement of Thomlinson's influence. "Giles Motorsport [run by ex-McLaren F1 mechanic Steve Giles] was the team to beat at that time and all the drivers wanted to go there, so Barrie was trying to spread them out a bit more and try to even the level out. He had a lot of grip on the whole thing."

Results still weren't great, but Moury was about to have his eyes opened. He was recruited as an engineer in late 2012 by RBM, which was running one of the works BMW teams in the DTM.

"The level was just on another planet," he recalls. "I thought, 'Right, I've got to step up here because the guys here are way more clever than I am,' and this kind of led to an improvement within M2 as well.

"We decided to change completely the approach, and we made a financial sacrifice to an extent - we decided to invest a bit more and get Alex Lynn and Nick Cassidy in the team."

Cassidy won that 2013 TRS title, with Lynn - now an Aston Martin factory driver in the World Endurance Championship - completing a 1-2. Now the team was really firing on all cylinders, with Moury spending the summer in European paddocks, working in the DTM and recruiting TRS drivers, while Pilcher focused on the practicalities back in NZ.

"Mark is in charge of everything that's mechanical, and he has the relationship with Toyota in the first place," says Moury. "I do all the engineering and the talking, because I talk a lot! I ended up talking to Alex and Nick, because I was based in Europe; same with the staff as well - it allowed us to get more people from Europe, and that increased the level of the team as well in terms of mechanics and engineers.

"You have to remember that the cars are owned by Toyota, and they stay at Toyota's HQ during the year, so Mark goes there and re-preps the cars across the season while having other jobs, because he's involved in all sorts of stuff."

The pivotal season was 2015, when Stroll - who was a Ferrari junior back then - and his then-sidekick Brandon Maisano were sent to race in TRS by Prema Powerteam in preparation for their rookie F3 European Championship season. They were accompanied by Prema chief Rene Rosin.

At this point, Moury and his then-girlfriend Elise Acker had resigned their engineering jobs, at RBM and the WRT Audi GT3 squad respectively, in order to try to set up an M2 team in the inaugural season of British Formula 4, only for their entry to be turned down by the series organisers. But the Prema connection provided a big opportunity.

"We started talking, and us being a tiny TRS team existing for five weeks a year, our talking to Rene was a massive thing for us," recalls Moury. "The whole thing worked really well, we gelled with Rene, we gelled with the Prema engineers, the dynamic just happened to be fantastic and we ended up dominating with the new [for 2015] car."

Stroll romped to the title, with Maisano completing an M2 1-2.

"At the end of TRS Rene came to me and said, 'Well I think I have found my team manager for GP2'," adds Moury.

Moury accepted, and was instrumental in setting up the Prema team, although he and Acker worked in the interim for Virtuosi - then operating under the Russian Time banner - in 2015, together engineering Artem Markelov in GP2.

"Virtuosi was a fantastic team, but I wanted to become a team manager, and when you have the offer to be a team manager at Prema you can't really say no," says Moury.

Back in NZ, Norris swept to the 2016 TRS crown, but Moury was called away before the season finished because his father had passed away.

"We carried on working at Prema until about May, but at the same time my dad had the family real-estate business which we were running at the same time, so we were travelling back and forth between Italy and Belgium," he says of an exhausting time. "It was just not possible. I had to stop racing [in Europe] for a couple of years, so I stopped with Prema halfway through the year."

The successes continued to mount in TRS, before the Mourys - now husband-and-wife - let go of the family business and began work on their European programme, which would be with the new Tatuus Regional F3 chassis in the 2019 Formula Renault Eurocup.

"The opportunity came along with the new car in Renault, we applied for it so everything was aligned," says Moury. "My wife being an engineer, she got excited about it as well and we wanted the chance to do things our way.

"When you compete against teams that have been in the championship for 15 years, that wasn't bad, and it laid the foundations. We're proud of what we did in the first year" Jonathan Moury

"We put in the formula that worked pretty well in New Zealand, because we really wanted to do it in Europe as well."

Arjun Maini had won races with M2 in the TRS in 2015, and the family came calling again for the team to run younger brother Kush, fresh from a promising season in British F3. In the driver's and team's rookie Renault Eurocup season, they combined to take sixth in the championship, and runner-up in the rookie standings.

"Realistically the rookie championship was what we were aiming to fight for, which we did but there were too many mistakes, both from Kush and from the team," states Moury. "There were some small mistakes that could have been avoided, and the sum of all that meant we fell too far behind.

"When you compete against teams that have been in the championship for 15 years, that wasn't bad, and it laid the foundations. We're proud of what we did in the first year. People tend to forget that it was not only Kush's first year in Eurocup but ours too. And he was the first non-R-ace GP or MP Motorsport driver, which is also satisfying."

TRS's adoption of the same Tatuus Regional F3 car for 2020, along with tyres from Eurocup supplier Hankook, appeared to offer an open door for M2 to further strengthen its NZ stranglehold for 2020.

But rival team MTEC Motorsport set up a formal collaboration with Renault titan R-ace; Kiwi Motorsport started a less-well-publicised tie-up with MP Motorsport; and, says Moury, the remaining team - Giles Motorsport - took on some freelancing Eurocup expertise. It may have Toyota Racing Series nomenclature but, engine aside, the championship is now a winter Renault Eurocup in all but name.

"This year it was huge competition in New Zealand with MP and R-ace coming over, and I took great pleasure in fighting for the championship," declares Moury.

It boiled down to a tremendous fight between returning 2019 champion Liam Lawson and TRS first-timer Igor Fraga. Brazilian Fraga pipped his M2 stablemate to the title and, like Lawson had been the year before, was rewarded with a place in the Red Bull Junior fold.

"I don't think many people were expecting Igor to perform that well," says Moury. "We were expecting Igor to be at the front, but not to be in a position to be level with Liam so quickly. Liam won the first round, and he was the fastest, and I remember the conversation clearly.

"Liam came to me and said, 'Mmm, Igor's going to be a problem.' I was like, 'Yep, later on but it might take some time.' And Igor came to me and said, 'Where do I find the three tenths to go and compete with Liam?'

"And sure enough, the kid works incredibly hard and he caught up, and both drivers were to me really incredible in the way they worked. They pushed each other but without any mind games - they were very respectful of the team and of each other.

"They both drove exceptionally well, and to be honest it could have been one, and then the next day it could have been the other who won the championship. It was not much at all."

With Maini moving on to R-ace for 2020, the team will be up against it in Renault Eurocup. Inexperienced Japanese-American Reece Ushijima is the only driver confirmed, although most paddock insiders reckon M2 is running rapid Russian SMP Racing protege Mikhail Belov, who shone in German and Italian F4 last season. A third seat is open too.

And don't forget, it's still early days in Renault and in Europe for M2. Make sure you check the team's 2021 TRS line-up though - chances are there'll be a future F1 star among them.

M2's star alumni

Moury on...

Raffaele Marciello (2012)

"The Ferrari thing with 'Lello' wasn't fantastic and it was a bit bitter at the time. The biggest thing is that a lot of drivers make a lot of mistakes in New Zealand. A prime example was Lello. The drivers who have a difficult time in New Zealand, they come back to Europe and then six months later they say, 'Actually, I'm glad I did TRS because I nearly went into the same pattern in Europe and I didn't.'"

Nick Cassidy and Alex Lynn (2013)

"Clearly there was something missing with Nick, because he was with Prema [in F3 in 2016] and he should have been more consistently at the front. But he has worked tremendously hard and I have to give credit to him for that. At the time, I thought Alex would be an F1 driver. I'm very good friends with both of them, I was Alex's race engineer as well so we had a special relationship on that side, and Nicolas Caillol [who has since become the TRS category manager, taking Thomlinson's old job] was Cassidy's engineer.

"If you ask me now if Nick deserves a shot at an F1 seat then I would say yes. Alex could have kept on going to F1, because in my opinion he was really capable of it, but there was a whole lot of stuff at the time - there was Stroll, and Alex needed a lot more money and instead he made the switch to be a professional driver.

"Alex is a clever guy. He had a massive shunt at Teretonga, destroyed the car completely, and he managed to pull the team together, thank the team for what they'd done. A very good team player and well-educated person."

Lance Stroll (2015)

"Rene Rosin [Prema boss] didn't want to do the Florida Winter Series thing again for Lance [this was a series that Prema ran for old Formula Abarth cars in early 2014]. So it was, 'OK, let's send him to New Zealand'.

"It was a new car for 2015, and Mark Pilcher did a fantastic job, because the reliability of our cars was exceptional compared to the others, and that made a big difference. And performance wise we were so well organised that even Rene said to us, 'You guys have a very good platform'.

"It made the rest of it much easier as well, because we had performance, we had the drivers, we documented everything and we were prepared enough."

Lando Norris (2016)

"The thing I remember the most is we were in Ruapuna and it was starting to rain a little bit. A lot of drivers boxed for wet tyres, and at some point it was properly wet, like you have to pray and everything, and Lando on slick tyres was still over a second faster than everybody else, and when you see that you think, 'This is just incredible'.

"After the first round, his engineer Nico Caillol came to me and said, 'I think I'm going to try to go for all the poles this year'. He didn't, but he was only two shy [out of 10 qualifying sessions, and in the two he missed out on pole he was a close second].

"Lando was just really exceptional. You look at him and think, 'That guy's going to be a Formula 1 driver'. Lando was the first one who for me arrived and was the man, no question."

Jehan Daruvala (2016/17)/Guanyu Zhou (2017)

"They did really well, but they got overshadowed [by Norris]. They weren't quite there yet. Jehan had a lot of talent, but it needed a bit more time to mature. He came back for another year, and I think the approach was the not the right one, and that led to him not winning the championship.

"It was early days for Joe - very good but a lot up-and-down. My wife Elise was running him, and she struggled sometimes. But they got there. With the right package, he has done very well in F2.

"The problem with five weeks is you can only have so much of an impact, it's relatively short term, and it took three years to sort him [Zhou, below] out. But already back then he was a decent pedaller."

Robert Shwartzman (2018)/Richard Verschoor (2018)/Marcus Armstrong (2017-19)

"It was incredible in 2018. We were head and shoulders above everybody else. Robert and Marcus will probably hate me, but Richard was the best one that year of the three. He was returning, and this was helping for sure, but he put on a tremendous performance and only lost the title because of a mechanical failure, otherwise he would have won it by a country mile.

"He really impressed me as well, and he was doing his own stuff on the side. There was a lot of focus between Robert and Marcus, and they were focused on each other [as Ferrari juniors], and Richard kind of plugged along and did his own thing, and I think it helped him perform.

"In the end it was a crazy year with a crazy finale. I feel sad for Marcus - to lose a championship like that [his car went into limp mode in the finale with the title in sight] is not nice, but I felt happy at the same time for Robert. It's really conflicting feelings when it's like that, but when you have three fighting for the championship there's only one who is happy and two who are miserable."

M2's TRS roll of honour