2014 GP2 Series season preview and primer - MotorSportsTalk

As Formula 1 steals the limelight and often overshadows all other motorsport events that take place at the track on a race weekend, its premier feeder series – GP2 – has a great reputation and prestige within the sport’s community. Since its inception back in 2005, the series has produced 25 F1 drivers, including 2008 world champion Lewis Hamilton, race winners Nico Rosberg and Pastor Maldonado, plus the likes of Romain Grosjean, Nico Hulkenberg, Kamui Kobayashi and Heikki Kovalainen.

2014 sees the series enter its tenth season, and with a number of highly exciting drivers entering the championship, the stage is set for a classic season of GP2 racing. Who will follow in the footsteps of Fabio Leimer and clinch the title this year?

WHAT IS GP2?

GP2 emerged from the old International F3000 series back in 2005, and has since been the direct feeder series to Formula 1, although drivers have been known to graduate from Formula Renault 3.5 and GP2’s own feeder series, GP3. Many of the teams in F1 do have major interests in GP2 with junior teams and drivers, as it is the perfect training ground for them under the wing of the sport.

GP2 perfectly prepares drivers for life in Formula 1 as they are part of the grand prix weekend. Each GP2 round supports its respective grand prix, meaning that the drivers get to use the exact same facilities and circuits. The series also gets great exposure by being an integral part of the grand prix weekend, being broadcast all over the world and in front of the baying crowds that flock to some of F1’s best-attended races.

THE CAR

In order to make the racing as competitive as possible, all drivers race with identical chassis, engines and tires in GP2.

The current car, the GP2/11, was designed by Dallara and is fitted with a four litre V8 engine (larger and louder than in F1, where V6s are used), generating up to 612 BHP. It will be used until 2016 to keep costs down.

The GP2/11 can do 0-60 in 2.9 seconds and is capable of a top speed of 206mph. This may be the ‘feeder series’, but a GP2 car is no slouch. The car must also pass a Formula One crash test and be up to F1 standards in all areas of safety.

Pirelli tires are a standard for all teams racing in GP2, just as they are in Formula 1. Furthermore, teams have the same compounds that are used in F1: super-soft, soft, medium, hard, intermediate and wet.

THE DRIVERS AND TEAMS

Here is the grid for the 2014 GP2 Series season:

RT RUSSIAN TIME
Mitch Evans NZL
Artem Markelov RUS

Carlin
Felipe Nasr BRA
Julian Leal COL

Racing Engineering
Raffaele Marciello ITA
Stefano Coletti MON

DAMS
Jolyon Palmer GBR
Stephane Richelmi MON

ART Grand Prix
Stoffel Vandoorne BEL
Takuya Izawa JPN

Hilmer Motorsport
Daniel Abt GER
Facu Regalia ARG

Rapax
Adrian Quaife-Hobbs GBR
Simon Trummer SUI

Arden International
Rene Binder AUT
Andre Negrao BRA

EQ8 Caterham Racing
Rio Haryanto INO
Alexander Rossi USA

MP Motorsport
Daniel de Jong NED
Jon Lancaster GBR

Trident Racing
Axcil Jefferies ZIM
Johnny Cecotto Jr. VEN

Venezuelan GP Lazarus
Conor Daly USA
Nathanael Berthon FRA

Campos Racing
Arthur Pic FRA
Kimiya Sato JPN

THE CALENDAR

1. Bahrain 4-6 April
2. Spain 9-11 May
3. Monaco 22-24 May
4. Austria 20-22 June
5. Great Britain 4-6 July
6. Germany 18-20 July
7. Hungary 25-27 July
8. Belgium 22-24 August
9. Italy 5-7 September
10. Russia 10-12 October
11. Abu Dhabi 21-23 November

THE RACE WEEKEND

The typical GP2 race weekend fits around the proceedings of Formula 1. On the Friday of each race, there will be a free practice session lasting 45 minutes, and then a 30 minute qualifying session. The grid for the feature race is formed from these results.

On Saturday, the feature race sees drivers race over a distance of 170km (140km for Monaco) and, like in Formula 1, they must make a pit stop and use both compounds of tire. Points are awarded in the same way as Formula 1 (without double points in Abu Dhabi).

On Sunday, the top eight finishers in the feature race are reversed to form the grid for the sprint race (i.e. finishing P8 in the feature race gets you pole for the sprint race).

The sprint race is run over a reduced distance of 120km (100km for Monaco), and points are awarded on a smaller scale (15 for P1, 12 for P2, 10 for P3, right the way down to one point for P8.

Points are also awarded for pole position and the fastest lap in each race.

DRIVERS TO WATCH

Raffaele Marciello
Marciello is widely considered to be Italy’s next great racing hope, and is the leading star in Ferrari’s driver academy. Known as “Lello”, he won last year’s FIA Formula 3 European Championship and now makes the step up with the team that took Fabio Leimer to last year’s title, Racing Engineering. He also raced up against NBCSN’s very own Will Buxton in the Florida Winter Series, and is a definite star for the future.

Stoffel Vandoorne
Just as Marciello is Ferrari’s great hope, Vandoorne is at the top of McLaren’s junior programme. The Belgian youngster finished as runner-up to Kevin Magnussen in Formula Renault 3.5 last season, and he is now chasing the GP2 title at the first attempt with ART. With Jenson Button approaching the end of his career, Vandoorne could be his direct successor, and a strong rookie year in GP2 certainly would help his chances of moving into F1 soon.

Felipe Nasr
Brazilian driver Felipe Nasr enters his third year in GP2 this season, and he is certainly one of the title favorites after finishing fourth in last year’s championship despite not winning a race. He will be balancing his campaign with a test driver role at Williams.

Alexander Rossi
As the only American driver to hold an FIA superlicense, Rossi is the nation’s best hope of a home driver in the near future. Having impressed during testing with Caterham Racing, he will be keen on mounting a serious title challenge this year after finishing as top rookie last time around.

Conor Daly
After a difficult winter, Daly secured a seat with Venezuela GP Lazarus just a few days ago, but he is geared up for the new GP2 season. After racing in GP3 last year and finishing the championship in third place, Conor – alongside Alexander Rossi – will be looking to give the US fans something to shout about in GP2 this season.

Also look out for: Mitch Evans, Stefano Coletti, Takuya Izawa, Arthur Pic.

Follow @LukeSmithF1

(Editor’s note: This story on the Heart of Racing sports cars shootout for women is one in an occasional Motorsports Talk series focusing on women in racing during March, which is Women’s History Month.)

Heart of Racing driver and team manager Ian James says his daughter, Gabby, isn’t so interested in auto racing. But she is interested (as a New York-based journalist) in writing about the sport’s efforts and growth in gender equality

It’s a topic that also was brought up by James’ wife, Kim.

“They’re always saying, ‘Hey, you manage all these guys, and you help them, so why not a woman?’ ” Ian James told NBC Sports. “And I feel like there are a lot of women that haven’t had a fair crack at it in sports car racing.

“Our whole DNA at Heart of Racing is we give people opportunities in all types of situations where there’s been crew personnel or drivers. And I felt like we hadn’t really addressed the female driver situation. I felt like there was a void to give somebody a chance to really prove themselves.”

During the offseason, the team took a major step toward remedying that.

*Hannah Grisham at the Heart of Racing shootout (Mike Levitt/LAT)*

Heart of Racing held its first female driver shootout last November at the APEX Motor Club in Phoenix, Arizona, to select two women who will co-drive an Aston Martin Vantage GT4 in the SRO SprintX Championship.

The season will begin this weekend at Sonoma Raceway with Hannah Grisham and Rianna O’Meara-Hunt behind the wheel. The team also picked a third driver, 17-year-old Annie Rhule, for a 2023 testing program.

The Phoenix audition included 10 finalists who were selected from 130 applicants to the program, which has been fully underwritten by Heart of Racing’s sponsors.

“We didn’t want it to be someone who just comes from a socio-economic background that could afford to do it on their own course,” James said. “We can pick on pure talent. We’re committed to three years to do this and see if we can find the right person. I’m very hopeful.”

So is Grisham, a Southern California native who has been racing since she was 6 in go-karts and since has won championships in Mazda and Miata ladder series. She has several victories in the World Racing League GP2 (an amateur sports car endurance series). The last two years, Grisham has worked as a test driver for the Pirelli tire company (she lives near Pirelli’s U.S. headquarters in Rome, Georgia, and tests about 30 times a year).

Starting with the Sonoma during SprintX event weekends (which feature races Saturday and Sunday), she will split the Heart of Racing car with O’Meara-Hunt (a New Zealand native she got to know at the shootout).

“It’s huge; the biggest opportunity I’ve had in this sport,” Grisham, 23, told NBC Sports. “Now it’s up to me to perform how I know I can. But I’m super lucky to be with such an amazing team and have a good teammate. The Heart of Racing has a family vibe and energy to it that’s really amazing. It’s super exciting. It’s hard to put into words.”

Grisham is hopeful that a strong performance eventually could lead to a full-time ride with Heart of Racing. The team has full-time entries in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship and won the GTD category of the 2023 Rolex 24 at Daytona with the No. 27 Aston Martin Vantage GT3 piloted by James, Darren Turner, Roman DeAngelis and Marco Sorensen.

James said “there’s no guarantee” of placement in an IMSA entry for Grisham and O’Meara-Hunt, but “if they prove themselves, we’ll continue to help them throughout their career and our team. The GT3 program is an obvious home for that. If they get the opportunity and don’t quite make it, we’ll be looking for the next two. The next three years, we’ll cycle through drivers until we find the right one.”

Grisham described the two-day shootout as a friendly but intense environment. After a day of getting acclimated to their cars, drivers qualified on new tires the second day and then did two 25-minute stints to simulate a race.

*Hannah Grisham reviews data with Heart of Racing sports car driver Gray Newell during the team’s shootout last November (Mike Levitt/LAT).*

“Everyone was super nice,” she said. “Once everyone gets in the car, it’s a different level. A different switch gets turned on. Everyone was super nice; everyone was quick. I feel we had an adequate amount of seat time, which is definitely helpful.

“It’s always cool to meet more women in the sport because there’s not too many of us, even though there’s more and more. It’s always cool to meet really talented women, especially there were so many from all over the world.”

IMSA has celebrated female champions and race winners, notably Katherine Legge (who is running GTD full time this season with Sheena Monk for Gradient Racing). The field at Sebring and Daytona also included the Iron Dames Lamborghini (a female-dominated team).

*The Heart of Racing’s female driver shootout drew interested candidates from around the world (Mike Levitt/LAT).*

James believes “a breakout female driver will be competing with the best of them” in the next five years as gender barriers slowly recede in motorsports.

“It’s been a male-dominated sport,” James said. “It’s still a very minute number of women drivers compared to the guys. I’m sure back in the day there were physical hurdles about it that were judged. But now the cars are not very physical to drive, and it’s more about technique and mental strength and stuff like that, and there’s no reason a girl shouldn’t do just as well as a guy. What we’re just trying to achieve is that there isn’t an obvious barrier to saying ‘Hey, I can’t hire a guy or a girl.’ We just want to put girls in front of people and our own program that are legitimate choices going forward for people.”

“There’s been some really good female drivers, but a lot of them just haven’t been able to sustain it, and a lot of that comes from sponsorship. I think (with the shootout), there’s no pressure of raising money and worrying about crash damage. We’ve taken care of all that so they can really focus on the job at hand.”

Funding always has been a hurdle for Grisham, who caught the racing bug from her father, Tom, an off-road driver who raced the Baja 1000 several times.

“I don’t come from a lot of money by any means,” she said. “So since a young age, I’ve always had to find sponsorships and get people to help me, whether it was buying tires, paying for entry fees, paying for the shipment of a car to an actual race. Literally knocking on the doors of people or businesses in my town.

“So yeah, it’s definitely something I’ve always struggled with and held me back because the sport revolves so much around money. So again to get this opportunity is insane.”

*Rianna O’Meara-Hunt was one of two women selected by the Heart of Racing to drive in the SRO SprintX Championship this year (Mike Levitt/LAT).*

Grisham credits racing pioneer Lyn St. James (an Indy 500 veteran and sports car champion) as a role model who has helped propel her career. She was hooked by the sights, smells and sounds of racing but also its competitive fire.

“There’s a zone you get in, that subconscious state of mind when you’re driving. It’s like addictive almost. I love it. Also I’m just a very competitive person as I think most race car drivers are.

“For sure I want to stay with the Heart of Racing. Obviously, I’m still getting to know everyone, but it’s a super family vibe. That’s how I grew up in the sport with just my dad and I wrenching on the cars. That’s what I love about this sport is all the amazing people you meet. And I think this is one of the most promising teams in this country. For sure, I want to learn as much as I can from them and hopefully continue. I feel so lucky and grateful to be one of those chosen.”