SCALING A NEW ALPINE PEAK
It’s an outbreak of common sense. One team boss declares that “it’s more or less like the old Formula Opel Euroseries”. Another team manager enthuses that “it’s finally sorted that old crap out about the F1 superlicence points. It’s taken away a lot of confusion, given clarity and simplified it.” And a member of the combined series top brass says “there was a common will – it was obvious”.
This weekend, at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix at Imola, there will be no FIA Formula 2 or F3. Instead, there will be the inaugural event for the newly merged, FIA-endorsed Formula Regional European Championship by Alpine. No fewer than 32 cars (at time of writing) are expected on the grid. That’s a massive step forward from 2019-20, where the historic Formula Renault Eurocup and the ‘upstart’ Formula Regional European Championship sat uncomfortably alongside each other, using the same Tatuus Regional F3 chassis and diluting the marketplace.
The background to that has been documented in these pages before, but just for a quick precis… In 2018, the FIA launched a tender process to operate its new-for-2019 Regional F3 series in Europe. Renault Sport had the history, the knowhow and the glamorous Monaco Grand
