If there’s one thing Alfa Romeo’s reserve driver Theo Pourchaire has struggled with so far in his career, it’s his own expectations. And what feeds into those is the expectations of others.
Having finished second in Formula 2 last year with ART Grand Prix, and now being deep in preparations for another season with the team, he faces the reality that for many he will be title favourite. And he has to make sure that this year it doesn’t break him.
There was no catching MP Motorsport driver Felipe Drugovich in 2022, but Pourchaire and his team made the job of finishing second harder for themselves and particularly when the realisation came that winning the title was becoming an increasingly small possibility.
Both parties became more desperate to win, leading to more mistakes, and Pourchaire suffered a loss of confidence after telling himself through the first half of the year that he was fighting for the title and was therefore putting himself in prime position to earn a Formula 1 seat with Alfa Romeo for 2023.
In broadest terms, he burst his own bubble, and then hurt himself further seeing Zhou Guanyu retain his Alfa Romeo seat for a second season.
ART GP team boss Sebastien Philippe, who almost won the 2020 Formula 3 title with Pourchaire in addition to running him in F2 for the past two years, spoke to media at pre-season testing last week to discuss what went wrong for his driver in 2022.
“There is a lot of things to say. Last year we didn’t deliver what we should have done. Both on the team’s side and the driver’s side,” he admitted.
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“I think it’s not one thing went wrong, it’s many, many little things. For sure also Theo, like many young drivers now, stepped up the categories very, very quickly, and we should never forget that last year he was just 18 years old and it was really the first time that he was repeating a category.”
That isn’t quite the case: Pourchaire spent two years in Formula 4 at the start of his car racing career (winning the French F4 Junior title and then Germany’s ADAC F4 championship), although those were in different cars. And Pourchaire’s F2 career did start in 2020, as he contested the final two rounds once the F3 season ended.
Philippe believes the approach Pourchaire had to have in 2022 “was completely new”, despite the goal being the same as in all…
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