26 June 2024 – Press release Arthur Rogeon
GB3 Championship, round 4, Hugaroring, 22 – 23 June 2024
This year, French motorsport hopefuls are winning in most championships: F4, FRECA, F3 and F2. The GB3 Championship (ex-British F3) must now be added to this list as 17-year-old Arthur Rogeon from Laval scored his maiden victory at the Hungaroring! The Rodin Motorsports driver overcame all the pitfalls and obstacles that stood in his way and clinched an unchallenged win in race 3. His season is launched!
And yet, the weekend didn’t really get off to a great start for Arthur. Hardly had he arrived, when he caught a chill. From free practice to race 1 his performance fell short of expectations and in race 2 he was forced to retire, the likely cause being the electronics. “From the beginning, I started to lose places, so I stopped in the pits. The championship and engine supplier’s engineers intervened and sent me back out again, but the problem persisted. I pitted again; they changed something else, but still there was no improvement. They concluded that there was clearly an electronic issue and decided to change the entire harness. The intervention required more than five hours work! To have a chance of finishing in time for race 3, two technicians attached to the GB3 championship helped the mechanics from Rodin Motorsports. Together they did a fantastic job!”
For race 3 the grid lineup was reversed for the first twelve. Arthur made a stunning start from the first row, attacked the pole sitter in the first corner, came out alongside him, overtook him on the outside of the second corner and began his run to victory. “I didn’t really push at the start so as not to overwork the tyres too much. I did just enough to protect myself from an attack. Around the halfway mark, I pushed really hard for two laps as my immediate pursuer seemed to be struggling with his tyres and I continued to widen the gap at the rate of half a second per lap.” Arthur went on to win with 5.6s in hand over the second-placed driver and 8.8s over the third. A really significant uncontested flawless domination!
The string of events that occurred in Hungary not only gave Arthur a victory. By finding the explanation for the glitches encountered since the start of the season, the young Frenchman will be able to take the fight to his rivals until the end of the championship knowing that he will be in a position to fully express his potential and do battle on an equal footing.
“Now we know there was a problem with my car. By analysing the data, we saw strange little oddities, which the team and the engineers were unable to explain. We managed to fix some issues, but the car still lacked a bit of performance. In Hungary, its behaviour was good, but in qualifying for example, the gearbox refused to downshift twice. After changing the harness this kind of problem disappeared and I gained 3 km/h on the straight. In fact, my season really starts now!”
The Hungaroring marked the first dry race weekend for the GB3 Championship, and the first trouble-free race for Arthur. So everybody’s looking forward to Zandvoort , the next meeting on the calendar, which will take place on the weekend of July 14!
Photo by Jakob Ebrey
