Who is Callum Ilott? The first British driver from the Ferrari F1 Academy receives an Alfa Romeo chance at the Austrian Grand Prix

British motorsport is currently characterized by a rich language of forms. Lewis Hamilton may not be leading the F1 World Championship right now, but he’s the reigning champion and one of the greatest of all time.

Ready to follow suit is Lando Norris, fourth in the overall standings for the rejuvenated McLaren team, ahead of Mercedes No. 2 Valtteri Bottas and well ahead of his more celebrated team-mate Daniel Ricciardo. Then there is George Russell, a Mercedes junior who has promoted Hamilton for a long time and continues to impress despite his underpowered Williams. And Callum Ilott is waiting in the starting blocks.

Ilott is technically a Ferrari junior but will get his second chance on Friday to drive a Formula 1 weekend with Alfa Romeo, for which he is a substitute driver. In this day and age this title is often just a title, but in a year when the risk of contracting Covid and being excluded from a race or more is high, it is a job with higher odds than usual called up to become.

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It’s not exactly a meteoric promotion, however. Alfa Romeo team principal Frederic Vasseur spent most of two decades in junior formula, working with the likes of Hamilton, Paul Di Resta and Romain Grosjean to nurture their talent for years before entering Formula One.

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He first discovered Ilott in 2015 while driving for Carlin in European Formula 3, his first year in formula racing after winning continental and global awards in karting, but he really made an impact three years later when he now third in the series became known as the F3 series, the third stage of motorsport. A few months later, he was a test driver for Alfa Romeo while also racing in the F2, where Mick Schumacher ousted him to the title last year.

Even in the early days, Vasseur wasn’t the only one who kept an eye on Ilott. The Ferrari Driver Academy (FDA) had already got him to put the pen on paper to become the first British driver on the program. Thanks to Ferrari’s relationship with Alfa Romeo, Vasseur can continue to use his services. Ilott is now an experienced F1 simulator driver – but his Alfa Romeo boss doesn’t want him to lose touch with the tarmac.

“He tests a lot in the simulator, but the project is supposed to keep him close to reality,” says Vasseur I.

“That means he has to drive the real car with the real tires every month or every six weeks to keep in touch with the real business before going back to the simulator.”

Ilott, who should have made his training debut with Haas in Germany last year but was plagued by thick fog, has already driven for Alfa once in Portugal in FP1, which should reduce the initial nervousness any young man could experience driving a borrowed car worth several million euros. He too has a job to do: teams only have three hours on the track before qualifying and every second is filled with valuable data.

“Just because we have a rookie in the car in FP1 doesn’t mean that we skip the session and just tell him, ‘Don’t leave the car, stay safe,’” adds Vasseur.

“They know that if you want to learn something you have to be at the limit, and that means we have to get the job done. If you look at what the team has been up to over the past two or three seasons, I wasn’t a big fan of FP1 with the young kids at the beginning.

Ilott gets a valuable hour in the Alfa Romeo in Austria (Photo: Delivered)

“But if you look at the past two years, I think it’s always been a good boost for the team. It was always such a weekend when the other guy in FP1 might push a little more because he has the boy by his side.

“And it’s an additional motivation, but we can’t stay in the comfort zone. I think it was our best weekend in the last two or three years when we had a rookie in the car. “

That’s the nature of F1 drivers, they always push harder when they feel threatened. It says a lot that Ilott gets the most out of those he drives. You know he’s a threat.

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