Ivan Domingues hoping for early season advantage with Van Amersfoort Racing familiarity

6 February 2025

Van Amersfoort Racing will have a friendly face in the car in Ivan Domingues. The Portuguese driver is preparing for his rookie campaign in FIA Formula 3 this season, but is more than familiar with the team already.

Domingues competed in the Formula Regional European Championship by Alpine in VAR colours last year, and also raced for them back in Formula 4. It means he is already feeling very at home with his ‘new’ team ahead of the 2025 season getting underway.

“I’m very happy to have re-signed with Van Amersfoort Racing, this time in FIA Formula 3,” he said. “It’s a very big step from what I was doing last year in FRECA.

“It’s a good thing for the country too, being the first full-time Portuguese driver in the Championship, it’s something that I’m very proud of and I’m looking forward to it.

“I’m not in that phase where a driver changes teams and they’re still getting to know everybody"

“I think this year will be very positive. We are working very hard at the moment, we haven’t stopped over the winter.

“We’re working on a lot in all the areas that weren’t as good as they should’ve been last year. So we’ll make sure we don’t make the same mistakes, and we learn from them as much as we can.”

Expanding on his experience with VAR, the Portuguese racer added that it is a major benefit, especially at this point in the year when other rookie drivers will be learning names and faces around the team still.

He says he is already up to speed of who’s who, and that can only be a positive for him going into the pre-season test and the early rounds.

Domingues says he is feeling right at home with Van Amersfoort ahead of his debut in 2025

“It’s definitely a good thing. I know my engineer already, I worked with him for one year already, so it’ll be our second year together. I’ve known him since my F4 days.

“I’m not in that phase where a driver changes teams and they’re still getting to know everybody. We already have that working relationship established so that’s a very good thing.

“I’m happy because I like the team a lot, they’re all good and very professional, and that makes things easier when you’ve known everybody for a long time already.”

Domingues was in the cockpit for the Dutch team during the post-season tests last year, an experience he said was extremely helpful in his adaptation to the Championship.

While he openly admitted that the Jerez test was the tougher of the two, the 2025 VAR driver added that Barcelona was a good confirmation that he was on the right path with his learnings at the team in F3.

“The tests were very useful. The first one in Jerez - it was the first time stepping up from FRECA to a faster car and I didn’t know the track. It was my first time there and the rain made things a bit tricky in the beginning. But that was all about learning the car and just building confidence.

“Then in Barcelona we made a big step. I was driving the car, and everything went smoothly. We just needed to adapt a bit more to the usage of the tyre.

“I think that’s the trickiest part of F3 and the part I need to work the most, and that’s what I missed the most in testing. But it was definitely a positive test.”

Those post-season tests were conducted with the last generation of F3 car. All of the teams and drivers will currently be focused on pre-empting the new one, as they await their first time in the 2025 F3 car in Barcelona later this month.

The Portuguese driver says the new tyres could play to his and other rookies' advantage

Alongside the new cars, the tyres they will run on are new for 2025, as F3 switches to larger 16-inch Pirelli tyres.

Domingues is taking that switch as a positive, and while he admits those with prior F3 experience might still be quicker to understand the new rubber, rookies will be much closer that they would have otherwise been.

“We will work on it a bit, but improvements will come mostly with experience, watching what people have done in the past and in last year’s races. But definitely the thing that will help me the most is experience.

“But with it also being a new car, we won’t know how it will interact with the tyre. The tyres change as well, so it will be a bit more of an equal starting point since nobody has tried them.

“That will be a benefit to the rookies, I think. For sure the guys that are in their second or third year, they will work them a bit better in the beginning, because even though the tyres are changing, the way they work probably won’t change much.

“But it will definitely help a bit. The rookies will be on a bit more of an equal starting point in my opinion.”

Between now and pre-season testing, Domingues says work will continue but the trajectory is a positive one for both himself and the team.

“We are working on everything. I’ve done a lot of physical preparation and spent a lot of time in the factory with the engineers and the mechanics, learning more about the physics of the car and how it all works, what I can do to help for the future.

“It’s been all about that over the last few weeks, but there’s definitely been progress over the winter.”