Good vibes, coffee, rest and relaxation: Dino Beganovic on his hometown

After an intense 2024 season, Dino Beganovic has one round left of the Formula 3 campaign but will have spent plenty of time at home at various points this year.

We asked the PREMA Racing driver what it was like in his hometown of Linkoping, what there was to do there and what he’d recommend.

So come with Beganovic for a whistle-stop tour of his home in Sweden.

“So my hometown is in Sweden obviously, it’s a town called Linkoping. It’s about two hours south of Stockholm. So usually I fly out of there. It’s quite far but that’s what you need to do.

“What can you do during the day? Normally I go away if I want to do something… But as a town it’s quite a young place I would say. There’s a big university, the second biggest in Sweden, I think. So there are a lot of students. Other than that, we have one of the biggest military aircraft manufacturing places in the city. I remember when I used to go to school, they were always testing and you could hear them in the air, so that was quite call.

“There’s a museum for that, so let’s say that’s something to visit. We have quite a nice city centre with some nice shops and cafés, restaurants that overlook the river.

“Going a little bit further out of town, there’s a lake that goes through the whole city, which is very nice in the summer. In Sweden, the summer days are very long. We basically don’t get any nighttime because it’s always so light outside, so that’s super nice.

“But apart from that, I’m not sure what else there is to do. When I’m there, I usually just train, stay with my friends and when we do stuff together, it’s either golf or paddle. There are some nice golf courses there actually where they do compete in tournaments, at least in Sweden.

“I just spend my time there to recover and not do anything really, which sounds like a boring answer.

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“There’s actually a place I go with my parents to eat for lunch especially. They have really good fish there. They’re famous for that, and also the salads are nice. That’s where we usually go when we’re not at home. We take the opportunity to go there sometimes.

“Then I’ve always got something for trying out new cafes in my city, coffee shops as well. So I’m trying to find the best coffee shop in the city, that’s my mission at the moment. But there are a lot of them in the city centre, so I normally go into the centre and find plenty of them.

“It’s a very good place to be, especially in the summer when people are graduating or celebrating something, mid-summer there’s a lot of people and it’s a young city which makes it nice.

“We have a big park where a lot of people gather in the summer, just to watch the football or hang out, not party but chill out there. It’s a good vibe, it’s a lot of young people and a lot of good energy, which is very nice.

“In terms of karting, we have a karting track in the city, which is like 10 minutes from my house, so it’s not that far. We used to go on a Wednesday and a Friday, and it was a free practice, from 5 to 8. It wasn’t a big track, but it has everything, and I learned quite a lot from it. It’s not just tight corners, it has chicanes, high-speed sections and tricky slow corners. So it was a good place to learn, especially being so close to my house, it was very useful to have.”