Campos Racing’s Mari Boya’s sophomore F3 season was a mixed one, with the Spanish driver ultimately finishing 2024 15th in the drivers’ championship with 45 points. Though not the season that he would have hoped for, especially after a 17th-place finish in 2023, Boya managed to retain his seat at Campos for the 2025 F3 season. He will partner with 2022 F4 Spanish champion Nikola Tsolov who joins from ART Grand Prix and Tasanapol Inthraphuvasak who joins after a disappointing 2024 season with AIX Racing.
Boya to arrive in Australia “confident” with 2025 F3 car
Despite his experience in the series, Boya admits that he was nervous going into the 2025 F3 pre-season testing in Barcelona. While speaking to the media, including Pit Debrief, the Spaniard explained that while he had confidence in his team and the work that had been done over the winter break, he had not known what to expect with the new car.
To be honest, arriving to Barcelona, I felt a bit nervous because it’s the third year and we have to deliver this year.”
“I have a lot of confidence in the team, but as the car is new, you don’t know what to know about the new car. The team worked hard during the winter. I was expecting that and indeed they did.”
However, after three productive days at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, Boya now feels “super confident” with the car and is excited to return to racing.
“I am feeling super confident with the car. We are arriving to Australia with a good base of the car and feeling really good.”
“I can’t wait to see how Australia goes for us, but I can tell you that the base of the car is looking really strong.”
No big difference with 2025 F3 car
Boya spoke further on his experience with the new car which will run a new engine package and the updated Dallara F3 2025 chassis. He stated that while the new car felt similar to the old, he had been surprised by the tyres. Despite this difference, however, Boya and his team go to Melbourne aiming to extract the best performance from the car.
“Yeah, a bit similar for me. We didn’t expect a big difference, but what surprised me a bit for me the most was the tyres.”
“It’s the only thing we have in contact with the track [unintelligible] and that side and I think we are working quite hard for Melbourne to try to find the maximum lap time there.”
F3 “a really specific category” with notable differences between testing and competition
A veteran in F3, Boya will bring lessons learnt from his 2023 and 2024 campaigns into 2025. When responding to a question from Pit Debrief, Boya explained that while testing allowed teams to estimate their pace for the season, it did not adequately prepare them for true racing conditions.
“I feel it’s a really specific category. Quite fast you can get into a good speed in testing when you have a lot of time to deliver, but then you arrive to a qualifying with only three laps in which you can get many things that don’t go as you planned, like traffic or red flags. You can’t warm up properly the tyres.”
He noted that challenges such as traffic and red flags could impair a driver’s ability to maximise his performance in qualifying and race sessions, and identified his plan to focus on these points.
“It’s really hard to deliver in these points and I think it’s the main point of this category. So I think for this year we know what to work on and especially on testing I have been focusing quite a lot on this.”
He added, “So I hope [I am] arriving to Australia the best prepared as possible.”
