Case Study – Campos Racing

F1 Academy 2025: A Landmark Season And A Big Step Forward For Campos Racing

The 2025 F1 Academy season has been the strongest demonstration so far of how quickly this championship is maturing – in sporting level, global reach, and technical sophistication.

Born in 2023 as an all-female, Formula 4-level series created and run by Formula 1, F1 Academy has grown into a key pillar of the single-seater ladder, aligned with Grand Prix weekends and supported by every F1 team. In 2025 the category continued to run with five established junior outfits, including Campos Racing, fielding three cars each and fighting across a seven‑round calendar that shared venues with the F1 World Championship.

The 2025 F1 Academy Story

Across Shanghai, Jeddah, Miami, Montreal, Zandvoort, Singapore and Las Vegas, the 2025 campaign delivered exactly what the series set out to achieve: close racing, a visible platform for female talent, and a technically demanding environment that genuinely prepares drivers for F3 and beyond. Flag‑to‑flag TV coverage in more than 170 territories and a dedicated documentary series helped take the championship to a much wider fanbase than its first season.

On track, the performance level stepped up again, with drivers now able to stay in the category for up to three years, allowing standouts to build experience instead of being forced into premature moves up the ladder. That continuity was one of the keys behind the intense title fight that ran to the final rounds and involved several returning names from 2024.

Campos Racing: From Rebuilding To Contenders

Campos Racing entered 2025 on an upward curve after a rebuilding phase in the inaugural season. The Spanish outfit had already shown in 2024 that it could fight at the front, climbing from the back of the teams’ standings in 2023 to genuine podium and victory contention the following year.

For 2025, Campos doubled down on that progress and set an explicit target: turn promise into a sustained championship challenge. With a strong technical core that also runs successful programmes in FIA Formula 2 and FIA Formula 3, the team approached F1 Academy as a fully integrated part of its performance structure rather than a side project.

The Red Bull–Backed Trio At Campos

The driver line‑up became one of the stories of the season in itself. Campos Racing combined continuity and fresh energy by retaining Chloe Chambers and adding two highly rated rookies, Rafaela Ferreira and Alisha Palmowski.

All three arrived backed by the Red Bull driver development structure, with Chambers under the Red Bull Ford Academy banner and Ferreira and Palmowski representing the greater Red Bull family, giving the team a powerful mix of experience, speed and institutional support. Chambers returned as a race winner from 2024 and immediately projected herself as a title contender, while Ferreira came in as the first woman to win in Brazilian F4 and Palmowski brought strong form from GB4 in the UK.

Results That Confirm The Progress

On paper, Campos translated this package into exactly the kind of season the team had been building toward. Chambers led multiple race weekends, frequently converting strong qualifying into podiums and wins, including a standout double podium run on street circuits late in the year. Ferreira and Palmowski developed rapidly across the campaign, growing from solid rookies into regular points scorers and podium threats by the time the championship reached Zandvoort and Singapore.

One of the clearest snapshots of Campos’s 2025 level came in Las Vegas, where the team locked out the top two steps of the podium with Chambers winning ahead of Palmowski and Ferreira also finishing in the points to complete a dominant team performance. Results like this were not outliers but part of a wider trend that saw Campos consistently among the best‑scoring outfits as the season progressed.

Our Engineering Support With Campos Racing

For the past two seasons, e-performance has been working behind the scenes with Campos Racing, providing engineering support focused on performance, operations and data‑driven decision making. Over this period, the F1 Academy project has shifted from a start‑up phase into a highly optimised programme, with much of the low‑hanging fruit in set‑up, tyre usage and workflow now systematically addressed.

Key areas of collaboration have included:

• Building robust weekend run‑plans and decision trees adapted to F1 Academy’s compressed format, with dual qualifying and multiple races per event.
• Refining tyre preparation, management and pressure windows around the Pirelli slicks used in the series, maximizing warm‑up on cold out‑laps without compromising long‑run consistency.
• Developing data tools and reporting templates that give drivers clear, actionable feedback between sessions, from corner‑by‑corner time‑loss breakdowns to brake and minimum‑speed references.
• Supporting race‑strategy calls in evolving conditions, particularly on street circuits like Singapore and Las Vegas where grip evolution and Safety Car probability dramatically influence risk profiles.

The result for 2025 has been a visibly more consistent execution across both qualifying and races, fewer “lost” weekends, and a higher conversion rate from raw pace to actual points and podiums.