“It wasn’t straightforward for the reasons you mentioned. In a way it wasn’t a risk, we knew Stefan very well personally and professionally – he had been with us in some capacity for 5 years, 4 years as a test driver. He’s an incredibly smart guy on the technical side and is very good at working with engineers, which was a big reason why we valued his contributions as a test driver. And he was already integrated in the team, he knew everyone and most understood how he operated.
However, there was some risk in that he didn’t race at all in 2020 and only did 12 races in eVirtual in 2021 – a class of racing that is quite different from FV. A lot slower overall with cars that don’t rely on downforce that much. We knew he had a lot of success in the junior categories in 2018 and 2019, enough that our original plan was to draft him in as a race driver for 2020. However, plans changed when we had the opportunity to sign Will Hoskins. At the time we felt it was important to sign Will to bring experience to the team and also to benchmark our drivers – we had only run drivers that had come from our academy over the years before that so didn’t have a lot of references for how other teams did things and how good Felix was. Overall, I think that was a good decision for the team. In 2020 in particular, Will had a great season with us – with him finishing 5th in points and winning a race for the first time in almost 5 years. We also gained even more confidence in Felix over this time, as he did a good job matching will in 2020 and then beating him in 2021, which was an important step to him becoming the team leader that he is now. In terms of Stefan, we were close to getting a loan deal for 2020 and honestly we probably screwed it up looking back. I feel a bit bad for him, he had to be incredibly patient to get his FV opportunity. But during this time, he showed his loyalty to the team. I have to think that he doubted he would get his chance at a race seat, especially by 2021. In the end I’m relieved and happy for him that we were able to deliver on our promise of a race seat for him and he has been able to deliver some results, particularly recently as our car has become competitive. It's no secret that we hired Carson Davenport as reserve driver for this season partially to offset perceived risk of hiring Stefan. I know some in the paddock speculated that Davenport could get some race starts this season, and that was certainly a possibility if things went poorly with Stefan. And while he had a slow start, by race 4 or 5 we were committed to Stefan. Carson has been a strong contributor to the team, being one of the most experienced drivers in FV history he has a lot of ideas and knowledge that he has brought to the team. However, I know that he wants to race again and if he gets an opportunity to race with another team we wouldn’t hold him back from that.” While Klien crashed out of the most recent race in Monza, he recently bagged FIRST’s best finish of the season and his first career FV Top 5 with a 5th place finish at Spa-Franchorchamps after qualifying a brilliant 3rd place in wet conditions on the Saturday. This followed on from his first career points finish in Dubai, finishing 8th. The rookie Austrian certainly had a slow start to the season, going pointless for the first 9 races. Some of that was down to the FIRST car’s lack of performance to begin the season, but also Klien did frequently trail behind teammate Perez at the beginning of the season. In recent races the two have been fairly equal and it will be interesting to see how that teammate battle plays out for the rest of the season while the two fight for important points in the midfield.
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