Caterham add Giovesi to young driver programme

2014 F1 season

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Caterham have continued the shake-up of their young driver programme by adding Italian racer Kevin Giovesi.

The 20-year-old currently lies fourth in the Auto GP championship where he has won twice. Prior to that he won the Copa category of the Euro F3 Open championship (now Euroformula Open) in 2012.

Giovesi’s role will see him work with the team at their headquarters in Leafield and work on their driver-in-the-loop simulator.

He joins Nathanael Berthon on the team’s new driver development programme which was announced following Tony Fernandes’ sale of the team earlier this month. Following the Berthon announcement the team’s long-time test driver Alexander Rossi parted ways with them.

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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27 comments on “Caterham add Giovesi to young driver programme”

  1. Well… Good luck to him, but I can’t see much coming out of this.

    Maybe some word about Auto GP is useful here. Basically it’s just not a good series. Driver quality is low, quality of racing is low. It seems like it’s slowly bleeding to death. Last weekend, there were only 11 entries (one of which a 39-year-old who bought a seat for a few races and was lapping some good 5 seconds slower than anyone else on track).

    For anyone to have any serious aspirations at F1, he has to dominate this mediocre driver field. Giovesi is not doing that… at all.

  2. Well, he is an eye- candy!!! <3

    1. Not my type.

  3. WilliamB (@william-brierty)
    22nd July 2014, 13:09

    Given that he’s currently being thrashed by the spectacularly unspectacular Kimiya Sato in AutoGP (the graveyard of Italian single seater careers as it could also be called), a driver that is in turn currently 25th and pointless in GP2, that rather outlines how slow Kevin is. And I thought Leal and Berthon were jokes…

    1. I hoped for a second that it was Kevin Ceccon..

    2. maarten.f1 (@)
      22nd July 2014, 22:18

      @william-brierty makes you wonder what he’s paying for it, doesn’t it? :)

      1. WilliamB (@william-brierty)
        23rd July 2014, 13:22

        @maarten-f1 Well, you’d assume there would be plenty of zeros on the figure, but other Italian drivers, such as Valsecchi, Marciello and Ceccon, had no budget to bring due to a lack of willingness on the part of Italian brands, so I guess daddy is just very rich…

        1. Ceccon daddy is also very rich, but became tired on wasting money for him. Valsecchi also has worthy family, but he really is tired of F1 ambient, after what happened in Lotus last year. Now he is much more enjoy be payed by Sky.
          Marciello is in Ferrari Academy, he doesn’t need Catheram summer school…

    1. I was watching that as it happened. It made me cringe. If you want to summarize the quality of the Auto GP driver field and racing in a few seconds, then this scene takes it.

      1. Yes, sadly. And Tamás Pál Kiss (the victim in the previous video), who is probably the best single-seater talent from Hungary since Csaba Kesjár (who died way too early after just a short F1 test – and Zsolt Baumgartner was in F1 purely because of his father’s money), is wasting his time in a series like this. Probably he’s not good enough for an F1 seat, but he had some good races in GP3, and I think he could cope well in sports cars (maybe fight in the midfield in GP2 or WSR), so I hope he turns his attention away from Auto GP after this year.

        Anyway, I hope Caterham won’t make too close connections with Giovesi, because he seems like a spoilt boy to me, but I don’t know if anything would help Caterham now after the Kolles-takeover…

      2. But Taki Inoue says on Twitter that it’s the best second-tier series in racing!

        1. @rjoconnell well, Taki Inoue should probably watch an Auto GP race first. Either that or he should dial the sarcasm a little down ;)

  4. Robin Frijns and Will Stevens need to leave Caterham will they have the chance. If drivers like Giovesi and Berthon are the first 2 drivers in their new driver devlopment program and Julian Leal got a test chance for Catherham before Rossi, those 2 should follow Rossi and leave instead waiting for your chance that you probably wont get.

    1. @mattypf1 Their problem is that they have nowhere else to go.. IMO, if I was Mercedes, I would pick up Frijns as reserve driver. But they already have lots of juniors in DTM, and Juncadella getting practice time at Force India. DTM may be a good option for Frijns.

  5. Neil (@neilosjames)
    22nd July 2014, 13:50

    Another one? For a team with no cash they’re building quite the stable. Unless it’s all part of a very cunning plan.

    Kolles: “Hey guys, I had a great idea. We could sack 40 workers and replace them with unpaid work experience kids! They’d even pay us to be here!”
    Albers: “Eh?”
    Kolles: “We’ll tell them it’s a ‘Young Driver Program’, take their money, then shove them in the factory and tell them to make a bargeboard. Say it’s part of their development.”
    Albers: “Hang on, in 2006 I designed the Midland front wing, did you…”
    Kolles: *Muttley laugh*

    1. @neilosjames Bernie: “That sounds like a good idea.. I could launch a competition to spice up my coverage.. use all these PC-sharp unpaid interns to finally develop the FOM graphics.. I only just learned how to put my messages into the TV picture :)”

    2. Hahahahahaha :’)
      That’s bloody brilliant!!!!

  6. I’d like to say something.
    Kevin Giovesi is better than you think. He had the measure of Sergey Sirotkin in Italian F3. He fared very well in F3 Open. Last year, he was electric in his few Auto GP rounds with Ghinzani Motorsport, but Piercarlo left for rival series FA1, so Kevin had to scramble for a seat with a completely new team called…Eurotech, put together at the very last minute after Puma’s entry sank.
    His GP2 results might not be great, but he was faster than Binder, and considering he was moving up from a much more low-powered series, he did a decent job.
    Final word: he has no more money than a Jon Lancaster or a Conor Daly.

    1. @wsrgo Indeed, I thought that GP2 drive was a little premature, but if you have zilcho cash you basically have to try for everything and accept any offers that come your way.

    2. It’s too bad your commentary will be buried under a sea of “I’ve never heard of this guy and they’re not Robin Frijns anyway so I’m going to assume they’re a talentless driver with way more money than talent” when the reality is that Giovesi might be making a bit more of an impact in racing right now if he actually had more of a budget. Not to the point where he’d be on par with a Carlos Sainz or Stoffel Vandoorne, but by no means Ricardo Teixiera.

      1. Agreed. Ricardo Teixeira is the best example of pay drivers and Giovesi is certainly not a pay driver that has caught Caterham’s attention

    3. @wsrgo

      Kevin Giovesi is better than you think. He had the measure of Sergey Sirotkin in Italian F3. He fared very well in F3 Open. Last year, he was electric in his few Auto GP rounds with Ghinzani Motorsport

      OK… Well, I won’t speak for others, but he’s not better than I think. I have watched him racing enough to form a decent opinion.

      Yes, he did better than Sirotkin. A two year younger Sirotkin, with Giovesi being in his third Italian F3 season and Sirotkin fresh in. A year where Sirotkin also raced Auto GP, and did better in his rookie season than Giovesi has managed up until now (= coming in third at season’s end).
      Yes, he won the F3 Open Copa class, a class where literally nobody of note drove.
      And how was he “electric” in Auto GP last year? I don’t remember him as “electric” from seeing the races. He participated in 5 out of 8 rounds, and in those 5 rounds was outscored by the top four drivers – Ghirelli and Campana are utterly forgettable, Karthikeyan and a fairly decent Kimiya Sato who was, and still is, outclassing him.

      If these should be the highlights, then I don’t see how you can object to people calling him mediocre.

      His GP2 results might not be great, but he was faster than Binder, and considering he was moving up from a much more low-powered series, he did a decent job.

      He was faster than Binder, then how did he manage to end up 2 times behind him (finishing one time in front) and not getting points when Binder did?
      Also, how and why is Binder any reference?

      Look, sometimes it just is what it is. He really hasn’t shown anything more than mediocrity. As I said, Auto GP seems all but dead, driver and racing quality is dreadful, and even then he isn’t able to rise to the top and shine.

      1. You clearly didn’t follow Auto GP last year, my dear sir. Giovesi was twice disqualified after having won a race, once because his car number tape was too high, and another time because of a gearbox infringement.
        And Ghirelli and Karthikeyan drove in the rocketship that was SuperNova.

        1. Yes, I did follow Auto GP last year. I did miss the odd race though. I never pretended to have seen each and every race, just that I have seen enough and that he never stood out as being better than the mediocre driver field he finds himself in.

          About those two disqualifications… Can you point out which rounds those were? I find he lost one win in Silverstone because of pitting too late, which allowed him to pass Karthikeyan who had made his stop on the last legal lap – so he wouldn’t have won if he had pitted at the same time and this is not a lost win.
          When was the other time?

          And please, spare me that stuff about rocketships. That doesn’t work in spec series. It’s not a Super Nova driver dominating this year, Pommer is their best-ranked driver and is fifth in the standings. It’s drivers making the difference.

  7. Lewisham Milton
    22nd July 2014, 19:39

    He’s called Kevin, just like Magnussen, so he must be good.
    Didn’t work for Lewis Williamson. He got kicked out of the Red Bull programme (for Antonio Felix da Costa, who was himself kicked out)

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