The first day of the 2025 E4 Championship took place at Circuit Paul Ricard in Le Castellet. Now in its third edition, the highly competitive championship promoted by ACI Sport and WSK Promotion is structured over three high-level rounds. At the end of the free practice sessions, the fastest lap overall was set by Sebastian Wheldon, the British-American driving for Prema Racing with the support of Andretti Global. His benchmark time of 2’06.443 improved upon the lap recorded earlier in the morning by his teammate Kean Nakamura-Berta.
Nakamura-Berta, Japanese-Slovak driver from Prema, ended the day in second place, 0.121 off the top. In third position was Brazilian driver Gabriel Gomez, who placed US Racing near the top of the classification with a gap of 0.381. Fourth fastest was China’s Zenrui Chi, 0.397 behind, followed by Ukrainian driver Oleksandr Bondarev of the Williams Driver Academy, who finished fifth with a margin of 0.
430. Both drivers represent Prema Racing.
Sixth on the timesheets was Dutch driver Reno Francot, 0.433 from the top. The PHM Racing driver had already delivered a strong performance last weekend at Mugello, on his return to the Italian series. In seventh was Colombian driver Salim Hanna, also with Prema Racing, at 0.634. Eighth was Alpine Academy driver Kabir Anurag with US Racing, who clocked a lap 0.636 off the best. Next came Mercedes junior Alex Powell of R-ace GP, ninth with a gap of 0.794. Rounding out the top 10 was Swiss driver Enea Frey of Jenzer Motorsport, 0.815 behind Wheldon and the last driver to keep the gap within one second.
Track action at Paul Ricard will resume tomorrow, Saturday 19 July, with qualifying split into two 15-minute sessions scheduled for 10:45 and 11:10. The first session will set the grid for Race 1, the second for Race 2, while the grid for Race 3 will be based on the second-best lap time recorded by each driver across both sessions. Later on Saturday, at 16:30, Race 1 will take place.
On Sunday 20 July, Race 2 will be held at 11:00 and Race 3 at 17:25. All races will last 30 minutes plus one lap and will be broadcast live on ACI Sport TV (Sky channel 228 and Tivůsat channel 52), via streaming on live.acisport.it, and on the ACI Sport TV Facebook and YouTube channels. An English-language live stream will also be available on the international channels broadcasting the E4 Championship, as well as on the official social media profiles of the series.