Bianca Bustamante gears up for GB3 debut with confidence, valuable experience from F1 Academy stint

Bianca Bustamante continues her pursuit of the pinnacle in motorsports as she gears up to make her debut in the 2025 GB3 Championship.

The 20-year-old Filipina racer is set to resume competing in a single-seater tournament in Europe with Elite Motorsports alongside Will Macintyre, and another driver to be revealed soon before lights out on April 26 to 27 at Silverstone Circuit.

“There’s so much confidence in me knowing that I’ve got the best support, the best team. We’ve had multiple testings where we were quite competitive. And I think that’s always a confidence boost,” Bustamante said in an exclusive roundtable interview on Monday. 

“But we’ve got our eyes set on multiple years in this championship. I know that this year will be the learning year, and next year we’ll be able to go for it like we did in F1 Academy,” she added.

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Fresh from her two-year stint in the F1 Academy, first with Italian team Prema Racing followed by a historic signing with McLaren as its first female Development Program Driver in her second season, Bustamante’s foot remains on the gas pedal.

GB3 is a competitive feeder series in Europe that bridges Formula 3 and Formula 4. 

There, Bustamante will go up against a mixed grid of boys and girls, and her rivals include 2024 F1 Academy world champion Abbi Pulling, who joined Rodin Motorsport after the season.

“Honestly, I’m just living the dream. I never would have imagined that I would make it this far into my career and be able to compete in GB3. Making this huge step in my career forward, it’s been such an exhilarating journey with a lot of ups and downs, but [I] always face it with a smile on my face,” she said.

"I’ve always said it’s progress that makes everything so worth it—the journey, the unknown, the fear, the butterflies you get before you get in a car, the butterflies you get when you do your first lap, when you put new tires on, when you warm up. Everything still feels new, even though I’ve been racing single-seaters for quite a while," she went on.

In F1 Academy, the all-female tournament promotes their drivers to a higher level of competition either after winning the world championship or having driven there for a maximum of two seasons. 

Eventually, the goal is for them to crack the fierce competition in the cutthroat world of Formula 1, where opportunity is rare.

From April to October, Bustamante will compete around Europe once more, with the season finale slated in Monza, Italy, where she claimed her second career win in 2023.  

With a more challenging car and competitive grid ahead of her, Bustamante will participate in three races every race weekend, which also closely resembles F1 Academy’s format, with the top finishers earning more points.

—JMB, GMA Integrated News