Insight: The Changing Nature of Carrera Cup Asia's Talent Pool
Sportscar365's Asian editor Jamie Klein goes behind the scenes and explores the selection process for Porsche Motorsport Asia Pacific's Talent Pool...
This weekend, the new Porsche Carrera Cup Asia season kicks off with a pair of races on the undercard of the Formula 1 Chinese Grand Prix at Shanghai International Circuit.
As the debut race weekend for the all new Type-992.2 Porsche 911 Cup car, it promises to be a significant occasion. But it’s also worth highlighting the increasingly diverse pool of drivers who are set to fight it out for overall honors in the Pro class at the sharp end of the field.
Starting in 2024, Porsche Motorsport Asia Pacific’s Talent Pool has been offering aspiring professional racers a chance to not only join the Carrera Cup Asia grid, but also to forge closer links with Porsche and potentially climb the marque’s ladder in the way factory stars like Matt Campbell, Julien Andlauer and Laurin Heinrich have done over the years.
This year, the Talent Pool comprises of a record eight drivers, six of whom are total newcomers to one-make Porsche competition were selected off the back of the Talent Pool Assessment Days, which took place last November at Sepang in Malaysia.
Emerging from the process with Carrera Cup Asia race seats were Amna Al Qubaisi, Naquib Azlan, ‘Ricky’ Liu Ruiqi, Alex Sawer, Seth Gilmore and Joshua Berry, who join series returnees Rodrigo Almeida and Marco Giltrap on this year’s Talent Pool roster.
For Carrera Cup Asia series manager Alexandre Imperatori, finding race seats for half of the drivers who turned up at Sepang to show their skills, both on and off the track, represents a major success, as a grid of 30 brand-new 911 Cup cars gets set for action at Shanghai.
“I think it’s a pretty good conversion rate,” says Imperatori. “After the test, we helped put the drivers in touch with teams, who were able to figure out a deal with them. And the most important thing is that we have an idea of how everybody performed in the test, and the top performers are all with us this year, so that’s something we’re really happy with.”
So, just how exactly did Imperatori and his team go about determining which of the 12 drivers at Sepang would actually be given the chance to race in Carrera Cup Asia?
The process took place across three days, starting with a day of off-track activities that saw the drivers travel to Porsche’s corporate offices in downtown Kuala Lumpur. There, they took part in workshops and interviews designed to assess the way they presented themselves, as well as their technical knowledge and, as importantly, their motivation for being present.
Sportscar365 also had a role to play in this process, as this writer conducted a ‘mock’ interview with each of the 12 drivers. Most of them were impressive in the way they came across while being interrogated, especially considering their young age and that many of them wouldn’t have dealt much with media in the categories they had raced in so far.
Then it was on to two-days of on-track assessments at Sepang, where three Cup cars (the previous 992.1 model, without ABS) were prepared by EKS Motorsports. Four drivers shared a car, having been divided into three groups according to height and weight in the interests of fairness. On hand to provide a reference was Enzo Trulli, who came through the same assessment at the end of 2024 and went on to impress so much in Carrera Cup Asia that he was appointed Porsche Motorsport Asia Pacific’s selected driver for this year.
Meanwhile, Sascha Maassen was present to oversee proceedings, performing the same role as he does for Porsche’s global young driver shootout. For Maassen, the biggest factor in the assessment was not the raw pace, but the rate of improvement and how the drivers, most of whom were sampling Cup machinery for the very first time, responded to feedback.
“There are different characters,” says Maassen. “Some people are very confident. And those people we need to get settled down because they are tending to push too early, too much. But if I can still see talent there, it’s not a problem. if we manage to get that under control.
“There’s not one particular thing we want to see. We expect that they take it seriously, that they show their best. It’s about the ability to progress, the potential that we see. This can be in different forms. Somebody who maybe spun in the first lap, we don’t want to see that, but they can still be good. And if someone is really controlled, but not going fast enough, then we need to push them, and we have to see that they can actually take advice.
“Whatever the starting point, we want to see them moving forward. And that can be from both ends, super-aggressive or overconfident, or the one that is too cautious.”
The two days at Sepang comprised a day of short runs on old tires, and then a day of race simulations on new tires. Imperatori and his team then reviewed the lap times, as well as all the other feedback from off the track, to create an internal ‘ranking’ of drivers that was then shared with interested team owners, several of whom were also on-site at Malaysia.
Ultimately, Porsche Motorsport Asia Pacific cannot force any team to sign a particular driver. But the assessment is designed to allow teams to tailor their budget requirements and put the best-performing drivers in a strong position to strike a deal. Imperatori admits that of the six top performers at Sepang, one slipped through the net, but otherwise, the drivers chosen to race generally match the ‘ranking’ compiled during the assessment.
Looking at not only the six Talent Pool newcomers but also the drivers who did not ultimately advance to the championship itself, there was a clear desire to try out younger single-seater drivers, instead of drivers with prior Carrera Cup experience elsewhere. Additionally, there was a clear emphasis on trying out drivers from the Asia-Pacific region, even with less experience. Hence why the 12-strong Sepang lineup featured three Chinese drivers, including Han Cenyu and ‘Dylan’ Jia Zhanbin as well as Liu, in addition to drivers from India (Akshay Bohra), Malaysia (Azlan), Singapore (Berry) and Vietnam (Sawer).
Imperatori is keen to highlight two drivers in particular he is excited to see in action this season. The first is Azlan (pictured above), who has a highly unusual background, having emerged from sim racing before becoming established in real-life competition in both his native Malaysia and Japan.
Azlan, Imperatori reveals, was the top performer from the Sepang assessment, and underlined that promise with the fastest time in the official pre-season test in Shanghai.
“Naquib applied for the 2024 assessment test, but we didn’t select him, so by applying again he showed us that he is really committed,” says Imperatori. “In the meantime, he had managed to do a season in GT4, so we could also start to see his potential.
“He really impressed us in the test, especially given he has relatively little actual experience in real race cars. So it was really almost a no-brainer. We really wanted to make sure he had a shot in the championship to show what he can do. And so far, he hasn’t put a foot wrong.”
The other driver Imperatori highlights is second-generation Emirati racer Al Qubaisi (pictured below), who at 25 is the oldest of the new intake but is still fairly new to sports car racing, having only made the switch last year, sharing a car with her sister Hamda in the Ligier European Series.
“She did a good job in the assessment test,” says Imperatori. “It was not easy with her driving position; she couldn’t show 100 percent what she could do in the test, but now the team has really been working with her very closely and she’s getting really comfortable with the car with Team Jebsen, so that’s also going to be something to watch and follow.”
Last season, Carrera Cup Asia was dominated by Dylan Pereira, who is no longer part of the series this year. Replacing Pereira as the ‘benchmarks’ the Talent Pool hopefuls must try and beat are a pair of fast Frenchmen, Porsche junior Marcus Amand and Supercup veteran Marvin Klein, who was also runner-up to Amand in Carrera Cup France last year.
But Imperatori is certain that on the evidence so far, this year’s title battle is going to be much closer, especially given how quickly the new Talent Pool drivers have been able to get up to speed at the wheel of their brand-new machines in pre-season testing.
“At the very front, we’ll have some really good benchmarks with Marvin and Marcus, who is also still very young,” he says. “And we’ve seen now after the test that the top Talent Pool drivers definitely can mix it in. As well as Naquib, Marco was doing a good job and was very close. Rodrigo was also very close, and he’s in his third year, so he has the experience now.
“And I think we haven’t seen the best of the young guys yet. They need a bit more time. They’re just coming from F4 and some of them are only 17, 18 years old, so they’ll take a couple of races really to find their feet. I’m pretty sure they’ll be there towards the end of the season. So maybe not for the title, but they will be there towards the end.
“I don’t think it will be just one guy running away with it this year. There should be a much closer championship.”
Photos: Porsche/Porsche Motorsport Asia Pacific