The unconventional route to Formula 4 for Ben Anh Nguyen
- Joseph Black
- August 20, 2026
- Motorsport, Team Radio
- 0 Comments
In 2025, there were three active Vietnamese single seater drivers. Now, there’s half of one.
Conflicts in the Middle East have put pay to the 2026 F4 South East Asia season, meaning Ben Anh Nguyen’s sophomore Formula 4 campaign has been cut short.
“It’s definitely a huge blow.” he told me on the Team Radio podcast. “It has slowed my momentum down a bit. I left the F4 UAE championship earlier this year in a bit of a down mood because I didn’t race the full season so I didn’t really get that many chances to perform well.
“Having the championship cancelled like that when I feel like I could have been really competitive is a really big bummer.”
A promising season certainly was on the horizon for Nguyen. His debut in Formula 4 cars came in the 2025 F4 South East Asia season with BlackArts Racing Team, where he outperformed fellow rookie teammate Joshua Berry.
“BlackArts was probably the most friendly environment and I think that was a great place for me to start.” The Hong Kong based team were founded in 2015 and have nurtured many a talent throughout the years, including four FIA F3 drivers and one, Rafael Villagómez, who is currently on the FIA F2 grid. “Alex Yoong [former F1 driver and team principal of BlackArts] is a really nice and helpful person and all my teammates were a delight to work with.
“They clearly understood that all of us were at different places in our career and so during a race weekend we were a lot more helpful to each other. […] We had Rishon Rajeev and Iñigo Anton who are very very experienced drivers and so they acted like my benchmark.”
Rajeev finished fifth in the championship, being pipped in the final round (which he didn’t compete in) by Niccolò Maccagnani who only competed the last two rounds of the season. Anton ended up third in the championship behind Seth Gilmore and dominant champion Alex Sawer, who won 9 of the 14 races. He, one of the three Vietnamese drivers in 2025, now competes in various Porsche Carrera Cups.
The other, Owen Tangavelou started racing a bit earlier in 2020. His CV includes fifth in the 2021 French F4 Championship and a race victory on his way to fourth in Eurocup-3.
“There’s very little infrastructure in racing.” Nguyen says on his home country. “There’s no race tracks – the closest proper go kart tracks are three hours drive from where I live and everywhere else that’s close is rental karting. So, if you ever wanted to get any sort of pro level, like preparation done for karting and so on, you’d either have to drive three hours to the track or you’re out of luck,”
Vietnam does not have a particularly conducive environment for motor racing. In the capital city Hanoi and the surrounding areas, there is just the one go kart track, as the country prefers football and builds its sporting infrastructure around it. The aforementioned Tangevelou didn’t even kart until he was 14 and he had moved to France. It was a similar story for Nguyen.
“When I first joined F4 [Alex Yoong] told me he had never worked with a driver that was more inexperienced than I am. He meant that in a more good way in that I had a more unconventional route.” Yoong would know all about that, having taken a Toyota Corolla to the Macau Grand Prix in his first racing season. “The first time I drove a go kart was summer 2024, before that I only played sim racing games for fun. I won my first race I participated in in late 2024 which got a lot of attention in South East Asia because at that point no one else was racing in Vietnam. I ended up getting in contact with the team at BlackArts […] and that led to me getting my F4 test and after that my F4 season in 2025.”
He is one of an ever increasing group of drivers that have rarely karted, but instead chosen to sim race as their pathway to real life racing. Keen viewers of the podcast will note that Roland Alfredsson is along the same lines, taking his experience in iRacing to the BMW Turbo Cup in the Baltic Touring Car Championship. It was something that he not only uses now for the weekends to come, but also when he was preparing for his single seater debut. With appearances in karts rare, sim racing was all he had.
“I think it was a huge benefit to me. In Vietnam where else would I go to drive, right? All I could do was stay cooped up at home and practice on the simulator.
“It’s such a big part of how I prepare for a weekend now that it’s almost integral. If I don’t do sim practice I feel like I’ve failed the preparations.”
There are differing benefits to both disciplines. Karting provides you the experience of racing in real life, at real circuits, and helps build your body up and gives the resilience needed for a Formula 4 car (and perhaps, takes it to the extreme). Sim racing will not give you that same feeling of being in the cockpit, but it means there’s the chance to race around the real circuits – or, near enough – with a replica of the equipment used by the racers as well. Ben had very different experience to many drivers in the F4 SEA championship when he headed to his first race weekend at Sepang.
“Doing more karting would have helped me to have a little bit more balls.” Eloquently presented, Ben. “I think [the simulator] played a big part in all of my race weekends but especially my car debut just because it helped me build up that mental endurance to keep pushing lap after lap after lap when that was something I was not really used to.
“I was so used to sim racing where my only senses were the eyes and your hands with all the force feedback. But then suddenly you put me into a race car when I’ve never really driven much in real life and suddenly I’m having to feel my butt, my abs, my whole body I have to feel moving.”
Ben picked up sixth place in his first race of the weekend, following it up with 3rd place in race 2.
The series got more and more popular as the year went on, growing from a grid of nine at the opening round to a peak of 13 the second time they visited the Malaysian circuit. Whilst that podium remained his only one of the year, he was able to consistently pick up top tens and ended up seventh in the championship by year’s end.
That season came to a close in September and he was back in the car by the start of December, competing now for Evans GP in Formula Trophy at a brand new track for him in Yas Marina. It was his fourth and final new track in 2025.
“Normally [when] I race at a track it’s already somewhere my team has gone in the past. So I immediately talk to my engineer ‘Do you have any onboards, do you have any laptimes – anything about weather and how the car’s going to feel?’ They usually send me 2-3 onboards and I also do my own research.”
20th and 16th were his finishing positions in a stacked field which featured the likes of Alp Aksoy, Niccolò Maccagnani (who had entered the tail end of the F4 SEA season and had thrived, with only podium finishes and a clean sweep at the final round to his name) and Adam Al-Azhari. Nguyen was back out at Yas Marina at the beginning with the year in the UAE4 Series.
He competed the first round of the season in a 36 strong field, and the last at Qatar in a 34 driver lineup – and if you’re not towards the front, you’re in a ‘chaotic midpack’. A slightly smaller lineup for his South East Asian campaign would have been a welcome change for Ben, but not to be as five of the dates have been and gone. There could, though, still be some hope.
“I wouldn’t call [F4 SEA] completely down.” he revealed. “I can’t really reveal anything yet but it’s safe to say that I can’t call it over quite yet.”
In the meantime, he’s been making the most of his team’s resources. The Australian outfit competes in multiple Formula 4 championships, but also Formula Regional Middle East, and when there was an opportunity to test the Tatuus T-326 car Ben jumped at the chance.
“It’s a really different car. The main difference is that, with the regional, you feel how much heavier it is, how much more momentum it carries and how much you have to steer. It’s way more power, way more downforce, but the actual cornering grip? Not amazing, especially the low speed corners.
“It’s a lot harder to drive than the F4 cars.”
A step up on the horizon, then?
“There’s nothing confirmed but I did hear that Formula Regional Asia is coming back in a way. So I’m definitely going to talk to my team about that, because they’re interested in regionals and so on.”
Vietnam’s only single seater driver is at a crossroads in his career as he looks to fly the flag for their over 102 million strong population. A move to the US – a sign of things to come?
Related Posts
