If somebody had beaten Liam Lawson, Yuki Tsunoda and Franco Colapinto to a junior-level single-seater title, you might think that driver would have a good chance of making it to Formula 1. And perhaps there’s an alternate universe somewhere where Igor Fraga, who did exactly that in the Toyota Racing Series in 2020, is now a fully-fledged grand prix driver.
Born in Japan to Brazilian parents, a prolific racer in both the real world and the virtual one, speaking English, Japanese, Portuguese and some Spanish to boot, 26-year-old Fraga is in many ways a marketeer’s dream. And in early 2020, just after his TRS triumph and with a Red Bull junior contract in his pocket, he seemed to have the world at his feet.
Fast forward five years, and Fraga is instead preparing himself for his first season in Super Formula with Honda squad Nakajima Racing, which marks the culmination of a long effort to rebuild his career in Japan following a two-year period on the sidelines – during which time the only races he participated in were virtual ones on Gran Turismo.
It seems like the ideal time to look back on why his brief stint as a Red Bull junior went awry amid a dismal FIA Formula 3 campaign for Charouz that yielded just a single point. That followed a promising Formula Regional European campaign, in which he placed an impressive third overall despite it being his first year racing outside of the Americas.
“It was difficult to negotiate with the teams because they didn’t know much about me,” reflects Fraga. “We had talks with Charouz and Carlin and in the end, we decided to go with Charouz. Everything was confirmed before the TRS season started.
“It turned out to be much harder than we thought. Because of the COVID-19 situation, the team was struggling with organisation and everything. We had a lot of mechanical issues: even during the weekends where we had the performance to score a few points, we just started at the back or something else happened, and it didn’t work out.”
Fraga goes on to reveal that Red Bull had arranged for Fraga to switch to Hitech for the final round of the season at Mugello, only for Charouz to stand in the way of the move.
“I notified the team and at first they were chilled about it,” he recalls. “But FIA F3 has a rule that says that in case of a driver switching teams during the season, that team has to release the driver, basically. In the end, they just said they didn’t want me to go, even though I had already paid for the full season and I didn’t have anything left to owe them.”
The plan was for Fraga to switch to Hitech full-time in 2021, and he got as far as testing for the team, even topping the afternoon session of the final day of the post-season Jerez test. But as is the case with so many F1 hopefuls, funding issues put paid to this.
“A contract was signed, but because of the COVID situation, one of my sponsors reduced the amount of funding,” he explains. “Hitech said that we cannot take this risk, because the same thing happened [with another driver] last year. The contract was cancelled and I had nothing to race. Then Red Bull told me if I was not able to race, then we are done.”
"It happened the way it happened, and it’s not because I did something wrong; up to that point I did everything I could have done"
Igor Fraga
Given that Lawson and Tsunoda are now both established in F1 with Red Bull, and Colapinto is an Alpine reserve and widely tipped for a race drive sooner rather than later, you would forgive Fraga for having regrets. But he isn’t one to dwell on what could have been.
“Probably if everything went well in F3, I could have had the chance,” he says. “But I prefer not to look back. It happened the way it happened, and it’s not because I did something wrong; up to that point, I did everything I could have done. I don’t have any bad feelings about what happened and I am really focused on the present and future now.”
Fraga would stay busy for the next two seasons with his Gran Turismo Esports activities, having risen to virtual fame in 2018 by becoming the first winner of the Nations Cup series established by the Sony title. Those connections and his heritage – his mother is half-Japanese – convinced him that Japan would be the place to reboot his career, although he had to wait until the country’s borders reopened in 2022 to finally make the move.
Visiting that year’s World Endurance Championship round at Fuji, he met team owner Masami Kunii, who signed him up to drive a Lexus RC F GT3 for the new Anest Iwata squad in Super GT’s GT300 class. Alongside that, he penned a deal to join B-Max Racing in Super Formula Lights, finishing fourth in the standings with a single win at Sugo.
The following year, rising budgets in Lights prevented Fraga from doing a second season with B-Max. Instead, after the chance arose for him to drive for Nakajima in the post-season Super Formula rookie test at Suzuka in place of an injured Naoki Yamamoto, he took on a reserve role with the team, making him ideally placed to step into the seat vacated by Yamamoto when the three-time champion elected to retire from the series last year.
“I didn’t know at the time whether Yamamoto-san would come back or not, it seemed like an opportunity to do maybe a few races,” explains Fraga. “Finally, Yamamoto was able to come back and did the full season, which was very surprising and also amazing to see up close.
“Spending a year as a reserve driver, even though it was not something I was keen to do at the beginning, I learned a lot – especially being able to speak to the engineers and the mechanics. It meant that when I did the rookie test with them again at the end of last year, all the communication was easier and it made the test much smoother.”
Fraga impressed in that test, setting the fastest time on the rookies-only third day and placing seventh on the second day against the full cast of Super Formula regulars, just fractionally slower than his new Nakajima team-mate Ren Sato.
Despite that, Fraga isn’t getting carried away, highlighting that setting fast times in testing and doing so on a race weekend, when track conditions often change considerably between practice and qualifying, are two different things. Consistent points are the target, he says, adding: “If we have one or two weekends when the car is competitive enough to be in the top three or top five, when that chance comes, I really want to make use of it.”
Fraga describes the coming season as a “turning point” in his career, and although he suggested success in 2025 “could lead to other chances” in other paddocks, he clarifies that a seat in Super GT’s top GT500 class is his most realistic near-term goal.
“As well as Super Formula, I want to be in GT500,” he underlines. “You never know what the future holds, and if the opportunity comes I might do something abroad again. But the main focus now is to become established in Japan and become respected here.”
After his ‘first’ career fizzled out amid FIA F3 paddock politics and the harsh realities of the pandemic, it’s clear Fraga is determined to maximise this invaluable second chance. Given his TRS pedigree, you wouldn’t bet against him eventually rising to the summit in Japan’s top single-seater series – and perhaps giving Red Bull some pause for thought.
