Keanu Al Azhari will step up to FIA Formula 3 with Hitech in 2027 after racing for the team in GB3 and Eurocup-3. Photo: FIA Formula 3 / Hitech.
Hitech has spent two seasons watching Keanu Al Azhari from its own pit wall. On Tuesday it decided it had seen enough. The 18-year-old Emirati will step up to FIA Formula 3 with the British team in 2027, the first name confirmed on Hitech’s grid for next season and, by his own account, the first driver from the UAE to reach the championship.
This is less a signing than an internal transfer. Al Azhari drove Hitech’s GB3 car in 2025, won the 2026 Eurocup-3 Spanish Winter Championship in a Hitech car, and is third in the main Eurocup-3 standings with the same team. No new engineers to learn, no new data conventions, no new debrief culture. For an F3 operation that needs a reset, that familiarity is worth more than it sounds.
Hitech’s F3 program needs to look like Hitech again
Hitech’s F3 record used to be a calling card. The team has won at least one race in every season since the championship launched in 2019, and the series’ own 2026 season preview pointed out that it had finished in the top five of the teams’ standings in three of the four seasons before 2025.
Then 2025 produced eighth place on 90 points, Hitech’s lowest finish and lowest total in F3. With an all-rookie line-up, 2026 didn’t fix it: eighth again, this time on 55 points, 279 behind teams’ champion Campos Racing. Jin Nakamura’s Sprint Race win at Spa-Francorchamps in July kept the winning streak alive. Little else did much to lift the season.
That’s the backdrop to this announcement. Al Azhari will be a rookie to the car and to most of the tracks, but not to the team. When you’re rebuilding, cutting out one learning curve matters.
The comeback drives are real. F3 will punish him for needing them
Paul Bellringer, Hitech’s F3 team manager, picked out Al Azhari’s ability to race his way forward when a weekend goes wrong. The GB3 record backs that up. At the 2025 Monza finale, he went from 20th to fifth in Race 2 and from 22nd to 11th in Race 3. His first GB3 win, at Silverstone that August, came from fourth on the grid and was settled by a move up the inside of Patrick Heuzenroeder at Brooklands. He won by about a second and a half.
Here’s the catch. In F3, one qualifying session sets the grid for the whole weekend: the Feature Race starts in qualifying order, and the Sprint reverses the top 12. A bad Friday means two races in the midfield of a 30-car field of identical cars, where every place costs tyre life and risk. Comeback drives make good highlights. Top-12 qualifying laps score the points.
The most useful thing he can do this winter is make his racecraft a fallback rather than the plan. There’s evidence the one-lap pace is there too: the official announcement credits him with three GB3 poles in 2025, alongside his win and six podiums.
The Eurocup-3 season isn’t finished
Before any of that, there’s unfinished business. Eurocup-3 has two rounds left, at the Hungaroring on October 23–25 and Montmeló on November 6–8, and Al Azhari sits third on 145 points. James Egozi is out of sight at the top on 283, but second place is still open. Rene Lammers is 16 points ahead on 161, and Ean Eyckmans is six behind on 139.
With the F3 deal done, Al Azhari has no contract to race for in those two rounds. He does have a runner-up spot to fight for. The Hungaroring is worth watching closely: it’s a track where lost positions are hard to win back, which makes it a decent rehearsal for the qualifying problem he’ll face in F3.
A first for the UAE, in a market that’s already moving
Al Azhari presented the move as a national milestone, describing his F3 debut as “a milestone I carry with immense pride” and saying he hopes it encourages young drivers across the region. If the UAE is going to build a pipeline into the FIA ladder, a driver arriving in F3 already settled with an established team is a far better test case than one scrambling for a seat in February.
Hitech isn’t alone in moving early. Trident has already started filling its 2027 F3 line-up, barely three weeks after Ugo Ugochukwu sealed the 2026 title in Madrid. One level up, F1 teams are locking in their own 2027 pairings. Feeder-series teams that wait until winter testing to sign drivers tend to get whoever is left.
The question for 2027 isn’t whether Al Azhari can pass people. GB3 answered that. It’s whether Hitech can give him a car, and a Friday, good enough that he doesn’t need to.
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