Fittipaldi is a key player in the Charouz breakthrough and emerges as a strong name in F2 in 2022

In the first two rounds of the 2022 F2 season, Enzo Fittipaldi hit the crossbar of the scoring zone with Charouz. Three times he finished 11th and once he crossed the finish line tenth, and he always found himself having to make up ground in the races, whether to make up for a bad qualifying, a pit-stop mistake, or even some incident on the track. It seemed, however, to be a matter of time before the Brazilian could take the Czech team to the points, and that something extra finally came in the third round, in Ímola, and it couldn't have been in a better way: a perfect combination of pace and strategy that gave the driver his first podium in the category.

From then on, Fittipaldi put together a sequence of four races in the points zone, and even though he is realistic when talking about Charouz' ambitions for the year, it is undeniable that the 20-year-old has been a fundamental piece in the evolution of the Czech team in the last races.

In 2021, Enzo moved up from F3 to F2 in the middle of the season, taking over from David Beckmann in Antonín Charouz's team. The promotion was a surprise, and the youngster needed a natural adaptation time before he started to build his own identity in the team. "As much as I already had experience, last season was very new for me. This year, I feel well integrated with the team, and our performance has been growing more and more", said Fittipaldi in an exclusive interview to GRANDE PRÊMIO.

A factor that boosted Enzo's evolution with the team was having moved to Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, to follow the team's work even more closely. "My engineer and I talk directly about what we can improve, and I think I have helped in this progress of the team in F2. It's hard to put it in numbers, but I believe I helped a lot, and the people who work at the headquarters and in the races are very happy with our evolution," he continued to GP.

In 2021, even taking a job already in progress, Fittipaldi managed to score his first points in F2 by finishing race 2 in Jeddah in seventh. A result that already indicated what could be in the following year, and Enzo has been living up not only to the team's expectations, but is so far responsible for 42 of the 46 points that Charouz has in the World Championship - by way of comparison, the Czechs have not gone beyond 28 points in the entire 2021 season, finishing tenth in the overall standings, the team's worst position since their F2 debut in 2018.

For Antonín Charouz, Fittipaldi's podium in Imole was the crowning achievement of the hard work of the entire team. "We knew from the start that we had the potential to be in the top-10, and the results confirm that. We still had a bit of bad luck in qualifying and in the sprint race, but on Sunday, Enzo drove an incredible race and got his first and well-deserved podium," said the boss.

The year 2022 is therefore a leap in performance for Charouz and the perfect opportunity for Fittipaldi to move up in the standings and put his name once and for all on the crowded young driver market. Of course, the surname of his grandfather, two-time F1 champion Emerson Fittipaldi, is a nice calling card, but Enzo knows and wants to build his own name. And the positive side of being in an average team is that the pressure for results is lower.

In fact, Enzo's ambitions are realistic, even though Charouz won, for example, five podiums in 2020. The youngster's main goal is to do a good job to score as many points as possible by the end of the year. And from what he has been showing, the Brazilian has everything to close 2022 in a better position than the current seventh.

Now, of course that Formula 1 is and always will be the biggest dream of anyone who starts his career still in karting, and it is no different for Fittipaldi. But just like Felipe Drugovich, current F2 season leader, Enzo also needs to go through some stages that do not depend only on his commitment and talent. However, he is on a great path, and even if he doesn't win any race this year - which wouldn't be a surprise and wouldn't diminish his achievement with Charouz -, it can already be said that the Brazilian is one of the strong names in this current grid and deserves to be watched closely.