🇹🇷 Alp Aksoy

Alp Hasan Aksoy was born on 10 October 2010 in Istanbul. He began karting competitively at the age of five, racing first in Türkiye and the United Arab Emirates. He made his European karting debut in 2018 in the Rotax Max Challenge Central Europe, where he won at the Speedworld Circuit in Austria — reported by Turkish outlets at the time as the first win by a Turkish driver in that series, achieved at eight years old.

Also in 2018 he won the Turkish Winter Cup in the Mini class and finished runner-up in the main Turkish championship. From 2019 he moved to international competition with the Baby Race Driver Academy, racing mini karts for three seasons with a best result of sixth in the 2021 Andrea Margutti Trophy. In 2022 he stepped up to junior karting and joined Tony Kart Racing Team as a factory driver — the point at which a karting career stops being a family project and becomes a professional one.

Racing in the OK-Junior class, Aksoy finished runner-up in the 2023 Trofeo delle Industrie and won the OKJ final at the opening round of the 2023 WSK Super Master Series at Lonato. He represented Türkiye in the Karting Sprint Junior discipline at the 2022 FIA Motorsport Games. In 2024 he moved to senior karting with Parolin Motorsport and Fusion Motorsport, with a best championship result of eighth in the WSK Euro Series standings.

For 2025 he remained in the senior OK class and switched to Prema Racing's karting operation for most of the year, briefly returning to Fusion Motorsport for the WSK Euro Series and finishing fourth in points. Prema's own release credits him with third place in the 2025 WSK Euro Series and multiple top-five finishes across the junior and senior ranks. He tested Formula 4 machinery with Prema during 2025 before committing to cars.

His single-seater debut came in the Formula Trophy series in the Gulf, driving for Prema-operated Mumbai Falcons Racing Limited. At the opening round at Dubai Autodrome in late November 2025 he crossed the line first in race one but was stripped of the win for jumping the start, then recovered to win race three and left the round second in the standings. It was his first competitive weekend in a racing car.

At the following round at Yas Marina in Abu Dhabi he finished third and eighth. Returning to the same venue for the finale, he took second in race one and won the closing race to secure the 2025 Formula Trophy title by twenty-seven points over Niccolò Maccagnani. It was the first championship of his car-racing career, taken within weeks of leaving karting.

Prema Racing announced on 14 November 2025 that Aksoy would join its Formula 4 team for 2026, with the Italian F4 Championship and the E4 Championship as his main programmes. He also contested the 2026 UAE4 Series with Mumbai Falcons at the start of the year, taking a best result of third in race one at Lusail and finishing eighth in the standings. The 2026 Italian F4 season was the first since 2017 to be held entirely in Italy.

The Italian F4 season opened at the Misano World Circuit on Saturday 9 May 2026. Aksoy started Race 1 from pole but hesitated at the launch and lost the lead to his Prema teammate Niccolò Maccagnani. He fought back to second on track; Maccagnani was subsequently given a ten-second penalty for starting his engine earlier than the regulations permit, dropping him to fourth. Aksoy was awarded the win, took the Rookie class victory, and became the first leader of the 2026 drivers' standings. The Prema seat is itself a signal: it is the team that ran Kimi Antonelli, Oscar Piastri and Charles Leclerc through Formula 4.

Junior single-seater racing is the most heavily documented youth pathway in sport. Every session is timed to the thousandth of a second, every penalty is published by the stewards, and championship points are audited by the national sporting authority — in the Italian case, ACI Sport. That is why a Formula 4 result can be quoted as precisely as an athletics time, and why Aksoy's Misano win, awarded after a ten-second penalty for an early engine start, is recorded with the reason attached rather than as a bare finishing position.

The step that decides most careers is not the first win but the change of machinery. A kart has no wings, no gearbox in the same sense, and none of the aerodynamic dependence that governs a Formula 4 car, so a driver arriving from karting has to relearn braking, tyre management and how a car behaves in another's wake. The usual pattern is a season of adaptation before results appear. Aksoy won on his debut single-seater weekend and took a championship within six weeks, which is why the Prema seat followed so quickly.