Talented young Estonian driver Stefan Arand will start the second part of his UIM F1H2O World Championship career with the Sharjah Team in 2025.
The 23-year-old burst on to the scene at the start of last season with Jonas Andersson and Team Vietnam and secured an impressive fourth place in the Grand Prix of Lake Toba, Indonesia after finishing in a similar position in his Sprint race. That debut performance was overshadowed slightly by Rusty Wyatt’s rookie victory, but Arand had put his name amongst the front-runners from the outset and his confidence was obviously high before the inaugural Grand Prix of Vietnam.
His challenge for honours at the Grand Prix of Bình Định-Vietnam in Quy Nhơn started well with the runner-up spot behind his team-mate in the second of the Sprint races, but the Tallinn resident failed to finish the race and lost ground on the early leaders in the Drivers’ Championship. He added six points to his tally for finishing fifth in his Sprint race at the Regione Sardegna Grand Prix of Italy in Olbia but another non-finish in the Grand Prix was a bitter blow for the rookie.
He did manage fifth overall in the weather-shortened Grand Prix of Shanghai but the Estonian’s season petered out from then on. He failed to start the second of the Chinese races in Zhengzhou and missed the finale on Khaled Lagoon in Sharjah. A rookie season that had promised so much ended with 10th place in the Drivers’ Championship, although he did play an important role in Team Vietnam winning the Teams’ Championship.
Fast forward to 2025 and Arand has now joined forces with Scott Gillman and the Sharjah Team and will be working closely with last season’s Rookie of the Year, Rusty Wyatt, and Finland’s Filip Roms.
Understandably, the youngster who began his career in 2012 and went on to secure the GT15 World and European Championships in 2014 and 2015, is relishing the new challenge of working with Wyatt and Gillman. His American team manager is a four-time UIM F1H2O World Champion and has a knack of spotting young talent.
Arand has shown his potential for several seasons, despite his young age. He was UIM Junior driver of the year in 2016, 2017 and 2018 and added GT15 and GT30 world titles to his list of achievements in 2017 and 2018 before switching to the UIM F4 series and then finishing third in the 2023 UIM F2 World Championship, where he was Rookie of the Year.
Things didn’t go according to plan for Arand after a strong start to 2024 but he has plenty of time before the opening round of the 2025 series in Indonesia to prepare both physically and mentally for this year’s rapid-fire five-round series, which is shaping up to be one of the most exciting on record. Could this be the year that he hits the podium for the first time?