Laurens van Hoepen is the first driver MP Motorsport has announced for its line-up in the 2027 FIA Formula 2 Championship. A Dutchman with a Dutch team – it seems so obvious, yet this will be the first time the 21-year-old has worked with the Westmaas-based outfit. We caught up with Laurens a few days before the announcement and asked him why.
As one of the two prominent Dutch teams in Formula 1’s feeder categories, MP Motorsport certainly has a tradition of supporting local talent. In that sense, Laurens’ announcement comes as no surprise, as he fits neatly into a line of recent Dutch MP drivers such as Richard Verschoor, René Lammers, Rocco Coronel and Kasper Schormans. However, Laurens can’t quite be regarded as a ‘home-grown’ driver, as he has spent his single-seater career to date with French and Italian teams. Even during his karting days, Laurens rarely came into contact with MP’s talent scouts, although he drove his very first karting race at Strijen, a stone’s throw from MP’s workshop in Westmaas, and not too far away from Wassenaar, where Laurens grew up as a kid.
“I went to Italy quite early on to go karting internationally,” explains Laurens. “So, through karting, there was never really a Dutch connection. Yes, I drove that first race at Strijen, but I’d already started at Genk in Belgium before that. The funny thing, of course, is that that track is now owned by MP!”
Laurens was just three years old when he first sat in a kart. It all started with a phone call from Toine Hezemans, the famous Dutch touring car champion of the seventies, who would go on to become a well-known dealmaker, team owner and entrepreneur in the motorsport world as well as the karting world, pioneering the Rotax kart engines and starting a chain of indoor karting centres.
Hezemans was a close friend of father Peter van Hoepen. “It was on a Saturday morning. Toine asked if we fancied coming for a go at karting. From then on, things quickly got out of hand!” From the age of eight, he started competing in national races, where he soon began winning, leading to his first title. The move abroad came quickly. In 2017, he won the X.30 Mini category of the IAME Euro Series, followed by a move to OK Junior and OK level in the FIA European Championship and the WSK, where he regularly contended for victories and podium finishes.
After his time in the OKs, an interesting move followed – to shifter karts, just as MP’s current F4 Spanish Championship leader Kasper Schormans has recently done before moving up to single-seaters. But Laurens did so with a different motivation: not as a stepping stone to Formula 4, but as an alternative to it. In his first and only season, Laurens finished third in the European KZ2 Championship, after which he made an almost immediate leap to what was then the Formula Regional European Championship by Alpine (FRECA), having contested just three preparatory races in the Challenge Monoplace in the French Ultimate Series – the very first of which, incidentally, he won straight away.
“I still don’t know whether it was ultimately the right choice to move to shifter karts. But it was a conscious decision at the time,” he explains. “The F4 car back then had very little downforce, and a season in F4 was already incredibly expensive. At the same time, we knew you could learn a great deal in the KZs too. Especially in terms of racing skill, because you’re up against guys who are paid to do that. They’ve been racing in the category for years and know all the tricks. So the idea was that it could be just as good a training ground for single-seaters before moving straight into a category with more horsepower and more downforce, where it really stands you in good stead.”
The very question of whether skipping Formula 4 was the best choice naturally arose during his first season in FRECA. “I missed out on quite a lot of test time, and was racing against guys who’d already done two years of F4 and felt comfortable on new tyres. I was quick straight away, but it was tricky to get everything right on every lap. For example, I’d be on my way to pole, but then I’d make a small mistake in one single corner. Then I’d lose two tenths and suddenly you’re down to 12th or thereabouts. That happened quite often, especially in my first year in FRECA. In the second year we did get the most out of it, but the car wasn’t quite top-notch.”
In his first year in single-seaters, Laurens was team-mate to Gabriele Minì and Mari Boya, who were already further along in their careers at the time and went on to come two of Laurens’ direct rivals in FIA Formula 2 this year. As it happens, Laurens is now succeeding Gabriele at MP. The Italian was one of the title favourites in FRECA during the 2022 season, so the question is what he learnt from Gabriele back then.
“Gabriele is a good driver with a great deal of talent. That was a huge asset for me, especially in my first season. You can learn a lot from him in terms of technique, but somehow also in terms of speed. It’s hard to explain, because speed sort of comes naturally, but when you have someone right next to you who’s very fast, you can still learn a lot from that.”
Laurens has fond memories of the winter break between his two FRECA seasons, when he travelled to New Zealand for a few rounds of the Formula Regional Oceania Championship, formerly known as the Toyota Racing Series. At Hampton Downs, he went on to win the New Zealand Grand Prix for local team M2 Competition. “That was really cool, because when we arrived in New Zealand everyone had already done three races. Before the free practice sessions, they were all thinking something like: ‘We’ll show that lad from the Netherlands how it’s done here.’ But in first free practice I was already quickest. After that, I took pole position and eventually won the Grand Prix.”
However, those victories kept eluding him in FRECA and subsequently over two seasons in FIA F3. Does he still regret that? “Yes, of course, I just want to win. I race to win. So yes, I’d have loved to have secured those victories, but unfortunately it wasn’t to be. I’ve often been close, but it didn’t happen – and that’s obviously a great shame. I hope to win soon, preferably this season!”
In the meantime, Laurens and his father met Julien Simon-Chautemps at Monaco in 2025. Simon-Chautemps is the former Senior Race Engineer to Kimi Räikkönen in Formula 1 and founder of JSC7 Engineering and JSC7 Talent. He has been supporting Laurens’ development and helping guide him through the next steps of his motorsport journey ever since. Together, they prepared his move up to FIA Formula 2. Having already competed in several F2 weekends in 2025, Laurens decided to extend his partnership into 2026 with a team that was regarded as an outsider and didn’t have a particularly successful season last year. Nevertheless, Laurens had every confidence in them. “I knew how hard the team was working to get things back on track. New people joined the team and we tried out lots of different things during testing to gain a better understanding of the car. On top of that, they were incredibly motivated. That’s why I felt confident enough to give it a go.”
Laurens then surprised friend and foe alike by being right up there from the start of the season. Right from the off in Melbourne, the Dutchman was among the frontrunners, going on to secure five podium finishes and one pole position. At the same time, he faced several setbacks, as he ended up being handicapped by technical issues halfway into the season. As soon as those were remedied, Laurens returned to the fray, right at the front of the field. How does he rate his season himself? “I think we can take a lot of positives from the year. The most important thing is that we were always in the mix when the car was okay – always in the top ten, often in the top five. So the pace was good.”
So now his move to MP Motorsport is just around the corner. When did the talks become serious? “Actually, we’d been in serious talks going into Formula 3, but it just didn’t work out. Every time we were talking, our schedules never really aligned. Now it worked out perfectly, we hit it off straight away. We’ve always kept in touch, because we have a good connection, and then we got back talking this spring. Besides, MP is simply a very good team with a lot of experience. They’ve already won the Formula 2 title, so that’s another reason why I took the step.”
It must help that he can simply have those conversations with team boss Sander Dorsman in Dutch. “Yes, that was actually quite nice! Look, I’m used to always speaking in English, and MP is now a team with many nationalities. But it does help.” Does the team still feel Dutch to him? His team manager will be British, his engineer Italian, and the mechanics come from all over Europe. “It would be strange not to communicate in English about the car, but still, it’s quite nice to finally have my home base right here in the Netherlands. First, I want to finish this season well – ideally with that first F2 victory right now – and then get stuck in with MP to do as well as possible next year.”
MP Motorsport is known as a team that knows how to celebrate its successes and is renowned for its family atmosphere. So finally, we want to know whether that suits him. “Yes, I think so. It’s just nice to have a good relationship with your team. If I have an idea, I’m the sort of person who likes to ring my engineer straight away, even if it’s in a weekend off or in the evening. At MP, they’re the same way – I can tell from how motivated they are. So it’s definitely going to be a good fit!”
