It’s the Macau Grand Prix weekend. Staged on the streets of Macau, once a Portuguese colony and now in southeastern China, the end-of-season showdown has long been considered by ambitious young drivers as a major stepping stone towards higher motorsport categories.

This year is the 71^st running and past winners include Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher and David Coulthard. Team UK athlete Luke Browning added his name to the impressive roster last year and hopes of back-to-back British winners rest with Freddie Slater, another Motorsport UK Academy driver and recent winner of the prized Italian F4 title.

“I’m going there to win, I’m not going there for anything else,” he told Autosport.com ahead of the weekend.

Traditionally the Macau race has been for Formula 3 cars but this year switches to Formula Regional single-seaters for the very first time. In a talent-packed 27-car field Slater lines up alongside fellow rising stars Dino Beganovic and Alex Dunne in SJM Theodore Prema racing’s three-pronged attack.

Beganovic, a Swede, is a member of the Ferrari Driver Academy and is a race winner in FIA Formula 3 while Irishman Dunne is a member of the McLaren Driver Development Programme and a cut his teeth winning the British F4 Championship in 2022.

Despite the competition from within his own team and elsewhere, Slater is fired up for the challenge and believes he has a good chance of victory – more so as the introduction of the Formula Regional car provides a level playing field.

“It’s a new car for everybody to learn on this track, which is going to be interesting to see how everybody picks the data from F4 to F3 to have a good starting ground,” Freddie said.

Making life even more difficult, the weather forecast for the weekend is not great either. Thursday’s first qualifying session was held on a wet track, however a somewhat drier second session on Friday would set the grid positions for Saturday’s Qualifying Race before Sunday’s Grand Prix finale.

While the track conditions had improved, the decisive session was an exciting and unpredictable affair interrupted no fewer than seven times by red flags as drivers paid the price for pushing too hard on the barrier lined streets.

Slater survived the stop-start carnage but never had the chance to complete a clean lap not least as his team was based at the far end of the pitlane meaning that drivers were among the last to complete their laps and thus more prone to missing out when the reds flew. Even so, he was fastest of three much-fancied Prema entries and will start Saturday’s Qualification Race in seventh place.

“It was a fairly chaotic day that left me with half a flying lap in qualifying,” reflected Freddie. “The pace has been good in the dry and in the wet, but unfortunately being so far back in the pitlane with the amount of red flags that we had, we never had a chance to show our pace.

“We got purple sectors but we were never able to complete a full lap. It’s a bit unfortunate, but what matters at the end of the day is that we did the best job we could with what we had. We will fight tomorrow, a long weekend still to go and we never give up. A massive thank you to SJM Theodore Prema Racing for giving me a car like that because it was always on rails and we had the pace for pole. I’m looking forward to the races, it should be good fun.”

Saturday’s 10 lap Qualification race will set the grid for Sunday’s 15 lap Macau Grand Prix – FIA FR World Cup. UK viewers can follow the action live streamed on Motorsport.tv as well as the FIA’s YouTube channel. The Qualification Race commences at 07:30 UK time on Saturday morning and the 71^st Macau Grand Prix at the same time on Sunday.