Charouz Racing System was a Czech motorsport outfit that, for five seasons, carried the colours of Prague into the FIA Formula 2 and Formula 3 paddocks before quietly vanishing after 2022. Never a championship-winning juggernaut, Charouz was instead one of the grid's great proving grounds — a family-run team with deep endurance roots that gave a generation of future Formula 1 names their first taste of single-seater warfare.
Origins
The team traces back to Antonín Charouz, who founded the operation in 1985, building it from European circuit racing in the 1980s into a serious endurance contender. Charouz's most celebrated chapter came not in junior formulae but at Le Mans: from 2007 the team campaigned Lola prototypes in the Le Mans Series, and in 2009 it won the LMP1 Le Mans Series title with Jan Charouz, Tomáš Enge and Stefan Mücke — a sportscar pedigree that lent the squad genuine racing credibility long before it reached the F1 support paddock.
The F2/F3 years
After the collapse of World Series Formula V8 3.5 — where the same organisation had run as Lotus, taking the 2017 title with Pietro Fittipaldi — Charouz stepped up to the FIA Formula 2 Championship in 2018, finishing sixth in its debut campaign. It expanded into the new FIA Formula 3 Championship in 2019. Across both series the team became a launchpad: Antonio Fuoco, Louis Delétraz, Callum Ilott, Enzo Fittipaldi and, in F3, future F1 racer Logan Sargeant all passed through its garage. Sargeant delivered Charouz's lone F3 win en route to a 5th-place constructors' finish in 2021. Per F1pedia's records, the team won no teams' championships across its F2 (2018–2022) and F3 (2019–2022) tenure.
Affiliations & legacy
Charouz's defining tie-up came in 2019, when Sauber established its junior programme and the F2 and F3 entries ran as Sauber Junior Team by Charouz — fielding Ferrari Academy talent Callum Ilott alongside Juan Manuel Correa. The arrangement lasted a single season; for 2020 the squad reverted to the plain Charouz name. After 2022 the team did not continue under its own banner: its F2 and F3 entries passed to Germany's PHM Racing, which raced as "PHM Racing by Charouz" in 2023 before the operation evolved into AIX Racing.
Identity
Charouz was the archetypal proud-but-modest national team — Czech to the core, family-named, technically respectable, and perennially the underdog against ART, Prema and Carlin. Its legacy is measured less in trophies than in the drivers and engineers it blooded, and in the rare distinction of a junior-formula squad that could also point to a Le Mans Series crown on its mantelpiece.