Nicola Lacorte entered his 2026 FIA Formula 3 season with DAMS Lucas Oil needing to demonstrate clear progress after a difficult F3 rookie campaign. By the end of 2026, the DAMS Lucas Oil driver had achieved exactly that, even if his final championship position failed to reflect the scale of his improvement.
Lacorte finished 19th with 33 points, but 25 of those came through an emotional maiden victory at Monza. That breakthrough transformed his season and delivered DAMS its first F3 Feature Race victory. Away from single-seaters, his continued involvement in sportscar racing also offered an increasingly significant indication of where his career could head next.
Lacorte enters his 2026 F3 season with higher expectations
Lacorte remained with DAMS after a turbulent 2025 campaign in which he failed to score and accumulated enough penalty points to trigger a race ban. His second season therefore needed to show more than additional pace. He also needed cleaner execution and greater consistency across entire weekends.
The Italian entered 2026 confident that both he and DAMS had progressed over the winter. He focused particularly on qualifying, which he viewed as one of the defining challenges of F3, and believed his experience gave him a much stronger foundation. During Pit Debrief’s pre-season discussion with Lacorte, he also highlighted the professionalism he had gained through endurance racing, including his experience with Ferrari at Daytona.
Pre-season testing supported his optimism as Lacorte featured near the front and topped the final afternoon in Barcelona. However, Melbourne quickly showed that greater speed alone would not guarantee a smooth second campaign.
Early penalties threaten to undermine his progress
Lacorte showed promising race pace in Melbourne but compromised his Feature Race through starting procedure infringements. The stewards handed him penalties for a false start and failing to engage the correct start procedure, while contact with Noah Strømsted also damaged his car. What began as an encouraging performance therefore ended without points.
Monaco produced further frustration. Lacorte collected another penalty after leaving the circuit and gaining an advantage during the Sprint Race before an additional starting procedure infringement compounded the result. He then retired from the Feature Race, leaving the opening two rounds with little tangible evidence of the progress he believed he had made.
Those weekends carried uncomfortable similarities to 2025, when penalties frequently overshadowed his pace. However, Lacorte gradually began to produce cleaner weekends and, importantly, DAMS also showed greater competitiveness than it had during its first F3 season.
Spielberg finally rewards Lacorte’s progress
Lacorte’s first points eventually arrived at Spielberg. Starting 17th in the Feature Race, he initially lost ground but recovered strongly as the race developed. He worked his way into the top 10 and finished ninth, collecting two points and finally opening his account.
The result mattered beyond the modest points return. As Lacorte explained after his Spielberg comeback drive, he felt DAMS had reached a level where it could genuinely fight with the cars around it. His ability to recover positions also offered evidence that the team’s progress extended beyond qualifying pace.
Silverstone interrupted that momentum, but Budapest provided a more convincing step forward. Lacorte qualified fourth, placing himself among the leading cars on outright pace, before scoring in the Sprint Race. He remained competitive across the weekend and headed into the summer break having finally established himself as a regular threat around the points.
Monza transforms Lacorte’s 2026 F3 season
Nothing else in Lacorte’s campaign compared with Monza. Racing at home, he qualified third for the Feature Race and added two points with ninth in the Sprint before producing the defining performance of his F3 career on Sunday.
Lacorte remained patient during a tightly contested Feature Race and gradually moved forward as the battle developed. Once he took control at the front, he managed the Safety Car restart and pressure from behind to claim his maiden victory. The result also gave DAMS its first F3 win and made Lacorte the first Italian to win an FIA F3 race at Monza in the modern championship.
His home victory in the Monza Feature Race carried even greater significance because of everything that preceded it. Lacorte had scored only six points before the weekend, while his entire 2025 season had produced none. Monza therefore represented more than an isolated victory; it provided the clearest proof that the improvement he and DAMS had discussed throughout the year could translate into a front-running performance.
Madrid produced no further points, leaving Lacorte 19th in the final 2026 F3 standings with 33. Nevertheless, he comfortably led DAMS’ scoring, ahead of Gerrard Xie’s 20 points and Nandhavud Bhirombhakdi’s zero.
Sportscars provide another route forward
While F3 remained Lacorte’s primary programme, endurance racing increasingly became an important part of his development. He had already made his GT debut at the 2025 24 Hours of Daytona with Cetilar Racing, sharing the Ferrari 296 GT3 with his father Roberto Lacorte, Lorenzo Patrese and Ferrari factory driver Antonio Fuoco. He later raced the Ferrari in IMSA at Indianapolis and completed the FIA World Endurance Championship Rookie Test in Bahrain with VISTA AF Corse.
That programme has continued to grow. Following his 2026 F3 campaign, Lacorte joined AF Corse for the European Le Mans Series Rookie Test at Portimão in the Ferrari 296 LMGT3 Evo and recorded the second-fastest LMGT3 time. Pit Debrief had already highlighted his participation in the ELMS Rookie Test with AF Corse, further connecting his single-seater experience with Ferrari’s sportscar structure.
An even larger opportunity now awaits. Cetilar Racing will enter a Ferrari 499P in the 2026/27 Asian Le Mans Series Hypercar category, with Lacorte joining his father and Fuoco in the No. 47 Ferrari. The programme places him in the same machinery that competes at the highest level of endurance racing and represents a significant step beyond his previous GT outings.
Monza 2026 provides the F3 breakthrough Lacorte needed
Lacorte’s 19th-place championship finish prevents 2026 from ranking among the strongest overall campaigns, and the early rounds showed that penalties and execution still required attention. However, his improvement from a point-less rookie season remained substantial, while his Monza victory demonstrated a level that had rarely appeared during 2025.
The broader picture also makes the season particularly important. Lacorte now leaves F3 with a Feature Race victory, experience of leading DAMS’ challenge and an increasingly developed sportscar résumé. His appearances at Daytona, in IMSA, the WEC and ELMS testing have already broadened his career beyond the conventional single-seater ladder, while the Ferrari 499P programme takes that progression another significant step forward.
For Lacorte, 2026 therefore looks less like the end of an F3 journey and more like a season that opened different possibilities. Monza finally delivered the single-seater breakthrough he had spent two years chasing, while his expanding endurance programme now gives him an opportunity to turn that progress into a career at the highest levels of sportscar racing.
