Featured: F3 racing driver Roman Bilinski on the mechanics of becoming a champion

In the world of motorsport, it comes down to the thousandth of a second. This is familiar to F3 racing driver Roman Bilinski, who for the final six laps of this year’s Monza Sprint Race was fighting for a second-place finish with Martinius Stenshorne before claiming a maiden victory.

‘It's an incredible thing that 30 drivers can go around the track on the limit and be within a couple of tenths of a second,’ Bilinski says. ‘Everyone is having to push a piece of machinery to its absolute limit. And while your brain is telling you to slam on the brake pedal, you have to push it a little bit further each time, one metre at a time. It’s not easy and it’s not natural, but you have to do it.’

Precision, of course, is key, and it is a skill that has taken nearly a decade to perfect. First getting into the racing world at age 12, Bilinski would spend 40 weekends of the year racing karts before he made his first appearance in Formula 4 in 2020. ‘I can remember the first time I stepped into a go-kart. I must have been around four or five years old. To think back then it wasn’t anything serious, and now it’s my whole life. It’s quite a big thing.’

Joining Rodin Motorsport this year, alongside GB3 champions Callum Voisin and Louis Sharp, Bilinski’s childhood passion was his driving force to get back behind the wheel following a serious road car accident ahead of Formula Regional European Championship’s third round at Zandvoort.

‘Initially, my first thought [after the accident] was, “I need to get back racing this weekend.” I didn't really know at that point how severe it was. I had no feeling in my legs, and they told me if I do walk again, I’ll be extremely lucky. Realistically, I wouldn’t race again, and I wouldn’t get back to any sort of exercise for a year. Three months later I was back in the car. But that’s what you do when you have a dream. It’s all I can remember from a young age; driving is what I do and I don’t regret it in any way.’

This perseverance and drive is what he hopes will lead him to become Formula 1 World Champion one day (and eventually be played by The White Lotus and The Gentlemen actor Theo James in his biopic, a casting that has been predicted by a number of F3 drivers, jokes Bilinski). ‘[Becoming World Champion] is kind of everyone’s dream when it comes to motorsport,’ he admits. ‘But I would love to also have a legacy and be remembered as someone who is just kind and giving. That’s very important to me.’

While Bilinski lauds Lewis Hamilton and Robert Kubica as his heroes in motorsport, his father is his true inspiration: ‘From a young age, I was quite lucky with what I had growing up and very fortunate. But then at the age of four or five, we lost everything, and it was a very, very difficult time. I think to go through something like that and to see how hard he worked for our family, and the success he has since achieved, is really inspiring to me. He proved that you should never give up. It definitely keeps me humbled.’

Diligence is also something the British-Polish racing driver searches for in a watch. ‘When you look at a watch it’s not just a timepiece,’ he explains. 'So many man-hours and [so much] precision has to go into something like a watch. It’s almost the same as a race car. Both have a dedicated team behind them and so much work goes into them that you respect the final results all the more for everything that’s been put into them. It’s more than just telling the time. When you look at the back of a watch, you see how small and fine these components are. The design, of course, is important, but the parts inside that sometimes you can’t see are where the respect comes from.’

In both watchmaking and motorsport, time is everything. As Bilinski rhapsodises, ‘the champion is made off track’, with success being determined by efficiency and perfect synchronisation between different components, whether that be between the steering, throttle pressure and brake timing on the track, or the mainspring, wheel train and escapement in Aera’s M-1 Dune. The final piece is only as good as the sum of its parts.

A timepiece, however, can only take you so far – in the end it’s down to the wearer, of course, in terms of how they use their time well – a sentiment that lies at the heart of Aera. For Bilinski, sometimes you have to work to your own clock: ‘The preparation is always important, but then, when something unexpected happens, you have to have the instinct to make those split-second decisions. Every thousandth of a second counts and you have to push yourself a little bit further than what you think is actually possible.’

Going beyond what’s possible in search for the extraordinary is what defines a true champion, both on and off the track.