Born: 17 September 1993 in Goodmayes (United Kingdom)
Website: www.alexlynnracing.com
Twitter: @alexlynnracing
Facebook: Alex Lynn
F1 involvement: Williams development driver

GP2 Series statistics

Seasons entered: 2
Races entered: 41
Races started: 41
Podiums: 7
Fastest laps: 3
Best qualifying result: 1st (x2)
Best feature race result: 1st (x1)
Best sprint race result: 1st (x4)
Best championship position: 6th
Points: 234

Season-by-season

2015 (DAMS)

Races entered: 21
Races started: 21
Podiums: 4
Fastest laps: 3
Best qualifying result: 1st (x1)
Best feature race result: 1st (x1)
Best sprint race result: 1st (x1)
Championship position: 6th
Points: 110

The 2011 Formula Renault UK champion, Lynn was third in Euro F3, second in the Masters of F3, and winner of the Macau Grand Prix in 2013. In 2014 he won GP3 as a rookie, with a hat-trick at his début. He won tests with Lotus F1 and with the GP2 development car, tested with ART and DAMS in post-season, and was confirmed to drive for the reigning champions alongside Pierre Gasly. He left the Red Bull young driver programme to get testing opportunities with Williams, with all seats at Toro Rosso and Red Bull taken for the foreseeable future.

He and his team mate had a season which, by the standards of their talent and the team they drove for, it is appropriate to define “average”. Much more was expected of Lynn than a single feature win and a single sprint win, and a little more was not far away: starting from pole for the second time that season, Lynn wanted to repeat his Hungarian dominant performance in Sochi. However, he made a silly mistake and had to retire from the lead. That was only his second retirement of the year but one fo his few mistakes came in the worst of circumstances. He ended the year tied on points with Marciello and Gasly but ahead of both on countback.

2016 (DAMS)

 

Races entered: 22
Races started: 22
Podiums: 5
Fastest laps: 0
Best qualifying result: 3rd (x1)
Best feature race result: 3rd (x1)
Best sprint race result: 1st (x3)
Championship position: 6th
Points: 124

Lynn remained with DAMS while his team mate was apparently demoted to a new team, Prema. As it turned out, Prema were straight away the top of the class and DAMS scored their worst result since 2010. Lynn’s new team mate, Latifi, proved worthy of his seat only on the first weekend, then faded to being a regular midfielder. Lynn had to almost single-handedly drag DAMS as high as he could, and he started by winning the first sprint race of the season. In Monaco, he was twice in the top five. In Baku, he recovered to ninth after retiring in the feature race through no fault of his own. Similarly but less impressively, he recovered from 11th in the first race to third in the second race in Austria. In Silverstone and Budapest he was three times out of the points and retired once. In all of this, Lynn had scored a single points finish in the last eight races, a mere ten points.

In Hockenheim he finished seventh on Saturday and took his second win the day after. At Spa he was third in the feature race but did not score in the sprint race, nor did he in the Monza feature race, but recovered to fifth in the sprint race. Another solid performance in Sepang saw him place fourth in the main race but again he couldn’t keep up the pace in the short race. In Yas Marina, finally, he finished 8th in race 1 and duly won in his final GP2 appearance in race 2. Lynn’s season was somehow even less consistent than the previous, as he scored twice in a weekend only four times the whole year. However, many of the times in which he couldn’t compete for the top positions the fault was clearly not his: he easily had the upper hand on his team mate regularly, but DAMS clearly had some inexplicably bad weekends when they couldn’t find the pace they needed to fight at the front.

After GP2

Already at the end of the year Lynn tried his hand somewhere else, racing for three events in LMP2 machinery in the WEC, taking pole in Shanghai. He signed to be the reserve driver at Virgin in Formula E for 2016-17.