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Racing team owner and former Formula 1 driver Adrian Campos has died aged 60.
His death was announced by his Campos Racing team on Thursday morning.
“Today is the saddest day in the history of Campos Racing,” the team wrote on social media.
“Our president and founder, Adrian Campos Suner, has left us.
“His heart has stopped beating, but his memory will be the engine that will keep us all fighting to continue his legacy.”
Campos drove for F1 minnow Minardi in 1987, but made it to the finish just once in that year’s extremely unreliable car.
Following a hiatus after being dropped by Minardi mid-way through the following year, Campos returned to competition in his native Spain and won the 1994 title in his national Super Touring championship.
A few years after that Campos retired from driving and set up Campos Racing.
The team joined the largely Spain-based Euro Open by Nissan (which would later become World Series by Nissan and subsequently transformed into the better-known Formula Renault 3.5) and won its first three drivers’ titles in 1998-2000 with Marc Gene, future two-time F1 champion Fernando Alonso and Antonio Garcia.
Campos Racing currently competes in F1 support series Formula 2 and Formula 3. It joined the former for its inaugural season as GP2 back in 2005, and won the teams’ title with Lucas di Grassi and Vitaly Petrov three years later (pictured below), before the entry was sold to Alejandro Agag’s Addax operation.
But Campos returned to the series in 2014, and entered GP3 that year as well, with both programmes continuing to this day.
Williams F1 reserve Jack Aitken, who raced for Campos in F2 in 2019-2020 and won three races in that time, wrote: “Adrian, RIP. You were so kind, true to your word, competitive, mischievous, wise. You always knew exactly what to say to me, because at heart you were still a driver.
“And you created a family at Campos full of brilliant, talented people, who will miss you dearly. I will too.”
During its GP2 hiatus, Campos was among several teams successfully bidding to enter F1 in 2010, but the entry was sold and renamed as Hispania before it finally made it onto the grid. It dropped out of F1 after three seasons of competition.
Back in 2019, Campos announced his intention of returning to the F1 grid for its new technical regulations in 2021, even naming a potential driver line-up of Alex Palou and Pascal Wehrlein (now racing for Ganassi in IndyCar and Porsche in Formula E respectively).
The new F1 rules were pushed back to 2022 but there has been little mention of Campos’ potential grand prix entry since, with a newly-introduced $200million entry fee adding to the hurdles it would face.
Campos’ squad also operated a pair of Formula E entries in the early years of the all-electric championship, running the race teams for NEXTEV TCR (now NIO333) and Mahindra.
It helped the former win the inaugural series title with Nelson Piquet Jr in 2014/15.
