Bianca Bustamante signs with Alex Palou’s team for Eurocup-3 in 2026, reunites with PREMA support
Bianca Bustamante’s next move is set. The 20-year-old Filipina will step up to Eurocup-3 in 2026 with Palou Motorsport, the young outfit founded by four-time IndyCar champion Alex Palou and his father, Ramon. Crucially, the entry comes with technical support from PREMA — the same engineering firepower that ran Bustamante in the 2023 F1 Academy.
“Two years later, I find myself back in red – just a step higher and a couple kph faster,” she posted on social media, confirming the deal. “Such an honour to be part of an incredible squad led by Ramon Palou & Alex Palou, and to work again 2 years later with the technical crew of PREMA Racing… I can’t wait to continue learning and growing with their guidance!”
It’s a smart reset after a rugged 2024 in GB3, where Bustamante finished 22nd in the standings — a long way off champion Alex Ninovic — and a year on from parting ways with McLaren’s junior programme, which she’d joined as its first female signing in 2023. The PREMA link is the headline here. PREMA don’t attach their people to projects for the optics, and their hand on the wheel should give Palou’s outfit a firmer technical base as it scales up.
Eurocup-3 itself is a sensible next rung: quicker machinery than GB3, a calendar that runs through proper European circuits, and a field that demands consistency rather than one-off heroics. For Bustamante, it’s a chance to bank mileage, sharpen racecraft, and rebuild momentum in a car that will ask more of her — exactly what a second-phase junior career needs.
Palou Motorsport, meanwhile, continues to grow in the slipstream of its founder’s on-track and off-track headlines. Palou’s F1 orbit has been complicated: he served as McLaren’s reserve during the 2022 US Grand Prix weekend, then became the centre of a very public split when he reneged on a deal to join McLaren’s IndyCar team for 2024 in favour of staying with Chip Ganassi Racing. McLaren responded with legal action, seeking $19.5 million in damages. Palou has admitted a breach of contract but insists he owes nothing; the case was heard at the High Court in London last year and even produced the odd splashy claim about who actually called the shot on McLaren’s 2023 signing of Oscar Piastri — allegations Zak Brown dismissed as “clearly ludicrous.”
None of that courtroom drama dims the significance of this move for Bustamante. After a year outside the McLaren ecosystem, she’s landed in a programme with clear intent and familiar faces. She called it “another big year” and “such a blessing to be able to compete again, year after year,” shouting out long-time backers Laurence Escalante and The Lee Collection in the process. If you’ve followed her journey from F1 Academy — where she showed speed and scrappiness in equal measure — you’ll know that the raw material is there. What’s been missing is continuity at a high technical level. PREMA’s involvement is exactly that.
There’s also a neat symmetry here: Palou’s team picking up a young driver who knows how to carry the pressure of a brand and a fanbase, just as Palou has learned to carry the pressure that comes when your name ends up on both timing screens and legal dockets. Palou Motorsport has been building quietly since its 2023 launch; this tie-up indicates a team starting to choose its projects more deliberately.
Bustamante’s own words say the rest: “Everyone knows how incredibly difficult it is to survive in this sport, and even more so to move up.” She’s right. The junior ladder is unforgiving, and the margins are thin. But a year with PREMA-armed engineering, in a car that bites back, across European tracks that matter? That’s the kind of season that can change a trajectory.
McLaren, for their part, have settled into 2025 with an established F1 pairing and a tighter focus on the sharp end. Palou’s relationship with Woking now plays out in legal briefs rather than debriefs. And somewhere between all that noise, a 20-year-old gets another crack to prove she belongs on the way up.
Back in red, a step higher. Now it’s about what she does with it.
