Oleksandr Bondarev has a habit of walking into new categories and leaving with a first next to his name. Two years after switching from karts to single-seaters, the 16-year-old Williams Academy driver has landed the 2026 UAE4 crown — and with it another line in the history books as the first Ukrainian to win a single-seater title.
The result matters on its own terms, but it also lands at a useful moment in the junior ecosystem. UAE4 is effectively the curtain-raiser for the European spring, a compact, pressure-cooker championship that teams and drivers use to sharpen operations before the heavier campaigns begin. Bondarev didn’t just use it to get match-fit; he used it to make a statement.
Racing with Mumbai Falcons, Bondarev took four wins and beat Andy Consani to the title by eight points. It was, in his words, exactly the kind of proof he felt he owed himself after a 2025 season that showed flashes without ever really becoming a full-throated title bid.
“It was my first single-seater title, and the first single-seater title for Ukraine,” Bondarev said. “So, yeah, a really great achievement.”
That acknowledgement of last year’s frustration is telling. Bondarev did win races in Italian F4 in his first full season, which in that paddock is no small thing, but he wasn’t able to muscle his way into the championship conversation. UAE4 has given him a cleaner narrative heading into 2026’s main event: results now attached to the speed.
“Last year didn’t quite go our way I think, but I finally was able to prove myself, what I can do in the car,” he said. “We didn’t quite have the pace at some points, but we still got the results and scored points.”
For Williams, it’s the kind of return junior programmes quietly crave. Bondarev joined the team’s driver academy in 2023, becoming the first Ukrainian ever signed by a Formula 1 outfit. Academies are full of promise; they’re thinner on silverware. A title — even one positioned as pre-season — is currency, and it changes the tone of every debrief and every planning meeting that follows.
“It’s been amazing,” Bondarev said of the support he’s received. “They’ve helped me prepare for single-seaters so much. It was a really difficult time for me last year, because I felt like I wasn’t bringing in the results that I probably should have with the pace that I’d had. But now finally, I’ve got the experience, and was able to put a championship over the line.”
If that sounds like relief, it’s because it is. Junior careers don’t tend to reward patience. One scrappy season can quickly become two, and by then the next wave is already arriving with fresh hype and factory backing. Bondarev’s UAE4 title is a timely recalibration: it shifts him from “rated” to “validated” as he heads back into the deeper end of the pool.
There’s also a human weight to all of this that’s hard to ignore, and Bondarev doesn’t try to. He described the response from fans in Ukraine as “amazing”, particularly given the country’s ongoing hardship.
“I got a lot of messages from fans in Ukraine, saying, ‘You lit up our day in very tough times for all of us in the country,’” he said. “So yeah, it was a great feeling for me.”
Bondarev’s own path has already included the kind of setback that usually derails a young driver’s momentum. In 2022, he sustained serious leg injuries in a karting crash, underwent 10 surgeries, and returned to racing five months later. The following year he won the Karting European Championship — another Ukrainian first — and that arc from injury to champion still seems to sit at the centre of how he talks about himself as a competitor.
“I feel like the injury made me stronger,” he said. “It made me stronger as an individual and a driver.”
Now comes the more complicated part: backing it up when everyone’s properly awake. Bondarev will return to both Italian F4 and the E4 Championship this year, rejoining Prema — a relationship that stretches back to his 2023 karting title. If UAE4 was about laying down a marker, these are the series that define reputations and set the next rung on the ladder.
Asked whether Italian F4 is the next target, he didn’t hesitate.
“Yeah, of course,” Bondarev said. “The UAE4 is basically a pre-season championship, and it gave me a lot of confidence coming into the Italian F4 knowing that the relationship with the team is good, and that we won a title already this year. So yeah, of course, the Italian F4, and the E4 championship, are the targets for the rest of this year.”
There’s an interesting edge to how Bondarev frames his motivation, too. He’s not leaning on a current hero figure; he’s already moved beyond that. As a kid, he was a Sebastian Vettel devotee — “probably the reason why I started watching Formula 1” — and like countless others he traces the earliest spark back to Pixar’s Lightning McQueen. But the tone now is less about dreaming and more about building.
“Now I’m already on the journey there, so I don’t really idolise anyone,” he said.
That’s the mindset Williams will be encouraged by as much as the points tally. Plenty of drivers can win races in junior machinery. The ones who become something more tend to be those who treat each series not as a vibe, but as a job — and who can absorb a messy year, then come back sharper without carrying the scar tissue into the cockpit.
Bondarev has started 2026 by doing exactly that. The next step is to prove UAE4 wasn’t a perfect early-season pocket of form, but the first page of a bigger year.
