On July 1st 2024, Feederseries.net featured an article about Dilano on their website.

Dilano van ’t Hoff, remembered by those who knew him

One year ago today, Dilano van ’t Hoff lost his life at age 18 following a crash in a Formula Regional Europe race. In a series of conversations with Feeder Series over the past year, those lucky enough to have known him pay tribute to a driver taken from us too soon.

By Michael McClure

When I ask those who knew Dilano van ’t Hoff to describe him to me, a few phrases recur in their responses. He was, in sum, a character – a joker and a fighter with a cheeky smile who was determined to do his best in motorsport, on his own terms.

The usually laconic Van ’t Hoff kept much to himself in the paddock, but his desire to be a champion was well known.

He achieved that goal in both karting and single-seaters. Winning the Dutch championship in the Mini class in 2016 helped him make a name for himself ahead of his full-time switch to international karting. Five years later, his dominant title win in Spanish Formula 4 in 2021 off the back of a narrow loss in the winter in F4 UAE set him out as a driver to watch on his ascent up the junior single-seater ladder – an ascent cut tragically short on 1 July 2023 while racing at the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium.

The year before his passing was marked by great adversity. Surgery to fix a broken collarbone forced him to miss three rounds of the 2022 FR Europe season in June and July, and the subsequent surgery he had in January 2023 to address complications to his shoulder from the original procedure kept him away from the car over the winter, when many of his rivals gained mileage in the Middle East.

Winning championships may have been impossible under those circumstances, but Van ’t Hoff could be proud of himself for doing his best to persevere regardless. Despite significant physical pain, he took a podium at Barcelona after his mid-season return from injury and scored three more points finishes in the series before his death.

Those results, and the 19th- and 23rd-place finishes he achieved in the standings in 2022 and 2023 respectively, hardly highlight the potential he had, says Frank Coekaerts, his engineer at MP Motorsport in FR Europe. 

“I regret that we never have been able to see his true potential. I would love him to know that,” he says.

“I think I have an even bigger need for that than Dilano himself, because Dilano was convinced of this. I just want the rest of the paddock to know how good this guy was, and that is never shown.”

Dilano van ’t Hoff was born 26 July 2004 in Dordrecht, a city to the southeast of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, as the only son and second child of Alex van ’t Hoff and Esther Schuller. Racing was a family endeavour for the Van ’t Hoff family; Alex competed in endurance and GT racing events domestically and internationally, including in 24-hour races at Dubai, Zolder and the Circuit of The Americas.

The young Van ’t Hoff liked cars from his earliest days and spent time growing up around the family’s horses, but it wasn’t until another driver’s withdrawal – and Van ’t Hoff’s insistence on substituting for him – from a local race contested by his stepbrother that the youngster’s racing dreams took flight. Regular visits to Strijen, a kart track just south of Rotterdam, followed.

There he met the people who would become his racing rivals throughout his childhood, including current F1 Academy driver Emely de Heus, who first met Van ’t Hoff in 2012 at Strijen. De Heus’ father, Bert de Heus, had raced on the same circuits as Alex van ’t Hoff in the 24H Series and the Dutch Supercar Challenge. After getting their licences for club karting, their kids would soon spark a years-long friendship – and rivalry – of their own.

“In Holland, we karted only against each other at the club races near our home. We did it more for fun than for competition,” De Heus says. “In the juniors, the championship was him and me and another guy. So one time we were good friends, and then the other time we didn’t like each other because either he was in front of me or I was in front of him. The championship was always about him or me and also another guy.”

In 2015, for instance, De Heus pipped Van ’t Hoff to fifth place by one point in the Mini juniors class of the Dutch Karting Championship. The next month they were in Las Vegas for the SuperKarts! USA Supernationals, until then the biggest races of their careers, enjoying downtime together. 

“I remember in Las Vegas, we went outside of the karting. We went to the Cirque de Soleil,” she says. “His dad was a bit angry at us because we didn’t stop talking in the show. That was a funny memory. And we just kept talking about the races instead of looking at what was going on in the show.”

Floris van der Est also met Van ’t Hoff at Strijen, about 15 to 20 minutes away from his childhood home. “We always said in Dutch, Op Strijen leert rijden. It means on Strijen, you learn to drive the go-karts as good as possible because every corner is there,” van der Est says.

Van ’t Hoff, it seemed, had already mastered the skills, but he wasn’t giving anyone else the secrets.

Read the full article on Feederseries.net.