Lloyd: Award not helping in race for GP2 funding.

Former McLaren Autosport Young Driver of the Year Alex Lloyd has revealed that winning the award has not made finding backing for his racing career any easier.

The Briton, who was forced to abandon plans to run in last year's national Formula Three series because of a budget shortfall, is looking to build on the part-season of Euro 3000 that he managed in 2004, but admits that he is racing against time to raise the finances required to land a GP2 or Renault World Series seat.

"We expected winning the award to open more doors for us," Lloyd told Crash.net, "It is supposed to be worth around ?250,000 in what you can expect to get in sponsorship, but we didn't get anything through winning the award at all. A lot of people blame it on 9/11 and, while I can't really understand that, since that time a lot of companies haven't been willing to sponsor somebody in motorsport. So, winning the award was great for me in terms of hype and getting my name known in the motorsport world, but it didn't help us make the first race, as we still had no money. It's great to have on your CV - people and teams look at you much more seriously - but it didn't get me to where I wanted to be."

While he admits that the troubled Formula Superfund series was likely to be his first target for 2005, Lloyd revealed that he is now looking at both GP2 and the World Series as options. However, with both starting ahead of the Superfund series, and requiring a greater budget, they have only served to intensify his quest for sponsorship.

"We were looking at Superfund, but [the situation] is not looking too great, so now we're looking at both GP2 and the World Series quite strongly," he confirmed, "GP2 would be great to run in, but it's expensive. We're trying to raise the budget, but obviously there is limited time before the first test - and, with only limited testing, you really have to be in there before the first one.

"The World Series would be a fantastic championship to fall back on, as it is reasonably priced, and has a support race in Monaco. We're just going to have to keep our fingers crossed for the next few weeks, and try to raise the budget. If we can get on the GP2 grid, that'd be fantastic, but, if not, we'll just have to aim for the World Series. Whatever we do, we have to go in with the right opportunities, put a full championship together, try to win as many races as we can and go for the championship, rather than what we did last season."