Dominating last year's German Formula 3 championship - with a near-record 13 wins from 18 starts - has put Kiwi racer Richie Stanaway on the career path travelled 20 years earlier by a young Michael Schumacher.
Stanaway spent December at home in New Zealand before flying to the UK last weekend and moving into an apartment in Oxford just minutes from the base of the Lotus F1 team.
As one of the drivers on the Gravity Sport Management academy programme, he becomes part of the Lotus young driver scheme and will soon begin testing ahead of racing in the World Series By Renault which starts in May.
It's worth recounting where Stanaway, who turned 20 in November, has come from.
His father is former top-ranked super stock car driver Neville Stanaway. Richie grew up at Kaharoa and went to high school at Bethlehem College. He raced in junior motocross and karting and followed the family racing path into speedway by driving youth ministocks at Rotorua's Paradise Valley Raceway - where his cousins Clive and Douglas have now become forces in the stock car ranks.
Dirt ovals provided his apprenticeship but winning the NZ Speedsport Magazine scholarship as a 15-year-old changed his racing direction.
Stanaway made the most of his prize drive to finish the 2007-08 season in third place and match the rookie season achievements of Shane van Gisbergen.
The following summer he repeated van Gisbergen's effort of winning the New Zealand Formula Ford title and since then it's been Formula Ford in Australia, a limited number of successful Toyota Racing Series appearances and then to Germany to win the 2010 ADAC Formula Masters title.
In 2011 Stanaway added his name to the likes of Schumacher and F1 drivers Nick Heidfeld, Jarno Trulli and Jos Verstappen when he won the German F3 crown.
"Last year was a big step forward for my career," says Stanaway.
"Probably up till 2011 my career had been in baby steps. I'd made progress each year and moved up the ladder but I had a big jump last year.
"The Formula Masters car I raced in 2010 was still an entry level car and since then I've jumped up to F3 and won a lot of races. I also won a GP3 race and was on the pace in a World Series car, which is now considered one step before Formula 1."
The race that put Stanaway in the European spotlight was his GP3 Series victory on debut at Spa-Francorchamps at the Belgian Grand Prix.
"I didn't expect to win a race in my first weekend. You always want to win and you always try to win, but jumping into such a competitive championship I was almost a bit overwhelmed to begin with. To win a race in my first weekend was definitely the highlight of the year."
His ride for 2012 is in the World Series by Renault with the team known as Gravity-Charouz, but likely to be rebranded as Lotus.
The nine-round, 18-race series is where Kiwis Brendon Hartley and Chris van der Drift raced last year.
Double world champ Sebastian Vettel is the best known WSR graduate, and 2012 F1 drivers Daniel Ricciardo, Charles Pic and Jean-Eric Vergne have also progressed via WSR.
Stanaway hopes to do the same, with hopes of combining his Lotus-backed WSR drive with a reserve driver role for the F1 team this year.
"We are pushing very hard to secure a reserve drive with the Lotus F1 team.
"I was very close to driving in November [at the end-of-season young driver test following the Abu Dhabi GP].
"It's looking very likely that I'll drive one [an F1 car] this year, which is quite an exciting thought."
In coming weeks Stanaway is testing in one of the old A1 GP cars in readiness for the WSR season, which is introducing an all-new car this season, although still based around a 3.5-litre V6 engine with about 480bhp.
"This year there is a new World Series car which should be a lot closer to a GP2 car. As many drivers are going to Formula 1 via the World Series now as drivers who are coming from GP2. It's definitely respected as a feeder into F1 now."
The highly regimented young driver schemes run by the likes of Red Bull, Lotus and Ferrari demand high levels of fitness and training in areas as diverse as nutrition and media work.
Stanaway knows the intensity of the training will increase this year.
"It doesn't worry me at all. The more it ramps up the more I enjoy it because I know it's getting serious. I want it to be as tough as possible.
"We do a lot of training camps and they push us very hard on fitness. They want to see the determination in the drivers through the fitness training.
"I think they do half of it just to see who is determined and who wants it the most.
"Fortunately my training is my biggest hobby. Running and gym are the two big ones for me, and I do a bit of cycling as well."
Another important part of racing preparation comes in advanced simulators.
"I have access to two or three simulators. It's common to spend 9-till-5 just driving on the simulator," he said.
"You miss some stuff on the simulator like the sense of immersion, speed and the G-forces. So you have to have a knack for translating the simulator stuff into real life.
"But we drive so much on the simulators that when we get in the real race car we've driven thousands of kilometres during the week. We're sharp and it definitely gives you an edge."
But although simulator work becomes an increasingly important part of a racing driver's preparation, there was one "real" test during 2011 that reinforced Stanaway's status in the German racing scene. He was one of three drivers called up to test the as-yet unraced BMW DTM car.
"It was most sophisticated car I've driven in terms of its build and development," says Stanaway.
"It was a great experience for me because the way the teams operate is pretty much identical to F1. You have the same amount of personnel and engineers working on the car.
"I got a whole day in the car and they gave us a lot of laps. It was good to work with that number of people because in the junior formulas it's still basic compared to those fullscale professional operations."
As well as racing and training, Stanaway's other target in 2012 is to work on the business connections that are crucial to making it into F1. He understands that even winning his way up the racing ladder still may not be enough to make it into F1.
"I think you have to win in a convincing way, so I try to dominate a championship if I can because it says a lot more than if you just win four or five races. If you dominate it proves a point and fortunately I've been able to dominate three championships.
"But in terms of getting into Formula 1, I think a lot of it will come down to politics and sponsorship and a lot of things falling into place. I definitely can't do it off the back on my results alone.
"The way I look at it is they [Gravity] wouldn't invest the money in me to begin with if they didn't have a long-term plan for me to be in Formula 1.
"So I'm hoping over the next 12 months they can help me build that bridge between where I am now getting good results in the junior formulas and actually making that break into Formula 1, where over the last five years it's become obvious that more drivers are bringing a large amount of sponsorship to a team.
"It's maybe something I will have to do as well. It's very rare that a driver gets into Formula 1 these days just with results.
"But the results help my cause. If I can get good results in the World Series then it makes things happen."
Stanaway has already shown he can do the business at the World Series level, showcasing the strength that has trademarked his career - being immediately competitive on his first experience in a new car - when he topped the end of season official test at Aragon in Spain.
"I don't know what it is but I just seem to be able to get in a new car and straight away get close to the best out of it," he says.
Stanaway rates the Aragon test as similar to his experience at the Hamilton 400 in 2009 when he drove a Toyota Racing Series car for the first time and dominated the street race.
"The session would finish, I would ask over the radio: 'where are we ranked?'
"When it's your first time in the car and lot of other guys had driven them before, to hear back over the radio that we're fastest was a nice surprise."
Because testing in the World Series cars is restricted to official test sessions, the coming weeks driving one of the original A1 GP cars will prove valuable preparation.
"The idea is to get some mileage under my belt with a big high-powered car, which I haven't done a lot of in my career," says Stanaway.
The opening round of the World Series By Renault is at Motorland Aragon in Spain on May 5-6.