Arden International was founded in 1997 by Christian Horner and his father Garry Horner as a vehicle to enable Christian to compete in Formula 3000. From its earliest seasons the team cultivated close links with Red Bull's driver development network, and those connections underpinned decades of success across Formula 3000, GP2, GP3, Formula Renault 3.5 and the British F4 Championship. The team won the Formula 3000 Teams Championship in 2002, 2003 and 2004, and produced champions including Bjorn Wirdheim in 2003 and Vitantonio Liuzzi in 2004.
When the GP2 Series was rebranded as the FIA Formula 2 Championship in 2017, Arden was among the established squads that continued. For the 2017 campaign the team ran Sean Gelael and Norman Nato, the latter taking the team's first Formula 2 victory at Baku. From the 2018 season the squad raced under the BWT Arden name following the partnership with the Austrian water treatment brand, running Nirei Fukuzumi and Maximilian Gunther. Gunther secured a sprint race win that year, though the team's championship position fell from seventh to ninth.
The most consequential change came ahead of the 2019 Formula 2 season, when Arden announced a technical partnership with HWA Racelab, the motorsport arm of HWA AG — the German company based in Affalterbach that managed AMG Mercedes factory programmes in the Deutsche Tourenwagen Masters and which had just launched its own FIA Formula 3 programme. HWA had been named as one of the founding teams for the relaunched FIA Formula 3 Championship in 2018, giving it simultaneous operations across both junior single-seater tiers.
For the 2019 Formula 2 season the team signed Tatiana Calderon, Alfa Romeo's Formula 1 test driver, alongside rising Renault junior and reigning GP3 champion Anthoine Hubert. The combination of Arden's experience and HWA's engineering resources represented an ambitious step forward.
The 2019 season was overshadowed by catastrophe at the Belgian Grand Prix support weekend. During the Formula 2 feature race at the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps, Anthoine Hubert was killed following a severe multi-car accident. He was 22 years old. The team retired the number 19 car for the remainder of the season in his honour, and Artem Markelov was signed to complete the final rounds at Sochi and Abu Dhabi in the number 22 machine.
The loss of Hubert reverberated far beyond the team itself, prompting widespread reflection across motorsport on driver safety and the demands of racing at circuits with high-speed sections. Hubert had been considered one of the most promising talents in the junior categories.
Following Arden's withdrawal from the 2020 Formula 2 Championship, HWA Racelab took over the team's entry entirely. On 16 October 2019 it was announced that HWA would assume full operational control, and the following month Artem Markelov — who had driven the closing rounds for the BWT Arden outfit — was confirmed as one of their drivers for the new season. The transition effectively ended Arden's Formula 2 presence and transferred the infrastructure to HWA's expanding junior ladder operation.
BWT Arden's brief existence as a named entity captures a transitional moment in junior formula history: an established British squad with over two decades of Formula 3000 and GP2 lineage operating in partnership with a German manufacturer-backed engineering company, in the final months before that manufacturer absorbed the entry altogether. Arden International itself continued in other junior categories, including BRDC British Formula 3, while the HWA Formula 2 programme ran until HWA eventually withdrew from Formula 3 in 2021, its assets purchased by Van Amersfoort Racing.
The 2019 season remains defined by the death of Anthoine Hubert, a loss that marked the most serious accident in Formula 2 since the championship's modern rebrand.