Formula 2 returns to the track tomorrow for a three-day test in Barcelona. Drivers say it will be an opportunity to try new things with the new 2024 Formula 2 car. One said it’ll be “the most crucial three days of testing that Formula 2 has ever seen.”

By Steven Walton

Formula 2 will be at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya in Spain from 23-25 April for an in-season test. It is the first opportunity for teams to test since the three-day pre-season test in Bahrain in February.

In Melbourne, F2 drivers said the Barcelona test would be very important. Campos Racing driver Isack Hadjar, who won the feature race in Melbourne, described it as the “three most important days of the year.”

“It’s where you get to test things you cannot on a race weekend, so it’s really important,” he said.

Formula 2 teams and drivers get very little time to try things at each round. There is only one 45-minute practice session before 30 minutes of qualifying. After that, the sprint and feature races are the only other on-track running.

Shuffle in running order post-test?

Hitech driver Paul Aron, who sits second in the F2 championship after three rounds, said during a press conference in Melbourne there would be a lot of proper testing in Barcelona, rather than just driving around to get experience.

“I think those will be the most crucial three days of testing that Formula 2 has ever seen,” he said. “It’s a new car, it’s still the beginning of the championship.”

Aron told Feeder Series in the Melbourne paddock that teams would have plans for what they wanted to try during the test.

“I think that test will give a chance for everybody to confirm their ideas and then probably from that Barcelona test onwards, we might start to see some shuffles in between the teams and the pace and so on,” he said.

“I think these first few rounds everybody had their baseline and they built from there, and then if someone is really struggling or they have some ideas [of] what to do, then I think that Barcelona test will be the first time where everybody really gets to explore a bit more.”

Three days is ‘really nothing’

Championship leader Zane Maloney said he expected his Rodin Motorsport team would learn a lot in Barcelona.

“You come into a race weekend with your package and you leave the race weekend with the same package a little bit different, but I mean you can actually properly make changes in Barcelona,” he said during a press conference in Melbourne.

“I mean three days feels like a long time, but in racing and what we have to be doing, it’s really nothing, so we’ll leave [the] Barcelona test wishing we had a couple more days,” he said.

“We just need to test the right items and make sure we do the right job in that sense.”

Why it matters

Last year, F2 held a pre-season test in Barcelona after the fourth round of the year and it worked wonders for Jack Doohan, who finally got on top of his early season discomfort in his Virtuosi car. 

Before the test, Doohan had failed to score points during two of the first four rounds. 

But after the test, he picked up three wins and scored more points than Théo Pourchaire and Frederik Vesti, the only two drivers who ended the season ahead of him in the standings.

It will take some time to see whether any of this year’s drivers experience a similar change in fortunes as the next F2 race weekend in Imola is scheduled for 17-19 May, nearly one month after the test.

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency