Paul Aron of Hitech GP is the outside contender for the F2 championship at 25.5 points behind championship leader Gabriel Bortoleto entering the title-deciding Abu Dhabi weekend. Ahead of the final round of the season, the Estonian discussed his season with Feeder Series and other selected media at a virtual roundtable. 

By Martin Lloyd

Aron’s campaign has been a rollercoaster, perhaps more so than that of any other F2 driver in 2024. From the first weekend of the season in Bahrain, the 20-year-old had clear pace, finishing third in his debut feature race. He threatened to become a runaway championship leader in the early part of the season, with only a lack of wins restricting him during a run of seven podiums in the first seven rounds.

From Silverstone onwards, Aron struck a much more difficult run of form.

“It was just a few mistakes from my side,” Aron told Feeder Series during the media session. “Some technical stuff, some bad luck, and everything kind of collapsed on us for those three or four rounds.

“In Silverstone, I made a mistake myself in qualifying, and in the races we had technical issues. We went to Hungary, bounced back, put it on pole, had a problem with the clutch and then made mistakes after that, which cost us the race again.”

“We went to Spa [and] put it on pole again. We didn’t have the pace to win, but we had the pace to finish on the podium, and the car stopped on the last lap. We went to Monza, where I qualified third, got the lead from the start and then got taken out. I got back up, got put down, got back up again and got put down.” 

Two weeks after the Monza round, the championship moved on to round 12 in Baku, the first time this season that Aron felt Hitech did not have strong pace. Still, he took a total of nine points from the weekend with sixth place in both races, making that weekend the first time he scored points in both races since the seventh round at Spielberg. 

“There was a worrying moment where I thought, ‘we’ve had all this bad luck and all this pace that we didn’t use, and now we’re actually struggling for pace,’” Aron explained to Feeder Series.

“But I think that Baku weekend was the turnaround. It was the weekend where we struggled with pace, but I stayed calm, we worked with the team, we made steps forward and we still managed to come away with decent points from what we had. Honestly, after the break going into Qatar, we were well prepared, and that was a very dominant weekend.”

After his mid-season struggles, Aron appears to be back on track after he finally won his first F2 race at Lusail. In the early part of the season, a title tilt seemed near certain given his consistency and the pace of the Hitech machine. 

While Aron is no longer a favourite to win the championship and needs poor weekends for both Hadjar and Bortoleto to do so, his feature race victory in Qatar means he is now within reach of the leading pair. The Hitech driver feels his calm mentality during the Azerbaijani weekend enabled him to take a crucial win in Qatar and cling onto a slim hope of title glory. 

“If I lost my head there [in Baku] and lost myself in the worry that we’ve lost pace and we didn’t use the opportunities we had, then probably the Qatar weekend wouldn’t have gone how it did, and I would have been in a much worse position,” he added. 

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency