Victor Martins set the best overall time on the final day of F2’s Abu Dhabi post-season test by topping the Friday morning session just before causing a red flag, while Campos Racing’s Pepe Martí led newcomer Nicolás Varrone in an afternoon focused on long runs.

By Michael McClure

Having also finished as the fastest driver in Wednesday morning’s session, Martins became the second driver after AIX’s Joshua Dürksen to top two of the sessions of the weekend.

The ART Grand Prix driver fell short of his pole time from a week ago by 28 thousandths but still set the second-fastest lap across the three-day test at the Yas Marina Circuit. His time of a 1:35.773, set just before he stopped on track with an unspecified issue, was 0.190 seconds slower than Dürksen’s best lap from Thursday morning.

In the afternoon, when most drivers focused on race simulations and pit stop practice, Pepe Martí made a late glory run and set a 1:37.351 to take first place away from Varrone, who was making his F2 testing bow for AIX Racing.

That session-topping result for the Campos Racing driver came after taking a breakthrough sprint race win last week in the season’s final round.

“Overall, it’s been quite a solid test. We managed to do everything that we were aiming to do, and that was the whole purpose of the test rather than position,” Martí told Feeder Series after testing finished on Friday.

“Going into winter break, to be fair, I didn’t really care about where we were sitting. I think it was more a matter of understanding the car a bit more. In the end, it’s only also the first year with these cars, and the more we understand them, the better.”

Day 3 morning as it happened

Times tumbled quickly Friday morning as drivers scurried to get on track to complete their qualifying runs.

AIX Racing’s Cian Shields set the first representative time of a 1:40.705, but a series of lead changes over the next minute ended when Victor Martins captured first place with a 1:37.634.

That would not be the first time Martins retook the lead from another driver. After Martí usurped him with a 1:37.155, Martins quickly responded with a 1:37.067, then went even better on a 1:36.979 four minutes later.

More improvements came in the way of Rafael Villagómez’s 1:36.225, beaten within minutes by Christian Mansell’s 1:36.077 and then by Dino Beganovic’s 1:35.843. Martins’ ultimate session-topper, a 1:35.773, was the closest anyone got to Dürksen’s benchmark.

While on his cooldown lap immediately after, the French driver stopped on track at Turn 13, bringing out a six-minute red flag. He returned to the track within 20 minutes, as did most of the rest of the field before they pitted again.

The final two hours passed without serious incident and without many improvements. The Hitech, Van Amersfoort and Prema pairs all did race runs, while Varrone attempted a shorter one as well in his first official F2 session.

The five highest-placed drivers at the end of a session all set their best laps in the first hour. Trailing Martins were Rodin rookie Alex Dunne on a 1:35.811, Hitech’s Beganovic, Mansell’s 1:35.871 and MP Motorsport’s Oliver Goethe on a 1:35.893.

Later improvements from Ritomo Miyata on a 1:35.959 and Roman Staněk on a 1:35.992 put them sixth and seventh respectively, with Richard Verschoor, Jak Crawford and Kush Maini rounding out the top 10. Twelve of the top 15 drivers also set their best times from the three-day test in the morning session, while all drivers down to Minì in 17th were within a second of the leader.

Both ART cars ran bare carbon liveries at the test, which was not broadcast. Martins’ pink and blue Alpine-themed livery was removed from his ART car after Sunday’s F2 feature race, which he finished fourth. Miyata also ran without the Toyota Gazoo Racing stickers and colour scheme that adorned his 2024 livery at Rodin.

Day 3 afternoon as it happened

The afternoon was all about race runs – at least when drivers were on track.  

For the first 20 minutes of the session, which began an hour earlier than the other afternoon sessions at 13:00, not a single driver left pit lane. Then the Rodins of Mansell and Dunne did, and more soon followed, with all cars bar the ART pair having gone out on track by halfway through the session.

The first of the qualifying-spec laps came from Verschoor, who usurped Van Amersfoort Racing’s John Bennett an hour and nine minutes into the session with a 1:37.956. Varrone, the driver who would take it from him next, had not even gone out on track in the afternoon by that point. But 32 minutes later the Argentine – replacing Dürksen for today’s running– became the new leader on his first day in the car with a 1:37.423.

Varrone remained in first for almost an hour until Martí’s late glory run with 20 minutes remaining lifted him 72 thousandths above the AIX driver. The Spaniard held the position until the end of the session.

There was one interruption during the session from 14:57 to 15:11 for a red flag to recover Crawford’s stricken car at Turn 1. The DAMS driver had suffered a brake failure and spun into the barriers, damaging his front wing and flat-spotting his tyres. He did not return to the circuit after the incident.

Another focus of the afternoon was pit stop practice, though the small size of the support paddock pit lane relative to the F1 pit lane limited how each team could conduct stops. Each garage is roughly seven metres wide, meaning that F2’s 5.285-metre-long cars had little room to manoeuvre if the team adjacent to them also had personnel present for a pit stop.

Teams such as Trident thus moved their personnel past the final F2 team garage, occupied by AIX, while ART staged their personnel slightly ahead of their garage located closest to pit entry.  

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency