ART Grand Prix’s Victor Martins took the first F2 pole of the season in Melbourne after Prema Racing’s Gabriele Minì was handed a three-place grid penalty for impeding Jak Crawford. The trio spoke to Feeder Series and selected media at a post-qualifying press conference about the session and how they prepared for it.

By Martin Lloyd

Throughout the session, Minì and Martins looked the class of the field. The pair were the early pacesetters nine minutes into the session, with Martins ahead of Minì. Joshua Dürksen, Crawford and Minì all had brief stints at the top before Leonardo Fornaroli set the fastest time with 19:40 remaining. He then bettered his own lap to set a 1:29.948, making him the first driver below the 1m30s barrier.

Martins’ best lap of the session, a 1:29.523, came at the start of the second runs. Martins improved his own time to set a 1:29.400 with three minutes left before Minì, then third behind Crawford, jumped to the lead with a 1:29.286, putting him on top.

Minì lost his pole for impeding Crawford at Turn 4 in the closing stages of qualifying. The Italian was relegated to fourth for the feature race on Sunday and will thus hand Martins the two points for pole. Still, the 2024 F3 runner-up qualified fastest in only his second F2 weekend after he substituted for Ollie Bearman at Prema at Baku in 2024. 

Additionally, six drivers will take 10-place grid drops for both races after their teams were found to have drilled one or more holes into their diffusers during pre-season testing, interfering with sensors. The DAMS, Rodin Motorsport and Trident drivers will lose 10 spots, meaning that Crawford is set to start 13th for the feature race. The only other driver in the top 10 to be affected is Rodin’s Alex Dunne, who will start 15th having qualified fifth.

The front row for the feature race will therefore be Martins and Richard Verschoor, who had qualified fourth. Invicta Racing’s Roman Staněk, who originally qualified sixth, will start third, with Minì fourth. They will be followed by the Hitech pair of Dino Beganovic in fifth and Luke Browning in sixth in sixth, AIX Racing’s Joshua Dürksen seventh and Invicta’s Fornaroli eighth. The reigning F3 champion will start on reverse-grid pole for the sprint race. 

Minì’s Prema teammate, Sebastián Montoya, will start ninth on Sunday, with Ritomo Miyata rounding out the top 10 in his first weekend with ART. 

The form of Prema and ART was markedly different to last year, when neither team had a consistent handle on the Dallara F2 2024 car. But in the first race of 2025, the two previously frontrunning teams returned to their positions of old. 

“I think it’s never quick enough,” Martins said. “I was with ART last year and we would have wanted to come back earlier in 2024 into the championship title [battle]. But I’d say we’re quite happy with what we saw, where we were last year for the second half of the season.”

Martins scored four podiums in the second half of 2024 and started on pole for the final race of the season at Abu Dhabi. Still, the Frenchman finished only seventh in the drivers’ standings despite having been a pre-season title favourite after a strong rookie year in 2023.

“We used that positively during the winter to always go even more,” Martins added, “even further into analysis. And I think also struggling a bit last year gave us extra motivation. [We were] saying to ourselves, ‘we need to react, we need to do things we were not doing before,’ for example. 

“And sometimes when you’re at the top, you have the tendency of, let’s say, not pushing the boundaries. And I think we were where we should have been [last season] and then we had some extra work to do.”

Minì said he was not surprised by Prema’s bounceback after their torrid 2024 season, which saw them finish a lowly fifth in the teams’ championship. 

“We know Prema historically,” Minì said, “they are a team that won a lot and they are hungry to win even more, of course.

“They [Prema] understood what to do and what was not in the right direction at the beginning. And during the winter, once again, by analysing data and the testing and all the work we have done, we improved even more.”

Earlier in qualifying, Trident’s Max Esterson collided with MP Motorsport’s Oliver Goethe at Turn 13 after only five minutes while on a faster lap. The American suffered damage and did not set a time. Neither driver received a penalty for the incident.

Meanwhile, power cuts affected several cars in practice. F2 released a statement after qualifying, stating that “the issue is only partially solved”. To attempt to fix the problem, the series announced that it would hold an extra 15-minute shakedown session at 10:25 local time on Saturday before the sprint race. 

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency