The Formula 2 round in Barcelona featured a topsy-turvy sprint on Saturday followed by a maiden feature race win for the series’ youngest driver on Sunday. Feeder Series walks you through five key lessons we learned from this weekend’s action. 

By Martin Lloyd

Arvid Lindblad began the weekend by topping practice, beating Alex Dunne by 0.278s. This marked a sign of things to come for the remainder of the weekend, with the Briton taking pole later on Friday by 0.245s over Sebastián Montoya. Richard Verschoor won the sprint as the leader of a group in the lower reaches of the field that took advantage of a late-race pit stop under safety car conditions. Lindblad resumed service to win the feature. 

• Pre-weekend roundtable: Browning, Martí weigh in on new Madrid race as Barcelona faces uncertain future
• Qualifying report and quotes: Lindblad takes F2 pole in Barcelona by largest margin of 2025
• Sprint race report and quotes: Verschoor: second F2 victory of 2025 in Barcelona was purely luck
• Feature race report and quotes: Lindblad sails to victory on Campos’ home soil under safety car finish 

1. Lindblad enjoys a perfect weekend 

Red Bull junior Lindblad has enjoyed some strong performances in his debut F2 season, with his sprint race win in Jeddah the pre-Barcelona zenith. But in Spain, the Briton elevated his performances to another level.

On Friday, he topped practice and took pole position. On Saturday, he finished eighth in the sprint race despite a mid-race spin while fighting Verschoor. The true highlight, however, came on Sunday morning. 

Lindblad started well from pole and effectively negotiated the longest run to Turn 1 on the calendar, taking the inside line to keep Montoya behind. The Campos Racing driver was largely unchallenged after this moment, with the only scare coming when Lindblad was held up behind Montoya’s teammate Gabriele Minì on lap 21.

Minì was much slower than the frontrunners as he had not yet pitted, and Montoya closed the gap to Lindblad from over three seconds to just over 1.5s by the time Lindblad had passed the Italian. As soon as Lindblad was through, however, any threat from behind evaporated. He seemed in full control of the race throughout, taking a deserved victory.

The win was also a home victory for Campos, who have experienced a difficult year off track for multiple reasons, including the devastating flooding that hit their home region of Valencia last autumn. While the team had won at Barcelona in 2022, 2023 and 2024 in F3, Sunday was Campos’ first victory in F2 or GP2 on home soil. 

2. Verschoor finds his form

Verschoor enjoyed a strong start to his fifth full season in F2. The Dutchman secured a top-six finish in each of the first five races, taking an early championship lead after he won the Jeddah feature. But as the championship’s European leg began, he endured a difficult run of races. 

He qualified 19th at Imola after the session ended early and retired from the sprint race. His ninth-place finish in the feature race was impressive but nonetheless insufficient for him to keep his points lead. At the next round in Monaco, the MP Motorsport driver qualified fourth and finished fifth in the sprint race, but he was eliminated in the first-corner melee in the feature race. Verschoor had pace at Monaco, where he took pole in 2024, but misfortune befell him.

The series then moved onto Barcelona, where Verschoor was dealt better luck. In the sprint race, he was eighth when the two Prema Racing teammates collided on lap 18 and the safety car was deployed. He was the highest-placed driver to take the free pit stop onto new soft tyres when the safety car pulled in, enabling him to scythe through the pack and take the race win.

In the feature race, Verschoor also performed solidly to dispatch Roman Staněk and Kush Maini at the start of the race and jump to third place. He then held off the late charge of Jak Crawford to take his fourth podium of the season.

Verschoor’s return to form has moved him back to second place in the drivers’ standings, just three points away from championship leader Dunne. 

3. Invicta’s first hurdle in 2025

Invicta Racing have been imperious in F2 in recent years. Low-scoring weekends are almost unheard of for them. Last season they won both the drivers’ and teams’ championships, with a six-point haul in Australia representing their lowest points tally from a weekend.

This season, Leonardo Fornaroli has been an early contender for the lead of the drivers’ standings, with Invicta also fighting at the top of the teams’ championship. But at Barcelona, the team endured their worst weekend in more than two years. 

In the sprint race, Fornaroli was able to salvage seventh place as he held off those who had pitted for soft tyres. He had run third for most of the race, however, while teammate Staněk ran sixth before the mid-race safety car. The Czech driver was unable to hold onto a points-paying position afterwards, finishing 17th. 

For the feature race, Staněk started fourth and Fornaroli ninth. For the latter, the race was over almost before it started after he was handed a 10-second stop-go penalty for a starting procedure infringement. He spent the race at the back of the field before pitting on lap 33, and a loose front-left tyre meant that Fornaroli’s race ended two laps early in the gravel trap at Turn 3.

On the other side of the garage, Staněk had started well but struggled to keep pace with the leaders on the option-prime strategy. He eventually finished just outside the points in 11th. 

Fornaroli’s two points for seventh in the sprint race meant Invicta avoided leaving Barcelona empty-handed. Nonetheless, this represented their lowest points total on an F2 weekend since they failed to score at Baku in 2023, when Jack Doohan and Amaury Cordeel drove for the team.

After Barcelona, Fornaroli dropped from third to sixth in the drivers’ standings and now sits behind Verschoor, Lindblad and Crawford. Invicta have likewise dropped from third to sixth in the teams’ championship, behind MP Motorsport, Rodin Motorsport and DAMS. 

4. A tale of two halves for Prema

Prema are still recovering from the difficult 2024 season that saw them finish fifth in the drivers’ standings, despite having a pairing of current F1 drivers Ollie Bearman and Andrea Kimi Antonelli. Recently, the team have shown more signs than ever of returning to their consistent frontrunning pace, but the Barcelona weekend featured a major hiccup. 

Montoya and Minì were scrapping for 10th place in the sprint race when they came together at Turn 1 on lap 18. Minì was making a move around the outside of his teammate when Montoya appeared to understeer into his path. Minì retired from the race after stalling the car as he attempted to return to the racetrack. Montoya continued and carved through the field on the same strategy Verschoor used to win, but he received a five-second post-race penalty, dropping him from fifth to 11th. 

The team recovered for Sunday with a strong performance. Minì drove a quiet race on the alternate strategy to finish 10th after starting 18th, while Montoya impressed to take a second consecutive feature race podium.

The Colombian has now qualified in the top five in each of the last three rounds, with his Barcelona podium moving him above Minì and Dino Beganovic to ninth in the drivers’ standings. Prema sit seventh in the teams’ standings, 21 points behind sixth-placed Invicta.

5. Dunne rebuilds and retakes points lead 

Alex Dunne’s driving standards were the hot topic of F2 discussion after last weekend. He was handed a 10-place penalty for the Barcelona sprint race for his collision with Victor Martins that triggered the first-corner pile-up in Monaco. On Friday, he received further three-place penalties for both races after he misjudged his braking point at pit entry in practice and again made contact with Martins. 

Helped by the late-race safety car in the sprint race and the subsequent opportunity to pit, Dunne rose nine places from 11th to second place in the final six laps, finishing just 0.380s behind race winner Verschoor. He had started the race 19th.

In the feature race, meanwhile, he finished fifth from seventh on the grid. He also took the extra point for the fastest lap in both races.

At minimum, Dunne needed two incident-free races in Barcelona to rebuild his confidence and reputation after his recent spate of crashes. A solid weekend would have already helped, but the Irishman managed more than that by taking 20 points from the weekend even with his combined 16 places of grid penalties across the two races. Only Verschoor and Lindblad scored more points across the weekend, and Dunne has now retaken the championship lead – a feat that many would have thought unlikely ahead of the sprint race. 

Dunne has proven on multiple occasions this season, notably through his drives to victory in the Sakhir and Imola feature races, that he is one of the fastest drivers on the grid. The McLaren junior’s task after the three-week break before Spielberg is to continue to avoid incidents so that he can build on his strong position in the championship. 

Results and standings after round 6 at Barcelona

Results	P1	P2	P3
Qualifying	Arvid Lindblad, 1:25.180	Sebastián Montoya, +0.245s	Kush Maini, +0.330s
Sprint race (26 laps)	Richard Verschoor, 42:00.288	Alex Dunne, +0.380s	Rafael Villagómez, +8.334s
Feature race (37 laps)	Arvid Lindblad, 58:49.191	Sebastián Montoya, +0.301s	Richard Verschoor, +0.602s

Standings	Drivers	Teams
P1	Alex Dunne, 87	Campos Racing, 128
P2	Richard Verschoor, 84	Hitech, 102
P3	Arvid Lindblad, 79	MP Motorsport, 96
P4	Jak Crawford, 73	DAMS, 94
P5	Luke Browning, 73	Rodin Motorsport, 89
P6	Leonardo Fornaroli, 66	Invicta Racing, 78
P7	Pepe Martí, 49	Prema Racing, 57
P8	Victor Martins, 41	ART Grand Prix, 46
P9	Sebastián Montoya, 36	AIX Racing, 11
P10	Dino Beganovic, 29	Van Amersfoort Racing, 10

Read our takeaways from the previous round here.

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency