Sami Meguetounif has experienced a rocky start to his Formula 2 career. The Trident driver sits 19th in the standings after eight rounds with just two points on the board. He spoke to Feeder Series in the paddock during the Silverstone round about his difficult season to date.

By Martin Lloyd

Meguetounif headed to F2 after a mixed roookie season in F3. The 21-year-old showed speed in 2024, winning two feature races at Imola and Monza, but he only scored 34 points outside of those races.

For 2025, Meguetounif moved up to F2, remaining with Trident. 

“For me, it was a nice opportunity,” Meguetounif told Feeder Series. “I joined Trident for one year, but we really linked super well and I felt part of the family there. Being a centre part of the project in F2, stepping up and staying there, was something that I really liked. I felt super motivated to go and to be the first one to perform with a Trident.”

Meguetounif alludes to the team’s disappointing record in F2. Before Richard Verschoor finished eighth in the standings last season, the team had not secured a top-10 finish in the second tier’s drivers’ standings since Luca Ghiotto’s eighth-place finish in GP2 in 2016. 

The Frenchman is therefore realistic about his predicament and aware that Trident have historically not been the quickest team on the grid. With the season proving difficult so far, it would be easy for Meguetounif to lose confidence in his own abilities, but he knows that he has the pace to challenge at the front. The 21-year-old has pushed his engineers to make the car quicker, using the benchmark of a 2024 F3 teammate as evidence of his speed.

“They work super, super hard. They believe in me,” he added. “They have the data of Leo [Fornaroli] and myself last year in F3. They know that when I’m five tenths off him, they have to work a bit on the car to put me closer to Leo because I’ve got [that speed]. 

“Sometimes I’m not always there. Sometimes I make mistakes, of course. But they know that they have to work on the car. This is a nice feeling for me because I push 100 per cent but they also push 100 per cent, and at some point it will pay off – I hope.”

Meguetounif finished seven places and 69 points behind eventual F3 champion Fornaroli. It was Fornaroli’s second F3 season with the Trident team after he took an 11th-place finish in 2023, and Meguetounif attributes his points deficit to the Italian’s added nous in the championship. 

“We [at Trident] all know that the difference between Leo and myself last year was just his brain, his experience, his management of the races, but the speed was there on my side. 

“On every quali, I was there fighting with him. He’s been smarter and used his experience better to win the championship, when I finished eighth by winning two races.”

Meguetounif references Fornaroli’s feat of winning last year’s F3 title without winning a race, comparing it with his own season, which involved much lower moments – 11 non-scores, to be exact – as well as the highs of victories. 

But Meguetounif did not follow his ex-teammate’s path of competing for a second season in F3 to hone that consistency, instead choosing to make the immediate step up to F2. He hoped to compete higher up the field more regularly, but he has found the going tough to date. 

“So far it’s a bit of a struggle. If we compare the championships, we have less cars but it’s so tight between the drivers. I think we’ve never seen it in the past six or seven years that tight, if we take the quali of the Red Bull Ring. It shows the level – 18 drivers that are very good, that are probably race winners in F3 and are good drivers,” he said. 

“In the end, what I see is that in F2, there are a lot more things to consider as performance things on the car. Like braking is very different to F3; the carbon is a big story to keep them in temperature; and the working range of the car is much, much tighter than in F3. To put the finger on something that is good to drive and fast is much harder than in F3. So far, we are struggling.”

Trident sit at the bottom of the teams’ championship standings with only two points, both courtesy of Meguetounif. That total puts them nine points behind closest rivals Van Amersfoort Racing. Fellow rookie Max Esterson is alongside Meguetounif, who feels that having two newcomers still learning the car’s behaviours has limited the team’s ability to receive technical feedback. 

Meguetounif’s most notable moment this season happened in the Spielberg sprint race. He was fighting with Luke Browning and Arvid Lindblad for 12th place on lap two when the trio crashed at Turn 3, resulting in Meguetounif’s flipping over. The Frenchman had attempted an ambitious move on the inside of Browning and Lindblad but had to take evasive action when Lindblad also moved to the inside to pass Browning.

“Obviously when he [Lindblad] started to turn into the corner, my distance to turn into the corner reduced massively,” Meguetounif explained. “My decision to brake late was already taken, and then [Lindblad] moved to the right to attack Luke without seeing me. And then from that movement that he made, I was dead. It was over.”

All drivers involved were uninjured, and all of them raced in the feature race the following day. The stewards deemed the collision a racing incident.

“I was there in the room, and I can tell you that [the stewards] were almost there to penalise Arvid because you need to give room for the car on the inside, because there was no room for Sami and he had no choice but to make contact,” Meguetounif said. “But at the same time, I think they understood that he really didn’t see me and they took that into consideration.” 

The race was a missed opportunity for Meguetounif, representing his 11th non-scoring finish in 12 races, but he bounced back from the incident with 10th place in Sunday’s feature race.

This is the essence of Meguetounif’s character, and indeed his season so far. There is a quiet resilience, determination and self-belief that belies his lowly championship position. Meguetounif may not have featured much at the sharp end of the F2 grid in 2025, but he has proven that he possesses both the speed and the mentality to spring a surprise later in the year.

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency