In March, James Robinson became the team principal of an Invicta Racing squad that had just won the teams’ and drivers’ Formula 2 titles. Nearly six months on, Invicta are back at the top of both championships with four rounds of the 2025 F2 season remaining. Feeder Series spoke to Robinson at Silverstone about his journey with the team so far. 

By Martin Lloyd

Robinson’s route into his role at Invicta was unconventional. While other F2 team principals may be the leaders of their family business – such as Adrián Campos Jr. or Frits van Amersfoort – or long-time company stalwarts like Sander Dorsman of MP Motorsport, Robinson comes from a background in F1 sponsorship. He also co-founded the Pace Six Four motorsport marketing agency, which had already been working with Invicta during the 2024 F2 season.

Robinson feels that a key difference from his roles in commercial partnerships so far has been the difference in involvement. That was made clear for the Briton after the four-car last-lap pile-up in the Spielberg sprint race that took out Invicta driver Leonardo Fornaroli, who was running in eighth place.

“Certainly, from the commercial executive role, which is a little bit later starts and early finishes, [you are] more here just for the key moments on track. There’s so much prep that goes into the day and post-session as well,” Robinson said. 

“We didn’t leave the track on Friday until almost 1:00 in the morning, and then after the shunt on Saturday in the sprint race, we didn’t leave until 2:30. And then we were back at 6:15 for the feature race, so I think most of the guys got an hour and a half sleep at best. And that’s not uncommon in this championship.”

After the team repaired Fornaroli’s car overnight, he repaid them with second place in Sunday’s feature race. The result at Spielberg, Fornaroli’s fourth podium of the season, was swiftly followed by his first three wins in any category since 2021 at Silverstone, Budapest and Spa.

“Leo’s done a tremendous job. His ability to execute in-session is outstanding,” Robinson noted before his Silverstone victory. “His ability to pull together his perfect lap at the right time – ie qualifying – has been very impressive. I think his race management has really come on a lot and his results [at Spielberg and Barcelona] don’t reflect that.

“He was really unlucky with the safety car in Monaco, of course. We were disappointed by the timing of the safety car in Monaco, but it happens and it’s part of racing, so there’s not a lot we can do about it.”

In Monaco, Fornaroli was on course to win the feature race before the timing of the switch from a virtual safety car to the full safety car allowed fourth-placed Jak Crawford to make a pit stop with minimal time loss. Frontrunners Fornaroli, Sebastián Montoya and Arvid Lindblad had to take another lap behind the safety car, relegating them behind Crawford.

Despite that disappointment, Fornaroli’s impressive race management has helped power Invicta up the standings. After a slow start, they have achieved eight podiums in the last four weekends, overturning a 50-point deficit to Campos Racing to head the teams’ championship by 42 points. Key to their rapid ascent has been their second driver, Roman Staněk, who has himself risen to eighth in the drivers’ standings.

Staněk had struggled to find his feet before taking his first podium in the same Spielberg sprint race in which Fornaroli was taken out. Speaking before the Czech driver’s sprint podium at Silverstone, Robinson was clear in his praise for the 21-year-old.

“His technical feedback has been outstanding. The way he works with the engineers, the way he’s able to articulate how the car is behaving, is really impressive – one of the best I’ve ever seen from any racing driver,” Robinson said.

“The potential is there. We saw that in testing, he had race runs better than anyone on this grid, and some quali runs which were exceptional. We know he has that ability. It’s just a case of delivering it consistently, just executing from mind into inputs that go into the car.”

That consistency has since been found, with Staněk now achieving an average finishing position of 5.1 across the seven races he has finished in the last four rounds. In the four rounds prior to starting his newfound form, this figure was exactly 11th. 

Staněk joined Invicta over the winter after two difficult seasons with Trident that yielded only one podium. This year, he has proven a key part of Invicta’s bid to retain the teams’ championship. 

The Norfolk-based team were already winning races and challenging for championships in previous years, but their success has never been quite so consistent. Before last season, when Gabriel Bortoleto won the drivers’ championship and he and Kush Maini helped Invicta secure the teams’ championship, the team last won a championship in 2017, when they were known as Russian Time. Now, Invicta’s current position atop both championships across multiple seasons has made them F2’s pre-eminent team in the Dallara F2 2024 era. 

Robinson is still relatively new to his role, and he still wants to keep his ‘eyes and ears open as much as possible’. He was keen to praise the personnel he inherited at the team. 

“Ultimately, people say this all the time and it is very cliché, but I think it’s true – this is such a people business,” Robinson said. “It’s really about having the right people in the right job and the quality of people that you have. I’m incredibly lucky in that I’ve come into a team that’s in a very good position in that respect. 

“I count myself very privileged that that’s my position and that I’m not having to try and go out and identify those people, because I think that’s really where the skill lies. Obviously, that might be something to do later down the line, if we do F3 or something like that.”

Robinson told Feeder Series on the eve of the season that the team has ambitions to move into other championships. Invicta are currently the only F2 team that does not have a team in another series, having split from the Virtuosi Racing team in British F4 after the full Invicta takeover. For now, their sole focus is on F2 – and on another charge for both titles. 

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency