Formula 2 returned from its summer break with a drama-filled weekend at Monza. Leonardo Fornaroli won the sprint race, with Luke Browning taking his first F2 win in the feature race. Elsewhere, several title contenders faltered while Joshua Dürksen enjoyed a double podium. Feeder Series breaks down the key talking points from the season’s 11th round.

By Martin Lloyd

The weekend was packed with action throughout, with three qualifying stoppages due to stricken cars. Luke Browning took pole position on Friday before Fornaroli strengthened his grip on the championship lead on Saturday with his third sprint win in four rounds. Browning’s triumph on Sunday came in a race that featured three consecutive safety car periods and six retirements. The Williams junior was calm throughout, winning the feature race by an eventual margin of 3.560 seconds. 

• Pre-weekend roundtable: Browning: ‘It’s like a second year starting for me’ after F2 summer break
• Qualifying report and quotes: Browning on first F2 pole: ‘It’s like it all came back in a circle’
• Sprint race report and quotes: Fornaroli wins at home in ‘typical Forna style’, Invicta boss says
• Feature race report and quotes: Browning takes first F2 win in Monza: ‘I wanted to win it, but not at all costs’

1. Browning has his day

Luke Browning has enjoyed a strong debut F2 season. With the joint-most podium finishes of any driver and two of the drives of the season in the wet at Silverstone and Spa, he has shown evident pace. The one thing missing from his first-season résumé was a victory, but he delivered it on Sunday with aplomb.

While Browning led for all but a five-lap period in the middle of the race, his win was far from simple. The Hitech driver had to negotiate leading on two safety car restarts and dealt with constant pressure at a circuit where it is especially difficult to break away from the chasing pack. It was a masterful race. 

The performance also marked a completely different weekend to those that Browning has experienced in recent rounds. At both Silverstone and Spa, he qualified 12th before charging back through to take feature race podiums in wet conditions, while he finished fourth in Budapest. In contrast to those maverick July displays, Browning’s Monza performance was controlled and mature, proving his ability to succeed in vastly different circumstances. When Dürksen overtook him on lap 14, he didn’t panic and calmly re-passed the AIX driver on lap 19, retaking the lead that he would never relinquish. 

The win elevates Browning to second in the drivers’ standings, with a 21-point gap to championship leader Leonardo Fornaroli. With most of the other contenders falling by the wayside, Browning has marked himself out as the clearest challenger to Fornaroli’s bid for back-to-back titles in the last three rounds of the season. 

2. A mixed Sunday for Campos

After their F3 teams’ championship success, Campos were hoping to continue their positive day with Arvid Lindblad starting sixth and Pepe Martí 13th. The two drivers’ races ended with opposing results.

After a fast start, Lindblad endured his most difficult race of the season. His lap eight collision with Alex Dunne at Ascari had severe consequences for both drivers. Rodin’s Dunne was immediately out of the race, dealing a critical blow to his championship chances. 

The safety car was deployed and Lindblad continued, but Campos bafflingly decided against changing his broken front wing during his pit stop. This cost the Red Bull junior driver crucial downforce, leaving him powerless to avoid a collision with the innocent Roman Staněk at the Variante Rettifilo that ended both of their races. 

If Campos did not realise the extent of the damage, the onus would have been on race control to show Lindblad a black-and-orange flag with his car clearly in an unsafe condition. Instead, two drivers’ races were ended and the safety car returned as soon as it had been withdrawn. 

On the other side of the garage, Martí drove impressively to avoid the constant chaos and take third place. He made contact with Rafael Villagómez while making the move for the final podium place on lap 28 at Variante Rettifilo, but both drivers continued and Martí chased after Dürksen in second. On the final lap, the pair touched at the same point. Martí suffered front wing damage but nursed the car home to take his first feature race podium of the season, moving him in front of Lindblad to sixth in the drivers’ standings. 

Campos have dropped to third in the teams’ standings following Browning’s win, sitting 10 behind Hitech and 42 behind championship leaders Invicta. Despite Martí’s podium, they will rue the mistakes that led them to lose ground in a championship in which they finished second last season.

3. Double podium delight for Dürksen 

The 2025 season has proved a rollercoaster for AIX Racing’s Joshua Dürksen. Rare positive results have been offset by a surprising number of races spent largely in the lower half of the field. Indeed, the Paraguayan has finished in the points on just six occasions so far. 

His sprint win in the first race of the season at Melbourne gave cause for hope, but Dürksen has endured a miserable campaign since then. A non-score at Monaco through two accidents was a low point, while he has also suffered on weekends when he enjoyed strong pace. At Silverstone, he finished fifth in the sprint race before spinning out of the podium fight in the closing stages of the feature. But at Monza, finally, everything came together. 

“As a team, we found something that’s actually working better with my driving style and with my approach,” he told Feeder Series in the post–sprint race press conference. “We were just working hard every time just to find the sweet spot, [and] I think we’re slowly catching it.”

Dürksen was seventh in qualifying and was therefore reversed to fourth on the grid for Saturday’s sprint. He emerged from a breathless race with his third podium of the season before returning to the rostrum after Sunday’s feature. Having started seventh, he rocketed up to fourth by the Curva Grande and was challenging Roman Staněk for third. Once he passed Oliver Goethe in the pit stop cycle, he never dropped out of the top three places and briefly led the race after he passed Browning at the second safety car restart. 

Although he was re-passed by Browning, Dürksen was impressive in his defence of second place from Martí and took a second podium of the weekend. He follows Browning, Richard Verschoor and Crawford in achieving two podiums within a weekend this season, showing a return to the form that shocked the series last year when he finished 10th in the championship after moving up directly from Formula Regional Europe. 

Even with his two podiums, Dürksen is only 12th in the championship, and he requires much more consistent points-scoring in the final three rounds to improve on his 2024 standing. Nonetheless, his strong weekend will be welcome to his AIX Racing team, whose other driver, Cian Shields, has not scored any points. The podiums ensure that they retain ninth in the standings and hold off 10th-placed Van Amersfoort Racing, who likewise more than doubled their points tally this weekend.

4. A dramatic weekend in the title fight

Heading into the Monza weekend, points leader Fornaroli held a 17-point advantage over Crawford in second place and a 30-point lead over Dunne in fifth. After Monza, Fornaroli still leads and Dunne is still fifth, but the gap is now 50 points. Both Crawford and Dunne failed to score across the weekend, creating a gulf that may prove impossible to bridge. 

Crawford faced an uphill battle from Friday, qualifying 11th, just 0.045s behind reverse-grid polesitter Dino Beganovic. He finished a lowly 16th in the sprint race but was running well in the feature when he made a pit stop. Two laps later, the safety car was deployed after Lindblad collided with Dunne, costing Crawford crucial time to almost every other driver who took a pit stop with a much lower time loss. 

He eventually finished 11th, just 0.709s behind John Bennett in 10th, to round off a difficult weekend. After both races, Crawford explained on Instagram that his lack of pace was down to continuous engine issues that had affected him throughout the weekend. 

Verschoor did not fare much better. He crashed late on in qualifying on Friday and was relegated from second to 14th because he caused a red flag, stripping him of his best lap time. He finished fourth in the sprint race and eighth in the feature, taking a total of nine points from the weekend. 

While Crawford, Dunne and Verschoor struggled, Fornaroli took advantage. He was also involved in early-race contact on Sunday, taking front wing endplate damage on the entry to Ascari while fighting Victor Martins, but held on for fifth place. Having won Saturday’s sprint to take his fourth win in four rounds, the Invicta driver scored 20 points across the weekend and has extended his lead on second place by four points to 21.

With three rounds remaining, there are only 117 points left to play for, and Fornaroli is looking ever more formidable while those behind falter. It is easy to forget that at Monza, he rebounded from a technical failure on Friday that ended his qualifying session early. For him, a second consecutive title is beginning to become more than a far-off dream.

Results and standings after round 11 at Monza

Results	P1	P2	P3
Qualifying	Luke Browning, 1:32.390	Kush Maini, +0.318s	Roman Staněk, +0.364s
Sprint race (21 laps)	Leonardo Fornaroli, 35:26.925	Arvid Lindblad, +1.662s	Joshua Dürksen, +11.067s
Feature race (30 laps)	Luke Browning, 53:52.454	Joshua Dürksen, +3.560s	Pepe Martí, +3.913s

Standings	Drivers	Teams
P1	Leonardo Fornaroli, 174	Invicta Racing, 255
P2	Luke Browning, 153	Hitech, 223
P3	Richard Verschoor, 144	Campos Racing, 213
P4	Jak Crawford, 137	MP Motorsport, 167
P5	Alex Dunne, 124	DAMS, 163
P6	Pepe Martí, 112	Rodin Motorsport, 127
P7	Arvid Lindblad, 101	Prema Racing, 117
P8	Roman Staněk, 81	ART Grand Prix, 94
P9	Sebastián Montoya, 74	AIX Racing, 47
P10	Dino Beganovic, 70	Van Amersfoort Racing, 24

Read our takeaways from the previous round here.

Additional reporting by Michael McClure

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency