Formula 2 signed off for the autumn with a chaotic round in Baku this weekend. Jak Crawford took pole and won the feature race, while Dino Beganovic took his maiden win in the sprint. Feeder Series breaks down the key talking points from the 2025 season’s 12th round. 

By Martin Lloyd 

Ahead of the weekend, it was announced that Trident had replaced Sami Megueounif and Max Esterson with Laurens van Hoepen and Martinius Stenshorne. Three red flags in qualifying stopped drivers from getting into a rhythm, but Crawford rose through the chaos to take pole. Beganovic moved up from second on the sprint race grid to lead a Hitech 1-2 on Saturday, while Crawford beat Joshua Dürksen by the barest of margins to take his fourth win of the season on Sunday. 

• Pre-weekend roundtable: Campos’ Lindblad: Inconsistency ‘confusing for me and the team’
• Qualifying report and quotes: Crawford takes F2 pole ahead of Fornaroli in manic Baku qualifying 
• Sprint race report and quotes: Hitech’s Beganovic dominates Baku sprint to take maiden F2 victory
• Feature race report and quotes: Crawford: ‘No reason why we can’t repeat’ Baku victory in late-season title charge

1. Fornaroli shows his first small cracks

Leonardo Fornaroli has been seemingly unstoppable in 2025. The Invicta Racing driver has scored in every race but two this season, and his two fifth places in Baku upheld that record. However, the weekend was also a missed opportunity for a greater points haul.

After losing out to Crawford by just 0.019 seconds in qualifying, Fornaroli started ninth in the sprint and second in the feature. Saturday’s sprint marked a rare occasion that Fornaroli was unable to keep pace with the frontrunners, and he was forced to settle for fifth. He would have finished sixth had Sebastián Montoya’s engine not overheated late in the race, forcing the Colombian-American to drop back. 

Sunday told a different story. The 20-year-old led the way after passing Jak Crawford at the start, but he lost out in the pit stop cycle after a safety car deployment on lap five. All the drivers were told to follow the safety car through the pit lane that time by, and most drivers – including the leading quartet of Fornaroli, Crawford, Gabriele Minì and Pepe Martí – intended to remove their supersoft tyres at the first opportunity at the end of lap six. 

Invicta held the third pit box in the Baku pit lane after Trident and VAR. The team completed Fornaroli’s tyre change without a problem, but their early position in the pits forced them to hold Fornaroli in his pit box until several cars had passed. DAMS, Prema and Campos, all positioned further down pit lane, did not experience the same hurdle, so Minì, Crawford and Martí could jump ahead of Fornaroli.

The Italian driver was unable to regain the positions and was instead forced to defend fourth place from Alex Dunne. The Irishman moved down the inside at Turn 3 on lap nine and took the position, but he lost it after Fornaroli made one of his first notable mistakes of the season. The 2024 F3 champion misjudged his braking point at Turn 1 on lap 13, running into the back of Dunne and sending the Rodin Motorsport driver into the run-off area. 

Fornaroli did not pick up significant damage, but he received a 10-second penalty for the incident. He finished third on the road after later passing Martí, but the penalty relegated him to fifth, crucially costing him five points. 

Fornaroli still scored 14 points in Baku, and it was not a disastrous weekend. But against the backdrop of his four near-perfect victories in the four rounds before Baku, his weekend was a reminder that the championship is nowhere close to decided. 

2. Crawford reignites his title charge

Monza was a difficult round for Jak Crawford. He entered the weekend in second place, 17 points behind points leader Fornaroli, and left it in fourth, 37 points away from the Italian. He faced mechanical issues throughout the weekend and scored no points.

Crawford’s results were quite the opposite in Baku, and he has returned to second in the standings. 

He started the weekend strongly, finishing second in practice behind Dunne, before setting the benchmark in the first half of the qualifying session. On this occasion, Crawford’s luck was in. Victor Martins’ accident and then Roman Staněk’s crash into the side of John Bennett each brought out red flags late in the session, preventing any of Crawford’s rivals from usurping him. 

The American performed well in the sprint to finish fourth, taking five points. He lost out early in the feature race as Fornaroli and Minì passed him in the first two corners, but the DAMS driver re-passed Minì for second at the start of lap two. Crawforde stayed in that position after the pit stops, albeit with Minì now leading.

After the safety car restart, Crawford remained within DRS range of Minì, and he made his second pass of the day on the Alpine junior at the start of lap 10. Having returned to his starting position, Crawford looked set for victory for most of the second half of the race.

Dürksen’s late charge, however, presented a serious threat. The AIX driver gradually closed with the aid of DRS and had several looks at the lead but could not quite make the move, finishing 0.216s behind at the chequered flag. 

It was the closest finish to any F2 race since the late Anthoine Hubert beat Louis Delétraz by 0.059s in the Monaco sprint race of 2019. To Crawford, the two tenths were worth seven points, with which he has almost halved the deficit to the seemingly infallible Fornaroli. The gap between the two is now 19 points, with 78 points still on the table in the last two rounds.

3. Verschoor and Dunne slip from title contention

Richard Verschoor and Alex Dunne were two of the championship favourites in the first half of 2025. The pair have won two feature races each and have led the championship at different stages of the season, but with two rounds remaining, a title bid now seems unlikely for either. 

Despite their similar fates, both have travelled on different trajectories in recent rounds. Dunne has continued to show the immense raw speed that has fuelled his title bid, but the incidents that have derailed his challenge have been as dramatic as the pace that powered it in the first place.

The collision with Arvid Lindblad at Monza was not his fault, and he continued to show his strong pace by finishing third in the Baku sprint. Both of his most recent races, however, were affected by huge flat spots on his front tyres. 

In the sprint, huge vibrations after a Turn 1 lock-up on lap 15 limited his ability to challenge for the victory. The lock-ups continued affecting his performance in the feature race, beginning on lap nine, when he passed Fornaroli at Turn 3 on lap nine but struggled to slow the car down. After Fornaroli’s braking error sent him tumbling down the order, Dunne locked up again at Turn 15 on lap 24 and went down the escape road.

When Dunne returned to the corner on the following lap, he was unable to stop and retired from the race in the run-off area. The McLaren junior is now 58 points behind Fornaroli, effectively out of the title battle. 

Meanwhile, Verschoor endured a third consecutive weekend without a podium finish. He qualified 11th and made up places in both races to take seven points from the weekend, but it was not enough to keep pace with Crawford and Fornaroli at the top of the standings. He is 37 points away from Fornaroli and, like Dunne, is likely out of realistic contention for the title. 

1. Beganovic and Browning deliver Hitech a sprint 1-2 

Hitech’s season has been enigmatic. At times, they have been incredibly quick, but they have only won their first races in the last two weekends. Browning and Beganovic’s dual charge from outside the 12th and eighth on the grid to third and fourth respectively at the chequered flag in the wet Silverstone feature race was one of the most memorable performances of the season.

The team may have struggled to put together consistent performances in the first half of the campaign, but their recent form has put them within reach of the teams’ championship lead.

Baku was one of the team’s most impressive weekends to date. Their qualifying was unspectacular, with Browning fifth and Beganovic ninth, but it was difficult to read into individual drivers’ pace given the lack of opportunities for them to set lap times. In the sprint, Beganovic dominated, while Browning worked his way up the order to take second place. 

On Sunday, Beganovic moved from ninth on the grid to take third, rounding out by far his best weekend of the year. Browning endured a more difficult race, suffering from a poor start and then colliding with Roman Staněk after the safety car restart. Though he finished a lap down after pitting for repairs, his Saturday form showed that his and the team’s pace was strong. 

Hitech scored 34 points across the weekend, more than any other team. This, coupled with Invicta driver Staněk’s failure to score in either race, has helped second-placed Hitech close the gap in the teams’ championship to leaders Invicta to 12 points, setting up a nail-biting showdown in the last two rounds.

2. Stenshorne impresses even without points

Rumours abounded after Monza that Laurens van Hoepen and Martinius Stenshorne would join Trident in place of Sami Meguetounif and Max Esterson, and the team announced the pair of F3 graduates as their new drivers this week. Van Hoepen endured a tough weekend, but Stenshorne showed quality in every session.

The McLaren junior qualified seventh on Friday, putting him fourth on the reversed grid for the sprint. Stenshorne was involved in the first-corner crash with Martí and Rafael Villagómez. The stewards adjudged that the collision was a racing incident, and Stenshorne continued in third place before making an overtake on Sebastián Montoya at Turn 3 on lap seven to move into second. The very next lap, however, an exhaust issue forced him to retire from the race.

On Sunday, he looked set to repeat his heroics and had moved into fourth by the second lap. He was defending fourth place from Pepe Martí at Turn 1 when the pair made contact, sending Stenshorne into the barriers. Martí was later given a 10-second time penalty for the incident. 

Despite his misfortune across the weekend, Stenshorne put in one of Trident’s strongest displays of the season. The real test would have been negotiating tyre management and his first pit stop later in the feature race, but he performed well nonetheless as he gears up for an anticipated full campaign in 2026. 

Results and standings after round 12 at Baku

Results	P1	P2	P3
Qualifying	Jak Crawford, 1:54.791	Leonardo Fornaroli, +0.019s	Gabriele Minì +0.399s
Sprint race (21 laps)	Dino Beganovic, 48:46.810	Luke Browning, +6.281s	Alex Dunne, +7.309s
Feature race (29 laps)	Jak Crawford, 1:00.40.563	Joshua Dürksen, +0.216s	Dino Beganovic, +5.371s

Standings	Drivers	Teams
P1	Leonardo Fornaroli, 188	Invicta Racing, 269
P2	Jak Crawford, 169	Hitech, 257
P3	Luke Browning, 161	Campos Racing, 227
P4	Richard Verschoor, 149	DAMS, 195
P5	Alex Dunne, 130	MP Motorsport, 172
P6	Pepe Martí, 112	Rodin Motorsport, 133
P7	Arvid Lindblad, 109	Prema Racing, 132
P8	Dino Beganovic, 96	ART Grand Prix, 95
P9	Roman Staněk, 81	AIX Racing, 66
P10	Sebastián Montoya, 76	Van Amersfoort Racing, 28

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency