Pepe Martí’s sophomore Formula 2 season has brought mixed results. The Spaniard has three sprint race wins to his name but is missing the feature race win that could have kickstarted a championship challenge. Feeder Series caught up with the Campos Racing driver earlier this month about his campaign to date. 

By Martin Lloyd

On the surface, Martí has enjoyed a much more successful season than his debut year. After 12 rounds last year, he had 43 points and no wins; after 12 events in 2025, he has 112 points and three wins.

But this does not tell the whole story. Martí wanted to compete for the title in 2025, following in the footsteps of former Campos teammate Isack Hadjar, who experienced a difficult debut season before a title-contending second year. With two rounds remaining, however, he is sixth in the drivers’ standings, 76 points behind championship leader Leonardo Fornaroli with 78 points still on offer. 

Inconsistency has been the key factor hamstringing his title charge. Martí achieved top-five finishes in four of the first five races of 2025 before beginning a five-race non-scoring streak. He buried that record with sixth place in the Barcelona feature race before winning the Spielberg sprint on his next outing four weeks later. 

It has been a confusing season from an outsider’s perspective, but Martí feels he has found what’s stopped him from being a consistent feature race frontrunner.

“It’s quite straightforward,” Martí said. “The main limiting factor is still having a best personal qualifying [result] of sixth. That’s been holding us up quite a bit. I think we have very good pace and a very good car. There’s weekends where you haven’t been the quickest as a team but there’s weekends where we’ve been very competitive, one of those being in Barcelona.”

At his home round, Martí watched as his Campos teammate Arvid Lindblad dominated the weekend and took his maiden feature race win. Lindblad took pole by 0.245 seconds, but Martí could only qualify 11th, restricting him to sixth on Sunday. 

“I still feel I should’ve been the one on the top step of the podium, but unfortunately on Friday I just didn’t feel comfortable enough and it has a repercussion on the weekend,” the Spaniard added. “There’s been some costly mistakes and qualifying is the way to improve.” 

Another strong Barcelona weekend after his feature race win there in F3 two years ago would have been the perfect way to kickstart his season, but Martí instead left the round frustrated. In some ways, it encapsulated his season. 

He made up five places in the first minute of the race but did not make progress beyond there. That performance reflects his overall weekend form; he has regularly found sprint race speed but has not translated that pace into regular strong feature race finishes.

He took his first feature race podium of the year at Monza, avoiding the race-ruining incidents and issues that plagued several of his rivals. Nevertheless, Martí had hoped to score more consistently on Sundays to give him a better chance of landing an F1 spot for 2026.

“Obviously [it’s] not what I wanted,” he admitted. “We’ve had a lot of really good races, we’ve won three races, so in that sense [I’m] quite happy. But from an honest point of view, we’re sixth in the championship, which is not what we wanted at the beginning of the season. It’s obviously a massive step forward from 2024, but 2024 was very underwhelming so it’s not a great comparison.”

As a rookie in 2024, Martí finished on the podium four times, taking his first win in the sprint at Yas Marina. But he spent most of his season battling for positions outside of the top 10, resulting in a 14th-place finish in the drivers’ standings while Campos teammate Isack Hadjar fought for the title. The Frenchman showed that the Campos car was capable of fighting for both the drivers’ and teams’ championships. 

Campos had never finished in the top three of the teams’ standings in F2 before finishing second last season, and they snapped a similar run in modern F3 with their 2025 teams’ title. They remain at the sharp end in F2 this season, 48 points behind leaders Invicta Racing after 12 rounds.

Having been part of Campos since his single-seater debut in Spanish F4 in 2021, Martí has witnessed the team’s transformation first-hand. In choosing to stay with them for his second F3 season in 2023 despite a torrid rookie year in 2022, Martí provided valuable continuity and experience to the team. Those factors contributed to their most successful F3 season until then, one he finished in fifth overall with three total wins.

“They had a repeat driver in the car which was something that they very often didn’t have,” Martí explained. “That has a big effect because you know the tracks, you know the car, you know how the car feels, you know how you want the car to feel. In that sense, me staying for a second year in F3 really helped the team. We were able to perform really well, win races and be ultra-competitive. To me, that was something that for sure helped the team. 

“From an organisation perspective, they’re a great structure. They always have been. Me doing a good job in F3 almost granted the opportunity for them to have really good drivers last year and this year, but obviously it’s not just down to me. It’s not like I’ve changed the world of Campos,” he added. “Adri [Campos Jr] has done an amazing job since his father’s passing, and I think the whole structure is really doing good at this point.”

Campos Jr took over the team when his father and the founder of the team, Adrián Campos Sr, died in January 2021. In recent years, the team has developed a close relationship with the Red Bull Junior Team. Out of their five F2 and F3 drivers in 2025, three – including Martí and Lindblad – are affiliated with the Austrian energy drinks company’s racing division. 

“We can travel to the Red Bull simulator, do some work there and prepare for the weekends, [test out] setup-wise what we want to try, what we want to think, et cetera,” Martí explained. “Nonetheless, both teams are still separate organisations. One thrives off the other, and it’s still a really good help for Campos. They’ve done a really good job and adapted well to the situation.”

While Martí is one place and three points ahead of his British teammate in the standings, it is the 18-year-old Lindblad who has been heavily linked to an F1 seat with Racing Bulls in his debut F2 season. There is an intense focus on Lindblad, but Martí does not feel that that affects him.

“In the end, I’m competing for my own future as well,” he said. “We’re fighting for the same car, in the same car, and obviously I want to have the upper hand and I want to be the quicker driver of the two. As each driver often says, I feel that I could be the best, and I think I could do a very good job no matter where I go. It’s not something to me that depends on other drivers.”

Martí himself is not short of F1 links. While he only joined the Red Bull Junior Team in the summer of 2023, the 20-year-old joined Fernando Alonso’s A14 Management company a year earlier. Others in the A14 management stable include 2024 F2 champion Bortoleto and fellow Red Bull junior driver Nikola Tsolov, who will move up to Campos next year.

While Martí still holds ambitions of a move to single-seaters’ top table, he recognises that doing so would require a better championship position in his second season. 

“At the beginning of the season and now, the hope is for an F1 seat, but being sixth in the championship is not what you want. In motorsport, what matters is the same thing, which is results,” he said.

“Qualifying and feature race wins is something that I have on the back of my mind all the time, and it’s something that I want to achieve before the rest of this season. I’m focused on the present and the current day and age, and we’ll see what the future holds.”

Additional reporting by Michael McClure

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency