Joshua Dürksen has surpassed expectations since making the ambitious jump from Formula Regional to F2 at the start of 2024, and now he has secured a move to the reigning champions for his third season in the series. Feeder Series caught up with Dürksen to discuss his career to date. 

By Martin Lloyd

Joshua Dürksen has not followed a conventional path in his racing journey. 

The Paraguayan started karting much later than most of his counterparts in a country with little motorsport heritage. Then, at a time when the FIA ladder has encouraged stepwise movement, he skipped F3 entirely to jump straight into F2 machinery.

Since he moved to the series with AIX Racing in 2024, Dürksen has achieved two wins and five other podiums. In 2023, the team had failed to score a single point, yet Dürksen played a role in elevating them from 11th in the teams’ standings to ninth.

In 2025, his role has grown further, as he has scored every one of AIX’s 66 points to date. Now, 2024 double champions and current championship leaders Invicta Racing have taken him on for a ‘golden opportunity’ to challenge for the title in 2026.

“It’s an incredible opportunity to be racing with the championship-leading team and just great people,” Dürksen told Feeder Series. “For sure they have a great car because they have shown it these last two years minimum that they are always quick in every track they go.

“And [it’s] just an amazing opportunity for myself, to be honest. I think it’s the biggest opportunity for me to shine in Formula 2 and also to knock some doors in F1, you know, to maybe have some chances in F1. For that, it’s also always great to then be on the top team. [I’m] extremely happy to start collaborating with them.”

Dürksen will now have the chance to compete for a team that has scored points in 48 of the 51 races since the start of 2024, with consistency the backbone of their frontrunning performances. By contrast, AIX, formerly PHM Racing, have scored in 20 of their last 51 starts, 17 of those with Dürksen.

Despite his clear upward trajectory in his move to Invicta, Dürksen said he was sad to be leaving AIX.

“We have spent so much time together on so many lows, also on so many highs,” he said. “When I joined the team, of course, the team didn’t have their best season – they were having quite tough times. And last year, when we started to work together, somehow everything was coming together and we were starting to have great results, of course.

“Both of us were underdogs and I think we surprised the paddocks. I think this made us also even connect a lot more, so for sure, it’s going to hurt because I feel like they’re family for me. It’s really amazing, the connection we have, the relationships we have.

“When I told them that I would move to Invicta, they had a completely different reaction than what I thought they would have. I thought, ‘Okay, they’re going to be a bit sad because I’m leaving.’ But they were actually really happy for me. They were like, ‘Wow, man, congrats, you deserve this, it’s an amazing opportunity, I’m so happy for you.’ I was completely shocked. I was like, ‘Wow’, and I think that’s where we saw how connected we are, and how we’re just happy for the other, you know, if the other has an amazing opportunity and uses it.

“I’m also always happy when the mechanics or the engineers maybe get another opportunity that arises. It has been just amazing. So for sure, it will not be easy to leave AIX because, yes, they gave me the opportunity to be racing in Formula 2. This opportunity with Invicta is also thanks to them because they gave me this chance.”

Dürksen has surprised doubters with his F2 performances, which is perhaps symbolic of his career to date. He started watching F1 in the early 2010s and began karting soon after, but he was already 11 by that point. As Dürksen himself recognises, most of his current competitors started karting much earlier than that. 

That means that he has effectively been playing catch-up throughout his racing career. 

“I did only three years of go-karting and 90 per cent of these races were local, so I was just doing the national championship,” he explained. “Internationally, I have done only maybe three go-kart races. So it’s nothing. And from there, jumping to Formula 4, was a massive step, big step. And I knew that I had this, let’s say, disadvantage of not having the track time and the experience that the others have with international races and high-level competition. 

“So I gave my best to recover this as quickly as possible, to learn as quickly as possible and as much as possible because I knew that the talent is really high. So I needed to be on my game as well. I was doing my maximum effort, and nowadays, I think I’m quite there on the same level as [those who started karting earlier].” 

When he left Paraguay to pursue a racing career, Dürksen had to adjust quickly. His first car championship was F4 UAE in 2019, in which he finished second out of nine full-time competitors with Mücke Motorsport. A tougher test awaited in the European season, when Dürksen competed in Italian F4 with Mücke and finished eighth. He combined this with a season in ADAC F4 in which he finished 11th.

For Dürksen, the differences between Europe and South America were just as big off the track as on it. 

“I had to move to Europe, be alone and surround myself with people around 35 years old, 40 years old. As a 15-year-old kid, it’s quite a big jump,” he said.

“It took me a bit of adaptation to manage the first year. It was quite tough because I was entering the real motorsport world. And what I’m not used to is that, in the motorsport world, people are straight. They tell you what they think. They tell you straight away what their opinion is. In Paraguay, it’s different.

“In Paraguay, we’re all very friendly, very kind. We don’t like to say this stuff straight away. We try to make it a bit softer. And this was something big for me. And then I always thought that people are just angry at me all the time, you know, ‘What’s going on?!’ But with time, I understood it’s just the way they work.”

For South American racers who move to the European scene as teenagers, the cultural differences only add to the difficulties of moving thousands of miles away from home and families. It was a big adjustment for Dürksen, who was 15 when he left Paraguay. But as he settled into living in Germany, the home of his ancestors, the culture became a positive influence.

“Now I understand that,” Dürksen added. “It’s okay. And actually, I like it now because I need that feedback to be able to improve. But in the first year, it was totally different for me. So it took a lot of adaptation just to change my everyday life [from] being with friends and family to being alone and training and just focusing on racing.” 

Dürksen also faced difficulties on track. He continued in Italian F4 and ADAC F4 in 2020 and 2021, finishing sixth in the German series his first year and occupying the same position in Italian F4 the following year. That result preceded a step up to FR Europe with Arden in 2022. 

In his first season in the series commonly called FRECA, Dürksen finished 14th, finishing 11 points behind one teammate, Eduardo Barrichello, and 37 ahead of the other, Noel Léon. Dürksen had hoped to build upon that foundation when he returned to the series with Arden in 2023, but he suffered his most difficult season to date, finishing 19th in the standings with just 26 points and a sole podium in race two at Spa.

He credits the experience with building his character ahead of a surprise step up to F2. 

“FRECA was the toughest time of my whole career,” Dürksen said. “It was not easy at all. I was at some points extremely lost, no motivation. I was like, ‘Why am I doing this?’ If I’m just being in the back, I’m doing everything, I don’t know what else I can do. I was doubting myself. I was like, ‘Am I really not driving well?’” 

“Many people won’t understand this, but after everything I have gone through, I understand it perfectly. But basically, these two tough seasons in FRECA made me ready for Formula 2. If I wouldn’t have these two tough seasons, I’m quite sure I would not be as ready as I am right now to be racing Formula 2. So actually, of course, the results are not great. For me, they are horrible. But the difficult moments have made me grow so much.”

Dürksen’s rise to the series directly below F1 also means that he has become incredibly popular in his home country. There are positive and negative impacts of the fame, the Asunción native told Feeder Series, but above all, he knows how valuable mementos are for his fans. 

“Even with the tough FRECA season, I was slowly getting recognised through Paraguay, but the big boom was when I announced that I’m going to Formula 2. This was a game changer,” he said. “Nowadays, every time I go to a public space, somebody recognises me, somebody asks me for pictures. It’s very cool. It’s very interesting because the popularity has grown a lot.

“I’m slowly starting to get used to it. It’s really great because it just reminds me every single day, every time somebody asks me for a picture, ‘Wow, the support is there. They’re a fan of what I’m doing,’ and it’s just a privilege. 

“Sometimes maybe it’s a bit too much. Sometimes you want just to relax and to not be in public. But at some other points, I’m like, man, I should see it as something positive because they’re supporting, they’re happy for me. I try to see the good thing of this as well and of course give everybody the opportunity then to also have a picture because if I see somebody that I admire, I would go crazy. I also would like to have a picture. Then I would try to think of the little me in the past and I’m like, ‘Man, I would die for a picture.’”

As the country’s first prominent single-seater racer and one of its leading athletes, he often shows his patriotism whenever he achieves a strong result by bringing the horizontal tricolour of the national flag onto the podium. 

“It’s just part of my personality,” he says of his celebrations. “To be honest, it’s also a question that I don’t understand about the other guys. I don’t know what’s the reason behind it, but I’m like, guys, we’re racing Formula 2. We’re one step away from Formula 1. We don’t know how long we’re going to race here. If we live tomorrow, if we will have another podium, if we will stop racing. I mean, I don’t know.”

He brought out the red, white and blue of Paraguay in both races at Monza in September, finishing second in Saturday’s sprint and third in Sunday’s feature race for his best F2 weekend of the season so far. Dürksen said he was surprised that drivers don’t celebrate podiums more vigorously. 

“I want to enjoy this moment. It’s special, it’s unique, it’s not coming back. What’s the point of not being happy of a podium or being, ‘Oh, I’m P2’? A lot of other drivers would love to be P2 in this race right now. So I don’t know if it’s something with the ego, saying ‘I only want to win’, I’m not sure, but it’s always a question I have. In my opinion… we have to be very grateful because we have the privilege of racing. Many even dream about racing at least go-karting.

“I think that we’re racing Formula 2, we’re travelling, we know so many countries, know so many cultures, so many stuff. It’s unique. You have to enjoy this because you’re not guaranteed that you’ll live tomorrow. You’re not guaranteed that you will experience this again.”

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency