Newly minted McLaren junior Leonardo Fornaroli secured the Formula 2 championship as the series returned from its two-month break in Lusail this weekend. Victor Martins beat Fornaroli to the feature race win, while Richard Verschoor took his fourth win of the season in the sprint. Feeder Series reviews all the action from the penultimate round of 2025.

By Martin Lloyd

Qualifying was always going to be pivotal on a Lusail International Circuit that only has one real overtaking opportunity. Drivers must have a large pace difference over the car in front in order to pass, so Oliver Goethe had a crucial advantage by setting the fastest time in qualifying. He was later demoted three places to fourth after a penalty for impeding Martinius Stenshorne, handing Fornaroli pole position on a weekend that started with five drivers in mathematical championship contention. 

Once the racing action got underway, Verschoor took the sprint win from pole after initially being passed by Joshua Dürksen. In the feature race, Martins passed Fornaroli off the line and never looked back, but the Invicta Racing driver took second place and with it the drivers’ championship as his rivals failed to finish high enough to keep the title fight alive.

• Pre-weekend roundtable: F2’s Dürksen: ‘We have the package to still make some good results’
• Qualifying report and quotes: Fornaroli inherits crucial F2 pole as Goethe earns penalty and rivals falter
• Sprint race report and quotes: Verschoor vows to ‘fight until the end’ for F2 title after record-tying win
• Feature race report and quotes: Martins wins Qatar feature as Fornaroli seals back-to-back F3 and F2 titles

1. Fornaroli takes richly deserved championship 

Leonardo Fornaroli stepped up to F2 in 2025 from a title-winning campaign in F3 in 2024 and has barely put a foot wrong throughout his rookie season, qualifying in the top 10 at every single round. The only real blemishes on his championship card came in the Barcelona feature race and Spielberg sprint because of incidents outside of his control. 

At the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, a wheel nut on Fornaroli’s car came loose after a pit stop following an earlier 10-second stop-go penalty stemming from an Invicta team member’s staying on the starting grid for too long before the race. At the Red Bull Ring, he was involved in a multi-car pile-up on the last lap after Amaury Cordeel spun on the racing line. Incredibly, he has scored at least one point in every race outside of these two.

Fornaroli could have won the championship earlier had he translated his early-season point-scoring into more victories. When he finally won his first race in the Silverstone sprint – his first single-seater win in four years – he embarked on a run of four wins in four rounds and never looked back. The 20-year-old first took the championship lead after the Spa weekend in which he won the sprint, and never relinquished it thereafter. 

Mistakes and misfortune have been rare for Fornaroli. His biggest error was rear-ending Alex Dunne in Baku and earning a 10-second penalty. A mechanical failure in qualifying in Monza set him back, and he likely would have won the feature race in Monaco had race control not deployed the safety car at a moment that allowed Jak Crawford to pit and leapfrog several drivers.

But for most of the year, Fornaroli has been faultless and has made his own luck at the front. The Qatar weekend was exemplary of his season: strong if not dominant pace that provided him with a haul of 23 points. With 211 points, he has almost surpassed 2024 champion Gabriel Bortoleto’s total of 214.5 with a round remaining. Though his racing plans for 2026 have yet to be announced, Fornaroli was confirmed this morning to be joining the McLaren Driver Development Programme alongside Richard Verschoor, one of his 2025 title rivals.

2. A disastrous weekend for Fornaroli’s rivals

Four drivers began the Lusail weekend still within mathematical reach of Fornaroli. The closest, Crawford, was just 19 points behind, with Luke Browning, Richard Verschoor and Alex Dunne also in the mix. Unfortunately for the four challengers, qualifying went as well as Fornaroli could have hoped. He qualified second and later got promoted to first when original polesitter Oliver Goethe was penalised for impeding. Crawford and Browning were 15th and 18th respectively, while Verschoor was a lowly 10th even if this did position him to be reversed to sprint race pole. 

Dunne was in a more favourable fifth, but his 58-point deficit to Fornaroli made a late-stage title tilt very unlikely with 78 points on the table. In effect, Fornaroli simply had to stay out of trouble in both races and maintain his position to reach the magic 40-point advantage that would see him crowned champion. To stay at the front of an F2 feature race is no easy task, but without real pressure from behind, Fornaroli made it look simple. 

Losing the lead to Martins was no great loss to his championship cause when Crawford and Browning were both stranded outside the points on a track where overtaking is notoriously difficult. The only obstacle for Fornaroli was Verschoor, who could have kept the fight alive had he finished fifth or higher. The Dutchman, however, only managed sixth place, and with that, the title was Fornaroli’s. 

The early conclusion to the championship, on a track offering little scope for wheel-to-wheel drama, was a tad underwhelming given that each member of the quintet bar Crawford has led the championship at some point, Now the attention turns to Invicta, who could take a second consecutive double championship win next weekend in Abu Dhabi. They lead Hitech in the teams’ championship by 35 points, with 65 on the table across the weekend.

3. Martins finally hits the front – but is it too late?

Victor Martins’ feature race win was a long time coming. It seems scarcely believable that on Sunday, 875 days had passed since Martins’ maiden F2 win in the Silverstone feature race of 2023. That was part of Martins’ mid-season run of five podiums in four rounds, and it seemed at the time that another win – or even a rookie-season title challenge – could be just around the corner. But since the end of that 2023 season, when Martins finished fifth as part of the ART squad that became teams’ champions, the Frenchman has endured a torrid time. 

It was always evident that Martins’ pace hadn’t mysteriously disappeared. He was regularly close to the top of qualifying sessions throughout his dry period, but a combination of extraordinary misfortune and ART’s struggles in race settings had limited him to a handful of podiums across the last two seasons. 

On Sunday, he finally took the win that he had awaited for so long. Lining up second for his sixth feature race front-row start of 2025, Martins quickly took the lead from a slow-starting Fornaroli. He never seemed in real danger of losing first place and handled the mid-race safety car restart impeccably, leading Fornaroli home by 1.265 seconds.

The ease with which Martins took victory in Lusail inevitably makes one wonder what could have been. What if he hadn’t stalled from third on the grid at Imola? What if he hadn’t been taken out by Alex Dunne in Monaco after snatching the lead? What if the Melbourne feature race, which he was due to start from pole, wasn’t cancelled? Perhaps ART lacked the pace for a championship challenge, but ninth place in the drivers’ standings is surely unrepresentative of Martins’ speed in 2025. 

Martins has missed out on a Formula One drive, despite his move to the Williams Racing Driver Academy at the start of the season, and has now switched his focus to alternative career options, including the stateside racing scene. The 24-year-old has participated in multiple Indy NXT tests as he looks for a seat in 2026. 

4. Dunne begins 2026 preparations with a podium

Alex Dunne has endured a turbulent few months since F2’s summer break. At Monza in early September, he was handed a 10-second penalty for forcing Kush Maini off the track in the sprint before being rear-ended and forced out of the race after a collision with Lindblad in the feature. He rebounded with third in the Baku sprint but retired from the feature after locking up multiple times entering Turn 15 while running well down the order, effectively ending his title bid. 

Between the Baku and Lusail rounds, Dunne parted ways with McLaren, having been part of their driver development programme since May 2024. At the time, Dunne said he had ‘mutually decided’ to split with the team. He added in the post-race press conference on Sunday that he ‘needed to make’ the decision, having realised that their current lineup of Lando Norris or Oscar Piastri stood little chance of leaving the 2025 constructors’ champions in the near future. Rumours abounded of a move to Red Bull’s academy or even the Racing Bulls F1 team, but neither has yet materialised.

In any case, having left McLaren, the Rodin Motorsport driver seemed to have a point to prove. He has shown two key characteristics during his debut F2 season: intense speed, with perhaps the fastest raw pace on the grid, and a propensity for incidents. Without that second factor, he could have challenged Fornaroli much more closely, with the opening-lap Monaco incident and his string of collisions in the Sakhir sprint two glaring examples of rash decision-making. 

However, Dunne is likely to stay in F2 with Rodin in 2026 for a full-fledged championship challenge. The preparations for that began at Lusail, and the Irishman passed the test with flying colours. Fifth place in the sprint race and third in the feature – despite a five-second penalty for an unsafe release – represented his best single-round points haul since the sixth round of the season at Barcelona.

While the title is now out of reach for Dunne, his performance last weekend lifted him to only 21 points behind Crawford and Verschoor – a deficit he could close or overturn entirely with a strong end to the season in Abu Dhabi.

Results and standings after round 13 at Lusail

Results	P1	P2	P3
Qualifying	Oliver Goethe, 1:36.115	Leonardo Fornaroli, +0.040	Victor Martins, +0.170
Sprint race (23 laps)	Richard Verschoor, 42:36.481	Joshua Dürksen, +0.970	Rafael Villagómez, +1.607
Feature race (32 laps)	Victor Martins, 55:18.455	Leonardo Fornaroli, +1.265	Alex Dunne, +7.439

Standings	Drivers	Teams
P1	Leonardo Fornaroli, 211	Invicta Racing, 296
P2	Jak Crawford, 170	Hitech, 261
P3	Richard Verschoor, 170	Campos Racing, 239
P4	Luke Browning, 162	DAMS, 196
P5	Alex Dunne, 149	MP Motorsport, 193
P6	Arvid Lindblad, 121	Rodin Motorsport, 154
P7	Pepe Martí, 112	Prema Racing, 148
P8	Dino Beganovic, 99	ART Grand Prix, 121
P9	Victor Martins, 95	AIX Racing, 74
P10	Sebastián Montoya, 91	Van Amersfoort Racing, 36

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency