In July 2025, AIX Racing made an unseasonably early driver announcement. The German-Emirati team revealed that Emerson Fittipaldi Jr would be their first Formula 2 driver for 2026, stepping up from his 2025 campaign in Eurocup-3 with MP Motorsport. Feeder Series spoke with the Brazilian driver at the Eurocup-3 season finale in Barcelona to find out why he elected to make the unorthodox jump to F2. 

By Seb Tirado

The 18-year-old, who was the first driver to be announced for this year’s grid, is the fifth driver in F2 history to make the direct leap from an FRegional–spec series and the second to do so with AIX after Joshua Dürksen made the leap in 2024. Fittipaldi had previously participated in F3 post-season testing in 2022 with AIX predecessors Charouz Racing System and in 2023 with MP before embarking on his maiden full-time campaign in Eurocup-3 with the Dutch outfit in 2024.

“I never thought of skipping F3, but when the opportunity came, we had to take the decision,” Fittipaldi said. “We were not going to say no to an F2 team, and we can see the performance they’re having these last couple of races has been pretty strong.”

By season’s end, AIX had taken a total of eight podiums with Dürksen, including victories in the first and last races of the season. The team finished ninth in the teams’ standings whilst Dürksen finished ninth in the drivers’. 

“This just puts more confidence in myself in the decision we took to go with them, because now it’s really paying off exactly what I expected them to do,” Fittipaldi continued. “And we’ll see next year because we have a good car, a good team. The team is really excited to work with me and I’m really excited to work with them.

“We start from the beginning, and it’s always going to be difficult. It’s always going to be a challenge. But I’d rather take the challenge than do something easy.”

Fittipaldi moves to F2 after two years in Eurocup-3 with MP. In 2024, he finished fifth in the championship with four podiums, while in the three-round 2025 winter series, he finished sixth with a tally of two. This should have provided a strong platform for success in the main season, but Fittipaldi could only manage 11th in the standings with a best finish of third in the Le Castellet sprint race. 

“This year has been really difficult for me,” he said. “All the races we’ve been doing, from the beginning [of] the season to the middle of the season, we’ve been struggling so much, a lot more than I expected. And then from Spa onwards, we managed to find and fix a lot of things with the car and just organise ourselves a bit better.”

After finishing down in 23rd in race one at Spa, Fittipaldi started on pole position for race two, his first since Barcelona the previous year. After an aborted start and an extra formation lap due to a malfunction with the start gantry, he stalled on the start line and fell to 22nd on the opening lap, eventually recovering to finish 10th. The pace was more encouraging, but Fittipaldi was still unable to find consistent results.

Despite this disappointment and other low points during the season, the Brazilian driver still looked back on 2025 in a positive light.

“Racing is difficult, and we’re here to learn and learn from some of the mistakes [we’ve] made and some of the mistakes that happen in racing,” he said. “It’s not the best season ever, but I’ll take the positives out of it, and I learned a lot this year.”

Fittipaldi had his first taste of an F2 car at Monza early last November, where he tested a Dallara F2 2018 chassis with MM International Motorsport alongside fellow F2 rookie and second-generation racer Colton Herta.

“It was just getting used to everything and focusing a lot on the procedures because it changes a lot from Eurocup to Formula 2,” he said. “It’s not the same tyres, procedures, [number of] testing sessions. You only get one [practice] session, then straight to qualifying on the same day. So we’re just doing what we need to prepare. It was positive and I enjoyed driving the car.”

Header photo credit: Eurocup-3