Formula 2 kicked off its 2026 season at Albert Park this weekend. Dino Beganovic took pole on Friday before Joshua Dürksen claimed Saturday’s sprint victory and Nikola Tsolov won the feature race on Sunday. Feeder Series analyses five things we learned from the first round of the season.

By Martin Lloyd

In a drama-filled race weekend, it was Dürksen and Tsolov who rose through the chaos to claim spots on the top step of the podium. Tsolov was among 11 drivers competing in their first full-time F2 season, with eight fellow F3 graduates, longtime professional racers Colton Herta and Nicolás Varrone, and former Eurocup-3 driver Emmo Fittipaldi Jr making their full-season debuts this weekend. 

• Qualifying report and quotes: Beganovic clinches first F2 pole of 2026 for DAMS
• Sprint race report and quotes: Dürksen takes back-to-back wins in Melbourne as León secures podium on F2 debut
• Feature race report and quotes: Tsolov withstands collisions, restarts for maiden F2 win in Melbourne

1. Tsolov and Câmara continue F3 form to lead F2 field

Rafael Câmara was undoubtedly the class of the F3 field in 2025, taking the title by an astonishing 42 points. His closest – if distant – rival was Campos Racing’s Nikola Tsolov. On Sunday at Albert Park, their positions in the standings were reversed, with Tsolov taking his maiden F2 win ahead of Câmara. The pair were ideally positioned in third and fourth before the two Rodin Motorsport cars crashed out of the top two positions, and they maturely converted their inherited positions into good points scores to start the season.

For Tsolov, the victory was well-deserved. Though a tangle involving two frontrunners early on helped him, he still had much to do in the rest of the race. The Red Bull junior driver pitted at the end of lap nine before he made the crucial move on Varrone – the lead driver on the alternate strategy –  on lap 22. Varrone had pitted under safety car conditions after Dino Beganovic’s retirement, meaning that the move was for real track position even if he was attempting a near-impossible task of nursing his supersoft tyres for the last 12 laps of the race. 

Critically, Câmara only made the move on Varrone on lap 27, giving Tsolov time to build a three-second gap. Tsolov’s win has given Campos a very early lead in the teams’ championship over the pre-eminent Invicta team, but Câmara’s second-place finish should strike fear into the hearts of Tsolov and other potential title rivals. Even when he did not have the pace to win, he navigated a difficult race to finish second and start the season with a bang. 

2. Dunne’s driving again imperils him – and his team

Alex Dunne was undoubtedly one of the pre-season favourites for the F2 title. The Irishman, now bearing the pink colours of the Alpine Academy in place of his former McLaren papaya, was consistently one of the fastest drivers in the series last season. Dunne’s biggest rival was more often than not his own racecraft, with a succession of often avoidable incidents ending his title hopes. If only he could put an end to those incidents, he could very plausibly become a runaway title leader. If only. 

Dunne’s collision with teammate Martinius Stenshorne was at best completely unnecessary and at worst dangerous. The two Rodin drivers battled towards the end of lap two and continued their duel on the start-finish straight at the start of lap three. With Dunne on the outside line and edging ahead approaching the Turn 1-2 chicane, he cut across to the inside to remove his teammate’s route to the lead of the race. Devastatingly for the Surrey-based squad, the pair made contact, with both receiving race-ending damage as a result. The collision deprived Stenshorne of the best result of his fledgling, four-round F2 career. 

Dunne is perhaps out of practice in working with a competitive teammate, with Amaury Cordeel failing to match his pace last season. Still, the rules of engagement in F2 meant Dunne should have afforded Stenshorne much more space. The crash also cost Rodin the chance of having an extremely positive start to the season, with a maximum haul of 43 points for first and second places eminently possible. This is especially painful given that unlike last season, this season, the team has a realistic chance of competing for the teams’ title.

Rodin’s pain was felt particularly given how early in the season – never mind the race – the collision occurred. While Dunne’s desire to remain ahead was understandable, his aggression in defence – seen previously in collisions with Victor Martins at Monaco and Gabriele Minì at Silverstone – could threaten to derail another F2 title campaign. He has also been penalised with a five-place grid drop for the next feature race, further worsening the consequences of his move.

Dunne could still very feasibly win the title. But the next two scheduled rounds in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia may be in jeopardy with the intensification of conflict in the  Middle East at the end of February, thus increasing the relative importance of every other round should they not be replaced. To throw away points so carelessly in one feature race was, therefore, a disastrous outcome. 

3. Trident return to the rostrum through Van Hoepen

For both Laurens van Hoepen and Trident’s F2 team, 2025 was disappointing. The Dutchman only improved on his 2024 F3 standing by one place, finishing 12th overall with ART Grand Prix, while Trident endured their worst ever second-tier season since they entered GP2 in 2006. But both had a weekend to remember at Albert Park. 

Van Hoepen laid the foundations of a strong performance on Friday, qualifying 11th – just two hundredths of a second from 10th and sprint race pole. Still, he had achieved a starting position that offered a realistic opportunity of points in both races, an opportunity that he took with aplomb. He finished seventh in the sprint race, scoring two points and equalling Trident’s entire points haul from 2025. While that statistic largely reflects the dire nature of the Italian team’s prior season, it was still an impressive achievement.

One could posit that, if Trident were offered seventh in the sprint, they would have been happy with the weekend’s outcome. But they and Van Hoepen did not stop there. The fast-starting 20-year-old gained four places on lap one in the feature race, passing Dürksen and Inthraphuvasak off the line as well and Kush Maini and León later in the lap. When the Rodins came to blows two laps later, he was up to fifth.

At that point, Oliver Goethe was fourth, and he and Van Hoepen both pitted on lap nine. But quick work from the Trident team helped Van Hoepen to emerge ahead. He and Beganovic traded places as Van Hoepen got his tyres up to temperature, but when Beganovic retired on lap 16, Van Hoepen moved up to a net third position – a position that he would not relinquish.

The driver and team’s performances all weekend hinted at a much-improved outfit. Van Hoepen competed in the last three rounds of 2025 with the team, attaining a best finish of 14th, but this was a completely different story. Trident found a competitive car setup on Friday, and Van Hoepen put a good lap together. Then, Van Hoepen posted stellar performances on Saturday and Sunday, while the Trident pit crew helped to land the decisive blow to Van Hoepen’s immediate rivals and put him on the rostrum. 

The podium was the team’s first since the 2024 Baku round, when Richard Verschoor won his last race for the team. If his fellow Dutchman Van Hoepen can perform similarly for the remainder of the season, scoring regularly with podiums scattered in, Trident will be on track for a much more respectable season than their 2025. 

4. Dürksen takes Melbourne sprint glory again

Joshua Dürksen is making quite the habit out of winning sprint races at Melbourne. Following his 2025 triumph with AIX, he flew to Melbourne with much greater expectations of results with his new Invicta team.

The Paraguayan controlled the race supremely and never looked under great threat once he had passed Tasanapol Inthraphuvasak for the lead on lap two. The 10 points he scored will be greatly welcome to a driver who, with Mercedes backing and an Invicta package, is expected to contend regularly at the sharp end of the grid.

He will take heart from his sprint showing but will also know that feature race results will be much more important. While he took one point from Sunday’s race through his 10th-place finish, Dürksen would have wanted more from his ninth-place grid slot, especially given his sprint form. Things unravelled at the start, however, when his engine entered anti-stall, dropping him to 16th. His recovery means that he will leave Melbourne with 11 points – a solid if unspectacular haul from the first round of the season. 

5. Hitech quietly impressive with new lineup

Hitech have assembled an all-star lineup of drivers who have achieved much in their previous professional careers. Ritomo Miyata is the 2023 champion of both Super Formula and Super GT; Colton Herta has 116 IndyCar starts and nine wins. But there are question marks over where the team’s level of performance will be – at least for the early part of this season. 

Miyata’s performances in his two F2 seasons to date have been below expectations, as he finished 19th and 17th in 2024 and 2025 respectively. At Melbourne, though, he finished both races in fifth, already matching his results from the best round of his 2024 season.

The one blemish on Miyata’s Melbourne record was qualifying: his 13th-place grid spot for both races meant that his potential performance was limited. But his ability to come through the field has rarely been seen in his F2 career to date, and the Japanese driver will take solace from an improved performance. 

On the other side of the garage, Herta could have expected a period of adjustment as he gets to grips with the Dallara 2024 F2 car following seven years in IndyCar. He started on Friday with a crash in practice and qualified 14th. His sprint race was similarly disappointing; under safety car conditions, he pitted from 13th for new supersoft tyres but couldn’t use them to his advantage and finished 16th.

Seventh in the feature race, however, was a solid return for the 25-year-old. The 20 points from the weekend place Hitech third in the teams’ championship, a solid start for a season in which they will hope to contend in the teams’ championship with F2’s most unexpected line-up. 

Results and standings after round 1 at Albert Park

Results	P1	P2	P3
Qualifying	Dino Beganovic, 1:28.695	Martinius Stenshorne, +0.216s	Alex Dunne, +0.344s
Sprint race (23 laps)	Joshua Dürksen, 39:09.726	Noel León, +2.139s	Alex Dunne, +5.746s
Feature race (33 laps)	Nikola Tsolov, 56:05.248	Rafael Câmara, +1.669s	Laurens van Hoepen, +3.517s

Standings	Drivers	Teams
P1	Nikola Tsolov, 25	Campos Racing, 33
P2	Rafael Câmara, 18	Invicta Racing, 29
P3	Laurens van Hoepen, 18	Hitech, 20
P4	Ritomo Miyata, 14	MP Motorsport, 19
P5	Tasanapol Inthraphuvasak, 13	Trident, 18
P6	Oliver Goethe, 12	ART Grand Prix, 13
P7	Joshua Dürksen, 11	Rodin Motorsport, 7
P8	Noel León, 8	DAMS, 3
P9	Gabriele Minì, 7	Prema Racing, 2
P10	Colton Herta, 6	Van Amersfoort Racing, 0

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency