At the start of each Formula 2 season, there is great fanfare about the rookies who are anticipated to make a mark in their debut campaigns. After a difficult 2025, Noel León was perhaps overlooked in this conversation, but his start in Australia showed that he possesses the pace to fight at the front. The Campos Racing driver spoke to Feeder Series ahead of the second round of the season in Miami. 

By Martin Lloyd 

While the cancellation of the rounds in Sakhir and Jeddah resulted in significant disappointment – and many logistical challenges – for the F2 paddock, the series had the opportunity to expand its horizons into North America with replacement rounds in Miami and Montréal.

The Miami round in particular provides a boost for León, who hails from Monterrey in the north-eastern Mexican state of Nuevo León.

“Normally my family doesn’t come to races in Europe because they have a karting team in Mexico, so almost every weekend they have a race,” León told Feeder Series. “So it’s very difficult for them to come to Europe. But finally with this unexpected race, they were free! So finally they have the chance to go to Miami and Canada. So it will be good.”

León has a tough assignment for this F2 season, but he heads to Miami in good spirits after his Campos team enjoyed a strong opening round in Melbourne. Both cars qualified in the top five on Friday, and León’s teammate, fellow F2 rookie Nikola Tsolov, won the feature race on Sunday. These were positive signs, then, for an outfit hunting the teams’ championship that has eluded them for the past two seasons. The Valencia-based outfit finished second in 2024 – their best finish since 2008 – and third in 2025. 

While he may have been eclipsed by Tsolov, who finished second in F3 last season, León also enjoyed a positive showing at Albert Park. With a sprint race podium and fourth place in qualifying, beating out Tsolov by one place, León showed that he is not to be underestimated in view of his teammate’s debut victory.

“It was a very good sprint race, qualifying, free practice to be honest,” León said. “[It was] almost a perfect weekend – just the little incident that I had on lap one where I broke my front wing. [That] damaged the weekend a little bit because I couldn’t score points on the feature race.

“But to be honest, the pace was there. I feel very confident with the team that we are doing a great job.” 

Campos’ pace was immediately apparent on Friday, when León and Tsolov placed second and fourth respectively in practice before their impressive qualifying showing. In the reverse-grid sprint race, León took a comfortable second place, finishing 3.6 seconds ahead of Alex Dunne and 2.1s behind Invicta Racing’s runaway victor, Joshua Dürksen. Sunday was a different story, with León making contact with Oliver Goethe at Turn 4 and falling to the rear after changing his front wing during the pit stop cycle. Although León recovered to 14th place, the race represented a missed opportunity for him given Campos’ clear speed. 

“What happened in the feature race in Melbourne was that I got a bit upset that I got a bad start,” the 21-year-old explained. “I tried to recover what I lost on the start and on Turn 3 and ended up in a crash with damage from my front wing.”

“I learned from Melbourne to be patient,” he added. “I know I have the pace. I know I have the car to be at the front. So I just need to reset my mind a little bit because last year, it was like trying to gain as many places as possible where I can. So now I don’t need to risk 100 per cent every lap or every corner to gain a position.”

That reset for León is crucial in 2026. While he is aiming to race consistently at the front of the grid in 2026, he is still recovering from a bruising 2025 F3 season with Prema Racing. For his entire career up to that point, he had dreamt of a seat with the Italian team, who boast an impeccable pedigree in junior single-seaters and especially F3. But the operation’s struggles with the new-for-2025 F3 car and ongoing financial difficulties left them struggling to find their footing.

All this meant León was unable to improve on his 2024 placing of 10th with Van Amersfoort Racing. Finishing 17th in his sophomore campaign made for a bitter pill to swallow, therefore, after he had expected to compete for the championship at the start of the season.

“I don’t think I need to talk a lot, but Prema has been in a very difficult situation these couple of years. Unlucky me that I was dreaming to be in Prema all my life!” León said. “It’s a team that you’re looking forward to being in the junior categories. Looking at everybody, all the top drivers in Formula 1, they’ve been there and they’ve been doing great. So unlucky me that I have that chance to be there in the wrong year. So that was a very, very unlucky situation.

“I think at the end of the day, I [finished on] two podiums where, at the beginning of the season or mid-season, it was almost looking impossible to be on the podium. So I take all the positives.”

The adversity was unexpected. In 2024, Prema sailed to the teams’ title a round early and competed for the drivers’ title until the final race of the season with Gabriele Minì, while they had previously won three consecutive drivers’ championships from 2019 to 2021 and every teams’ championship bar one from 2019 to 2023. Yet in 2025, León finished on just 36 points, seven points behind the best-performing Prema driver – 16th-placed Ugo Ugochukwu –– and 43 off his own tally from a year before.

León told Feeder Series that at the start of the season, he had been in talks with F1 driver academies, but these negotiations fizzled out during his run of difficult results.

It’s a scenario León has experienced before. In 2022, his first year of European competition after clinching the F4 United States title in 2021, he joined the Red Bull Junior Team expecting much from his debut season in FRegional Europe. In the end, however, he only scored points twice and finished 23rd in the drivers’ standings, while Arden Motorsport teammates Dürksen and Eduardo Barrichello scored on five and seven occasions respectively. It was not a vintage season for Arden, but the performance gap was clear, and León was released by Red Bull.

“I didn’t know any tracks. I did two test days before my first season in Europe where I was competing with guys that already had two seasons in the same car, same team. The team also was struggling a little bit,” he said. “It was very difficult to be same pace as them [other drivers], knowing that also Formula Regional at that time, it was a lot of safety cars or red flags on free practice or qualifying. So almost every time before quali, I have four or five push [laps] on the track.

“It was very difficult to be on pace, but I think I learned a lot. I learned to adapt quickly myself to the situations, and this helped me in the future.”

León’s career has taken an oddly non-linear path to date. Some drivers fly through the ranks and others flatline, but León’s performance has fluctuated. After his disastrous FR Europe campaign in 2022, he won the Euroformula Open title in 2023. He was the clear team leader at Van Amersfoort in his debut F3 year, taking four podiums while his teammates scored 12 points between them, before 2025 brought on more hard times. 

A move to a different category always brings uncertainty, especially with upcoming visits to two circuits where no F2 driver has yet raced. For León and his fellow rookies, though, those new tracks in Miami and Montréal offer a more level playing field. Buoyed by the prospect of his first open-wheel race on his home continent in nearly five years, León has all the motivation he needs – and, as Melbourne suggested, the pace to match – as he seeks to right 2025’s wrongs.

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency