Ten years ago today, the GP2 Series began its 12th and final season as Formula 1’s premier junior series before being rebranded as the FIA Formula 2 Championship for 2017. A decade on, Feeder Series takes a look at what happened to the 26 drivers who competed during the 2016 season.

By H. M. Gillard

Created in 2004, the GP2 Series held its first races in 2005 as a replacement for the F3000 International Championship. In its 12-year run, the series established itself as the preeminent launchpad globally for future F1 drivers, with 35 of the championship’s competitors making their way up to the premier category.

The series’ 2016 season finale at Abu Dhabi proved to be the final event held under the GP2 moniker. In March 2017, the FIA World Motor Sport Council approved an immediate rebranding of GP2 to F2, now run under FIA jurisdiction. The 2017 original calendar remained in place, all entered teams and drivers continued to compete, and the majority of the championship’s operational personnel kept their roles through the transition. 

In the years since, F2’s grid has gone through multiple generations of drivers, and the championship has introduced two new cars, the Dallara F2 2018 and the current Dallara F2 2024. The format has also changed several times, with the now-familiar structure of a sprint race on Saturday and a feature race on Sunday being the other way around back in the day. In 2016 and every GP2 season before, qualifying on Friday only set the grid for the feature race on Saturday, with the top eight reversed for the sprint race on Sunday.

Multiple teams have also changed hands: Arden International’s entry was subsumed by HWA AG, who were in turn replaced by Van Amersfoort Racing in 2022, while Russian Time returned to being Virtuosi Racing, who were bought out by Invicta Racing in the winter of 2025. Carlin, who left after 2016 but returned in 2018, are now known as Rodin Motorsport following a change in ownership in 2024. Racing Engineering and Rapax both left the series after 2017.

Twenty-two seats were on offer in F2 in 2016, with 17 of them filled by competitors who ran the full season. As such, four drivers entered two rounds or fewer. All drivers’ 2016 finishing positions and points tallies are noted in parentheses after their names.

Pierre Gasly (P1, 219 points), then a Red Bull junior, took four feature race wins on the way to his narrow championship victory over Prema Racing teammate Antonio Giovinazzi. Red Bull’s loyalty to the demoted Daniil Kvyat kept the Frenchman off the F1 grid when the circus arrived in Melbourne for the 2017 opener, so instead, Gasly passed his 2017 racing for Team Mugen in Super Formula and made a cameo appearance for Renault e.dams in Formula E. He found success in both series, losing the Super Formula title by half a point after the cancelled Suzuka finale and finishing fourth in his second Formula E race.

By the end of the year, however, Kvyat was out, and Gasly made his F1 debut with Toro Rosso at the 2017 Malaysian Grand Prix. He finally made his mark in F1 with fourth place at the 2018 Bahrain Grand Prix and, after Daniel Ricciardo departed Red Bull, earned a promotion to the main team for the following year. However, after a difficult first half of 2019, Gasly was demoted to Toro Rosso, spending three and a half more years with the Faenza outfit. This tenure included a memorable victory at the 2020 Italian Grand Prix, along with two other podiums, before he departed for Alpine in 2023. 

Now in his fourth season with the French team, Gasly has racked up two podiums and a best championship finish of 10th.

The only driver from the 2016 GP2 Series to be present on the grid for the first F1 race the following year was Antonio Giovinazzi (P2, 211 points), albeit as a substitute for the injured Pascal Wehrlein at Sauber. Giovinazzi had won five races in his only GP2 season, losing the title by just eight points. Once Wehrlein recovered, he spent two years waiting in the wings for a full-time drive, completing 13 practice sessions for Sauber and Haas. The only race outing Giovinazzi completed in 2018 was the 24 Hours of Le Mans, in which he finished fifth in the LMGTE Pro class for AF Corse.

In 2019, Giovinazzi finally got to make his full-time F1 debut, and he spent the next three years with the Sauber-run Alfa Romeo team. Sadly for him, as he became comfortable at the Hinwil outfit, they entered a dip in form, and he only scored 21 career points with a best finish of fifth in the 2019 Brazilian Grand Prix.

After losing his F1 seat, Giovinazzi spent a year in Formula E – one perhaps best forgotten – whilst also acting as a reserve driver for Ferrari and Alfa Romeo and completing two practice sessions for Haas. When Haas reshuffled its line-up at the end of 2022, there was no F1 return on the cards for the Italian, as Haas opted for Nico Hülkenberg. Instead, he found himself on the Ferrari AF Corse Hypercar team in the World Endurance Championship. In 2023, he was part of the winning line-up at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and in 2025 he became a world champion in the series, winning the title the same night his daughter was born. He and his #51 Ferrari teammates are defending the Hypercar title in 2026.

ART Grand Prix driver Sergey Sirotkin (P3, 159 points) finished third in the GP2 championship for the second year running in 2016, beating Raffaele Marciello on countback, but found himself without a full-time seat in 2017. The Russian completed just three races in 2017, two in the new F2 championship as a substitute for the injured Alexander Albon, plus the 24 Hours of Le Mans for SMP Racing, his longtime backers. 

Though Sirotkin had been a Renault development driver through 2016 and 2017, taking part in six FP1 sessions over two years, it was Williams who offered him an F1 seat for 2018. Sirotkin generally acquitted himself well, outqualifying teammate Lance Stroll 12–8 and scoring a single point in the Italian Grand Prix after Romain Grosjean was disqualified. Still, Robert Kubica was favoured for 2019, and Sirotkin found himself without a drive.

He returned to his previous employers, acting as reserve driver for Renault until the end of 2020 – as well as for Renault customer McLaren in 2020 – and racing for SMP in endurance and GT races for the two years following his exit. After 2020, Sirotkin took two years out of racing, and he has competed in just a few lower-level events for SMP since 2023, including an SMP F4 winter series round last December. In the meantime, he launched and built the S35 Academy for Russian karters, several graduates of which have gone on to race in F4 and FRegional championships worldwide. He and his partner welcomed a son in August 2023.

Russian Time’s Raffaele Marciello (P4, 159 points) tied with Sirotkin on points but took no victories in a season that thwarted his F1 ambitions. He was another driver who made a brief appearance in F2 in 2017, completing the Spielberg round for Trident. This was his last foray into single-seater racing, for he began a successful GT career with Mercedes in that same year. He won the Blancpain GT Series Sprint Cup – now known as the GT World Challenge Europe Sprint Cup – in 2018 and the GTWC Endurance Cup in 2022 and 2023. The same year as his first GTWC endurance title, Marciello also took the ADAC GT Masters championship.

Marciello has also tried his hand at some of the most prestigious races in the world. In 2018, he made his debut at the Bathurst 12 Hour, finishing second – a result he repeated in 2025. In 2019, the Italian won the FIA GT World Cup in Macau, with a second victory coming in 2023 in his final outing as a Mercedes factory driver. In 2021, he made his IMSA debut as part of the team that took the runner-up spot at the 24 Hours of Daytona in the GTD class.

In 2024, now aligned with BMW, Marciello finally made his FIA WEC and hypercar debut, though with one podium from two seasons, his stint in sports car racing’s top category has not yielded the same results as his GT career did. In 2026, Marciello is continuing with BMW for his third WEC season. He and his fiancée have a two-year-old daughter together.

Norman Nato (P5, 136 points) rejoined his 2015 team Arden in 2017 for that year’s F2 season, though he was not as successful as he had been with Racing Engineering in 2016, slipping from fifth in the final GP2 season to ninth in F2 in 2017 with one victory and two further podiums. In 2018, he left the F1 junior ladder and began an endurance career in the LMP2 class, finishing third in the European Le Mans Series that year. He then finished third in the championship and the LMP1 class in WEC in 2019–20, taking a runner-up spot at Le Mans.

Since 2020, Nato has split his time between endurance racing and Formula E, driving for Venturi, Jaguar, Nissan and Andretti in the latter and taking one race win. Currently, the Frenchman is in his third season for Nissan in Formula E and his third season for Team Jota, now operators of the Cadillac-badged Hypercar entry, in WEC.

DAMS driver Alex Lynn (P6, 124 points) narrowly missed out on an F1 seat in 2017, with Williams preferring the better-funded Lance Stroll over their development driver. Instead, as so many drivers do, he turned his attention to a dual Formula E and endurance program. In Formula E, Lynn took pole on debut as he substituted for José María López at Virgin Racing, earning himself a full-time seat with the team by the 2017–18 season. That venture ultimately proved unsuccessful, and after part-time seasons replacing previous and future Formula E champions Nelson Piquet Jr and Pascal Wehrlein, Lynn returned to full-time competition with Mahindra in 2021, taking his first win in his home race before exiting the series.

In endurance racing, Lynn took victories in both the LMP2 and LMGTE Pro categories, including a class win at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2020. After a year out to focus on Formula E, the Briton returned to WEC and IMSA SportsCar Championship in 2022, winning the 12 Hours of Sebring with Cadillac before joining their WEC hypercar team, with whom he has taken one race victory. Additionally, he won the LMP2 category in ELMS in 2023. In 2026, Lynn is expected to continue with Cadillac in WEC, sharing a car with Nato, although he was absent from the opening two rounds because of a neck injury.

One of the more interesting careers for a 2016 GP2 driver belongs to Jordan King (P7, 122 points), who embarked on his second campaign with Racing Engineering that year. The Briton remained in F2 for 2017 before moving stateside for a season racing only road and street courses in IndyCar with Ed Carpenter Racing, which yielded a best result of 11th in 2018. After being part of a winning team on his WEC LMP2 debut in early 2019, King returned to F2 that year, missing the Monaco round to participate in the Indianapolis 500. 

After the conclusion of the 2019 F2 season, King stepped back from competition, joining Alpine as a simulator driver in F1 and taking up a long-term role with the Mahindra Formula E Team as a reserve and development driver. It is a role he holds to this day and one that gave him his first race starts since 2019, when he substituted for Nyck de Vries at the 2024 Berlin ePrix. He also served as a commentator on a number of F2, F3 and F1 Academy races for several years from 2020 to 2024.

The 2016 season was the first for Trident driver Luca Ghiotto (P8, 111 points) on the highest rung of the F1 junior ladder, and he remained in competition there until the end of 2020 before making a brief cameo in 2022. After taking part in one endurance race, Ghiotto headed in the direction of GT racing with mixed success, taking podiums in the Italian GT Championship in his home country but failing to make the same sort of mark in the GT World Challenge Europe. Come the end of 2022, Ghiotto was without a race seat.

For the next year, Ghiotto acted as Nissan’s reserve driver in Formula E before returning to a race seat, taking part in the LMP2 class for Inter Europol Competition in ELMS in 2024 and 2025. Additionally, Ghiotto also headed stateside and participated in four IndyCar races in 2024, albeit with very little success, taking a best finish of just 21st. His 2026 schedule is not yet set in stone, although he appeared in the Italian GT Championship Sprint Cup opener and deputised for Nick Yelloly at Inter Europol in the second round of ELMS.

The highly rated Oliver Rowland (P9, 107 points) – Formula Renault 3.5’s 2015 champion – remained in F2 for 2017, moving from MP Motorsport to DAMS and finished the year third whilst also acting as Renault’s development driver. After a 2018 spent competing in few races and acting as Williams’ development driver, Rowland finally found a home in Formula E after Alexander Albon was signed by Toro Rosso.

Rowland seized his Formula E opportunity with Nissan with both hands, taking three poles and two podiums in his rookie season. He followed this up with his first win the following season. The hectic 2020–21 season meant that even though Rowland scored two podiums and 77 points, he ended 14th in points. He left Nissan for Mahindra at the end of the season.

Rowland’s season and a half with Mahindra was a career low point; he claimed just one top-five finish and departed the team midway through the 2022–23 season ahead of a return to Nissan. But the Rowland–Nissan combination has been exceptionally successful since, with the Briton winning the title last season, and it could have been his second on the bounce had the Englishman not been forced to withdraw from the Portland round in 2024. This season, Rowland has five podiums from the first eight races and sits fourth in points. He has also mentored F1 driver Arvid Lindblad throughout his career and now looks after the career of 15-year-old British karter Henry Domain, who competes for MP’s karting team. He and his wife have two children, born 2021 and 2025.

Russian Time’s Artem Markelov (P10, 97 points) remained in F2 for his fourth full season in 2017 and massively stepped up his game, ending the year as runner-up to Charles Leclerc. After a less successful 2018 – a year that still yielded fifth in the standings – Markelov turned his attention to Japan, racing in the Super Formula championship. He scored no points in five races before leaving the series.

An impressive cameo at Monaco in 2019 in place of Jordan King meant Markelov was a logical signing for Arden after the death of driver Anthoine Hubert at Spa in August. Arden became HWA for 2020, and Markelov made a full-time return to the series. While he played a critical role in the team’s development, his results were dire; he scored just twice in the 2020 season and ended up 18th in the standings.

Markelov made an F1 free practice appearance in 2018 at the Russian Grand Prix, his home race, just days before his father was arrested for his suspected involvement in a corruption and bribery case. Since 2020, Markelov has stepped back from racing. He got married and had his first child in 2020, during the F2 season. His second child was born in 2021.

Nobuharu Matsushita (P11, 92 points) went to Japan and back over the course of his F2 career. He stayed at ART for 2017, finishing sixth in the F2 standings, before moving to Super Formula in 2018 and finishing 11th with the Honda-backed Dandelion. Matsushita returned to Europe for 2019, completing two more seasons in F2 and taking three victories. Just before the end of the 2020 season, he departed Europe and headed back home – this time for good.

Matsushita took his first Super Formula podium in the 2020 season finale, and he managed to make the rostrum in Super GT the following year – though on this occasion it was with a victory. In his five years back in Japan, most of his success has come in Super GTs, with just one race win and a best championship finish of eighth in Super Formula. After a year away from single-seaters in 2025, Matsushita has switched disciplines entirely, stepping away from GTs and returning to Super Formula in the sole car of the debuting Delightworks team. 

Mitch Evans (P12, 90 points) has had perhaps the most straightforward career of any of the drivers who competed on this grid. After finishing his GP2 tenure with Campos Racing in 2016, the New Zealander joined the Jaguar Formula E team. Since the end of 2016 he has done nothing in racing but compete for Jaguar in Formula E. Though the first season for both driver and team was difficult, they quickly became a competitive pairing.

In spite of finishing in the top three in the standings for three years running, Evans is yet to win the Formula E World Championship. Instead, he must be content with being the driver who has won the most Formula E races in championship history with 16. Whether or not he wins the 2025–26 title – he sits second in points at present – Evans will be leaving the Jaguar team at season’s end after a decade together ahead of an expected move to join the new Opel outfit.

The post-2016 career of Gustav Malja (P13, 53 points) was short in comparison with the rest of his cohort. He moved from Rapax to Racing Engineering for the 2017 F2 season, testing a Sauber F1 car in the middle of the year. In 2018, he moved into Porsche racing and competed in the Porsche Supercup and Porsche Carrera Cup Germany. After winding up 14th in the latter in 2019, Malja has not raced again, instead taking on a career in business back home in Sweden.

Similarly, the racing career of Rapax driver Arthur Pic (P14, 36 points) ended after the flag went down in the Monza sprint race in 2016. The following year, the Frenchman took on a role in the family business, Groupe Charles André. He currently oversees the organisation’s logistics operations and lives outside of the public eye.

Campos’ Sean Gelael (P15, 24 points) competed in F2 until the end of 2020, doing five free practice one sessions for Toro Rosso before moving into endurance racing. He only once repeated his second place in the 2016 Spielberg feature race – at Monaco in 2018, also in the feature race.

After his single-seater career ended, Gelael spent three years competing in LMP2, finishing as class runner-up in WEC in both 2021 and 2022 ahead of a move to LMGT3s in 2024. Gelael’s time racing LMGT3s in WEC has been less successful, with a best championship finish of only fourth. He has, however, taken two class race wins in WEC while also being class runner-up at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2024. He is continuing in WEC for 2026 in addition to GTWC in Europe and Asia, taking a podium in GTWC Asia at his home circuit of Mandalika in early May. Gelael is engaged to Indonesian actress Hana Malasan.

The 2016 season was the first of four that Nicholas Latifi (P16, 23 points) spent with DAMS on the road to F1. He improved dramatically in 2017, finishing in the top five in the standings, but it was not until 2019 that he won more than one race. After taking four victories and second in the championship that year, he graduated from the series into an F1 seat with Williams. The Canadian had enjoyed extensive preparation for his F1 career, completing 11 practice sessions in the two years before his debut.

Once he began racing, however, he struggled to match teammate George Russell’s pace over a single lap, though he was much closer in race trim. In 2020, neither driver scored a point for Williams as the team finished last in the standings. There was a noticeable improvement for both Williams and Latifi in 2021, and he took his first points in the Hungarian Grand Prix that year, having run third in the early stages of the race. He finished ahead of Russell, who also scored his first points for Williams that day. 

Russell outscored Latifi in the remainder of the season, but Latifi was kept on for 2022. Reunited with 2018 F2 teammate Alexander Albon, Latifi struggled enormously with F1’s new ground-effect regulations. He looked competitive only in the wet weather, and it was in treacherous conditions at Suzuka where he scored his final F1 points by finishing ninth. He was not retained for 2023 and stepped away from racing, enrolling in the London Business School and graduating with a master of business administration degree in 2025.

The GP2 results of Marvin Kirchhöfer (P17, 21 points) did not live up to the expectations set by his German F3 and GP3 performances, and the Carlin driver left the series after the penultimate round of the 2016 season. In 2017, however, the German driver began a long and successful GT career, driving Mercedes cars in the ADAC GT Masters and Blancpain GT Series and achieving third in the standings in 2018 in the former. 

Kirchhöfer became a McLaren factory driver in late 2021, and he made his 24 Hours of Daytona debut in 2023, finishing third in the GTD class. After a full IMSA SportsCar Championship season in 2024, he won again in GTD at Daytona in 2025. Currently, he competes in IMSA, WEC and GTWC Europe.

Venezuelan-German driver Johnny Cecotto Jr (P18, 18 points) was a stalwart of GP2 grids in the early 2010s, competing from 2009 until 2016. When the series re-formed as F2 in 2017, he was present once again, retaining the seat he inherited from Pic at Rapax. After scoring in both Monaco races, taking a podium in the sprint, he left the series after four rounds and retired from racing.

In the years since, he has founded Stars, a luxury business group based in Monte Carlo involved in supercars, real estate, yachting and aviation. He and his wife have two children.

Just like Cecotto, 2016 Carlin driver Sergio Canamasas (P19, 17 points) was a regular on GP2 grids, competing from 2012 until 2017. That year, the Spaniard replaced Cecotto at Rapax mid-season before leaving the series three rounds later during the summer break. When explaining the reasons for his departure, Canamasas cited the apparent bad behaviour of the security at the Hungaroring and a lack of professionalism from the doctor present during an incident that he said almost cost his father his life.

Canamasas never returned to competition after that, and he has stayed out of the public eye.

Having left his Arden International GP2 seat two rounds before the end of the 2016 season, Sweden’s Jimmy Eriksson (P20, 10 points) began a four-year spell in GT racing. The peak of this tenure was being part of the team that took third in the championship in his rookie season of the Blancpain GT Series Endurance Cup.

After 2020, Eriksson did not race for three years, before making his return in the Scandinavian Touring Car Championship in 2024, in which he finished runner-up. The series was cancelled in 2025, and Eriksson has not raced since the end of 2024. He and his partner have two sons, born 2019 and 2022.

Daniël de Jong (P21, 6 points) is the son of MP Motorsport owner Henk de Jong, and he contested his fourth and most successful GP2 season for the Dutch outfit in 2016, having competed for them since he raced in Formula Renault 2.0 NEC back in 2008. De Jong left GP2 after that year, and since 2018 he has raced for MP Motorsport once per year – in the Dubai 24 Hours race, competing in the GT3 class. The Dutchman won the Pro-Am class in both 2020 and 2022 and last competed in 2025, with MP not contesting the 2026 edition.

Nabil Jeffri (P22, 2 points) remained on the grid for 2017, switching from Arden to Trident and scoring two points in the re-branded F2. He moved into endurance racing in 2018, driving for Jackie Chan DC Racing in both the Asian Le Mans Series and WEC and winning the 2018 6 Hours of Fuji in the former in the LMP2 class. After the Shanghai round of the season, all three Malaysian drivers were replaced in the #37 car, and Jeffri has not raced since. 

He has since started a family with his wife, actress Raysha Rizrose, welcoming a daughter in late 2024.

As in 2016, Carlin driver René Binder (P23, 0 points) focussed mainly on the World Series Formula V8 3.5 in 2017, finishing fourth. Additionally, he completed two F2 races at Jerez, with a best finish of 15th. In 2018, the Austrian driver moved into IndyCar, racing six times for Juncos Racing with a best finish of 16th.

Since 2019, Binder has been a mainstay of LMP2 racing, driving in ELMS, ALMS and WEC. These experiences have brought him one class title in ALMS as well as three class podiums at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. In 2026, he is competing in ELMS for Proton Competition. He has one child.

Philo Paz Armand (P24, 0 points) had achieved no podiums in single-seaters before stepping up to GP2 in 2016, and his dreadful campaign for Trident proved to be his last in motorsport. His father died from a stroke in early 2017, and since then, he has ended up in the spotlight primarily in relation to minor scandals involving well-known relatives and associates back in his native Indonesia.

The one-off outing for Arden that Emil Bernstorff (P25, 0 points) had at the 2016 GP2 finale also spelled the end of his racing career. In 2020, the British driver pivoted to streaming, broadcasting iRacing on Twitch. In 2022, he began to do the same on YouTube. He now has 14,000 followers on Twitch and also offers sim racing coaching.

Louis Delétraz (P26, 0 points) made his GP2 debut in the final round of 2016, replacing Kirchhöfer at Carlin, before embarking on a full campaign in 2017 in F2. After four full seasons, he left the series without a race win and with a best championship finish of eighth. In two of those seasons, he acted as a test driver for Haas, though he felt snubbed by the team when fellow reserve driver Pietro Fittipaldi was picked instead of him to replace Romain Grosjean in 2020.

In 2021, Delétraz began an illustrious LMP2 career with Team WRT, winning ELMS in his class for what would be his first of four championship titles in the series. Delétraz switched to Prema for 2022 and completed his first full WEC season that year, finishing as class runner-up at the 24 Hours of Le Mans and also making his debut in the IMSA SportsCar Championship. In 2023, he returned to Team WRT and won the LMP2 championship in WEC, while just this year, he took his sixth career LMP2 title in the 2025-26 ALMS. The Swiss driver now competes full-time for Cadillac Wayne Taylor Racing in the IMSA SportsCar Championship and for AO by TF in ELMS.

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency