Joshua Dürksen became Formula 2’s second repeat winner of the season, taking the win in the sprint race at the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps. He finished 0.6 seconds ahead of Rodin Motorsport’s Martinius Stenshorne, with DAMS driver Dino Beganovic in third. Feeder Series heard from the top three in the post-race press conference. 

By Cliona Sheerin

Durksen’s last F2 podium appearance was his victory in the first race of the season in Melbourne. Since then, the Paraguayan has endured a difficult run of form that had seen him fall to 15th in the championship order. In today’s sprint race, however, the Invicta Racing driver was confident in his ability to fight for his sixth win in the championship from a starting position of fourth.

“I knew I had a very good chance because it’s Spa and from fourth position you can do a lot,” Dürksen told Feeder Series in the post-race press conference. “I know that you can overtake here in Spa, so I knew that if we have the pace, if the car runs as good as I’m feeling good, we would have a big chance to win today.”

Polesitter Sebastián Montoya got a decent getaway off the line, as did Martinius Stenshorne alongside him. The two were side by side heading into La Source, but Montoya held the inside line and the race lead out of the first corner. But it was not his for long as Stenshorne tucked into the slipstream of the Colombian heading up Eau Rouge and Raidillon and sat right in the wheeltracks of the car in front on the Kemmel Straight. He pulled to the outside and swept around through the first part of Les Combes and into the lead of the race. Dürksen almost followed him through at Malmedy but to no avail. 

Meanwhile, Roman Bilinski, who lined up third on the grid, had a nightmare start, and he was swamped by his competitors on the front straight before filtering into ninth place, out of the points, by the time the field exited La Source. Fast starters Nikola Tsolov, Alex Dunne and Rafael Câmara all made up two places apiece in the first exchanges to move up to fifth, sixth and eighth respectively.

While leader Stenshorne scampered up the road and out of DRS range, Dürksen continued to apply the pressure on Montoya for second. On lap six, he finally took his chance, taking a page out of Stenshorne’s book of overtakes with a move around the outside at Les Combes. He now set after closing the 1.8s gap to Stenshorne in front.

However, that task was done for Dürksen with the deployment of the safety car on the same lap. Cian Shields found the barriers at Malmedy after being forced off by Ritomo Miyata while attempting an overtake on the exit of Les Combes. The drivers followed the safety car for one tour around the 7.004-kilometre circuit before the race went back to green on lap eight. 

Stenshorne maintained his lead on the restart, with the driver most under pressure being Montoya in third. He held on until lap 10, but a lock-up at La Source left him vulnerable in the subsequent corners to Dino Beganovic behind. There was nothing he could do to prevent the DAMS driver from completing the overtake on the Kemmel Straight. 

All the while, Dürksen was closing on Stenshorne, and on lap 11, he made the move on the run to Les Combes, with Stenshorne putting up minimal defence of his lead. The Norwegian stayed within DRS on the following laps before the next safety car intervention, this time for a scary moment for John Bennett. 

Having been overtaken earlier on lap 13 by Câmara for seventh place, Bennett lost the rear coming out of Blanchimont and found himself pirouetting across the middle of the track. The onrushing drivers all avoided the spinning Trident, but the safety car came out once more on lap 14 while marshals recovered Bennett’s car, which would go no further than the kink that follows Blanchimont. 

The lengthy safety car intervention that followed meant there would only be enough time for a single-lap shoot-out to end the race. On the restart, Tsolov set off a chain reaction in the fight for fourth with a bold lunge down the inside of Montoya at La Source. The Prema driver was slow to exit the corner, and Dunne drew alongside on the straight and up Eau Rouge. The Irishman hugged the inside line at the sweeping right-hander to take the position, while Montoya went wide at Raidillon and rejoined behind Câmara and Bilinski before a move from Oliver Goethe into Les Combes dropped the polesitter out of the points. 

Out front, however, Dürksen got the jump on Stenshorne when the race got back underway, and he held the Norwegian at arm’s length for the rest of the lap to come across the line as a winner for the second time this season. Stenshorne earned an extra points for setting the fastest lap of the race on the fourth tour with a 1:59.985.

The importance of DRS and positioning the car to take full advantage of it during today’s race was not lost on the top three, as they told Feeder Series afterwards.

“All of us have a lot of experience already in Spa, and we know how the DRS works,” Dürksen said in the post-race press conference. “It’s also something that you see in other tracks, it’s not only here. But that DRS strategy is quite important and you need to be clever with it.… All of us know more or less what we should do in each scenario, and then we try to maximise that.”

“It showed quite clearly when the car in front doesn’t have DRS and the car behind does how big of an effect it has,” Stenshorne said, “[such as] when Joshua overtook me and how I could stay with him as well.”

“Like always, here in Spa, you always talk about DRS and being smart with that,” Beganovic added. “In the F2 car compared to F3, it’s not as easy going up Eau Rouge to be well positioned for the Kemmel Straight. It’s definitely a strategic game, where you place your car, where you place yourself before the next detection and where you want to attack.”

The top three were all involved in an unusual incident before the race even got underway. Stenshorne in second had slowed on the run to the Bus Stop chicane on the formation lap, and Beganovic, approaching the corner with an overspeed to those in front, took avoiding action by going off track. In doing so, he overtook his teammate Bilinski; eventual race winner Dürksen; and Stenshorne, who was at the head of the slow-moving trio. Beganovic was ultimately given a warning for overtaking other cars on the formation lap, while Stenshorne was warned for allowing the gap to Montoya in front to become unnecessarily large.

Tsolov’s last-lap lunge earned the championship leader a fourth-place finish in the end, ahead of Dunne and Câmara, who will both start in the top three for tomorrow’s feature race. Despite his bad start, Bilinski extended his streak of points scores to six on the bounce with a seventh-place result in the sprint, while Goethe rounded out the points in eighth.

Title contender Gabriele Minì, now 22 points behind Tsolov in the drivers’ standings, was among the non-classified finishers after retiring with a mechanical issue on lap 11, while Noel León, who opted to start on the supersofts, also did not finish the race after entering the pits on lap six. 

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency