Formula 2’s inaugural visit to the Madring proved a crucial one for the championship contenders as struggles aplenty around the street circuit closed the gaps at the top of the standings. Feeder Series unpacks five things we learned from the weekend’s racing.

By Cliona Sheerin

Championship leader Nikola Tsolov’s weekend started off well with the fastest time in Friday’s practice session, before Dino Beganovic claimed his second pole position of the year in qualifying. Ritomo Miyata took his maiden win in the sprint race with Beganovic converting his pole into feature race victory.

• Pre-weekend roundtable: F2 leader Tsolov talks ‘strong relationship’ with Campos ahead of team’s home race
• Qualifying report and quotes: Beganovic blasts to Madrid pole over Dunne in crash-filled qualifying
• Sprint race report and quotes: Miyata takes maiden win in Madrid F2 sprint as Tsolov crashes
• Feature race report and quotes: Beganovic dominates Madrid F2 feature as Tsolov and Câmara falter

1. Tsolov’s struggles continue…

It was a round to forget for F2’s championship leader, who failed to score a single point across the weekend for just the second time this season. 

Things got off to a solid start on Friday, when the Bulgarian topped practice and continued his record of qualifying inside the top seven in all but one round so far this season. He started sixth and fifth in the sprint and feature races, respectively, but ran into trouble in both. 

In the sprint race, Tsolov was circulating in fifth, just behind his teammate Noel León. He believed he had a pace advantage, expressing as much to his Campos team over the radio. But the track was proving notoriously difficult to overtake on. Tsolov’s frustration grew. He  was evidently pushing hard to try to find an opportunity to get by, but on lap 14, he eventually went over the limit and brushed the barrier at Turn 20.

The contact forced his Campos into a spin and he failed to get the car going again. From his vantage point on the exit of the corner, Tsolov could only watch as his championship rival Rafael Câmara and vital championship points ran away from him. 

Tsolov had the opportunity to bounce back the next day in the feature race, with a better starting position and bigger points on offer. But, once again, the day ended in disaster. After electing to pit early, the Campos driver found himself stuck behind Mari Boya with no way through in sight.

As he shaped for a move down to Turn 5 on lap 17, he overshot his braking point and was barged out of the way by Câmara at Turn 7 after rejoining Tsolov lost his front-left endplate as a result of the contact, and he then sustained more damage in the dying stages of the race that saw him drop all the way to the back of the pack. He limped over the line in 18th. 

Madrid marks Tsolov’s third consecutive round without a podium. Prior to Budapest, he had a 50 per cent win ratio in the feature races. With just 16 points collected from the last three rounds compared to Câmara’s 45, the 36-point gap that stood between the two heading to the Hungaroring has now been reduced to seven. 

2. …while Câmara and Minì salvage crucial points

On the other side of the coin, Câmara and Minì recovered well from difficulties over the course of the weekend to cut down Tsolov’s championship advantage.

Minì missed out on a top 10 in qualifying for the second weekend running and started both races in 13th. In the sprint race, he managed to climb to just outside the points in ninth, while in the feature race, a well-timed safety car and some opportunistic overtaking in unconventional locations lifted him to a seventh-place finish. The accompanying six points boosted his account to 153 in total, to bring him back within a feature race victory of Tsolov on 177.

Câmara picked up two positions from where he started and three points in the sprint race. His feature race, however, almost ended at Turn 2 on lap 18 when  he made an aggressive overtaking attempt on Oliver Goethe, which resulted in contact that shoved the MP Motorsport driver in the wall. Câmara was hit with a 10-second time penalty, though in the end, it only cost him one position, dropping him from ninth to 10th at the flagf. 

With Tsolov not scoring and Câmara and Minì picking up points despite their respective incidents, the top three in championship are covered by 24 points with three rounds still to race. That seven-point gap at the top is now as close as it has been this season since Tsolov and Minì were separated by two points after Spielberg in June, with everything to play for heading into the three-race Baku round. 

3. Dunne returns to the rostrum

Alex Dunne, fourth in the standings, made his first appearance on the podium since the Barcelona feature race on Sunday. With that, he too made up crucial ground on the championship leader, cutting the gap to 38 points.

After achieving a podium in each of the first five rounds, Dunne was off the podium in the last five. Despite qualifying outside of the top three on only two occasions so far this season, he has only converted those starting positions into podiums four out of a possible nine times, with race pace Rodin’s Achilles’ heel this season.

“Race pace [is] usually as a driver one of my strong suits,” Dunne told Feeder Series after qualifying third last time out in Monza. “Whether or not it’s fixed I don’t think is quite up to me.… The team have been working hard with me to try and make improvements with the car to find the little bit that we’re missing. We’ve gotten better and better each weekend but probably still not quite where we wanted to be.”

Those improvements appear to have gone a way to resolving the team’s race pace deficit, with Dunne converting his qualifying position into a second place and fastest lap around the Madring in the feature race. Nevertheless, he couldn’t get close enough to lay a finger on Beganovic for the win, showing that the elusive 2026 race win may still be some ways away.

4. Beganovic masters the Madring

Not only did Beganovic lead every lap of the feature race from pole, but he did so in dominant fashion, pulling out a 7.320-second advantage over Dunne across the line. 

The DAMS driver was quick to get to grips with the new circuit, setting faster and faster laps during Friday’s qualifying session before coming away with his second pole position of the season. After his first pole at the first round in Melbourne, issues in both races meant he took home only the two points for pole. But this time, the result on Sunday was a lot more promising, with a clean start and a fortunately timed safety car intervention helping Beganovic on his way to his first feature race win in the championship.

In particular, Beganovic was able to showcase his pace in the latter stages of the race. After the pit stops, he exchanged fastest laps with Dunne before driving off into the distance in the closing laps, ending up more than seven seconds clear in 10 laps of green-flag running.

The win takes both Beganovic and his DAMS team up a position in their respective championship standings to sixth. The Swede is now on 106 points, 10 away from equalling his tally from his rookie season. 

5. Hitech enjoy best weekend of 2026 despite single-car entry

Hitech secured their biggest points haul of the season despite having only one car competing in both races.

Colton Herta suffered a crash at the end of qualifying on Friday, which effectively brought his weekend to an end as he withdrew from the rest of the round because of illness. Regardless, the team took home 26 championship points, all thanks to a double podium from Ritomo Miyata.

The Japanese driver’s move on reverse-grid polesitter Emerson Fittipaldi Jr before the first corner of the sprint race was enough to secure him his maiden F2 win around a track where overtaking proved limited. He followed that result up with third in the feature having started down in ninth. Those were only Miyata’s second and third podiums in the championship following his second place in the Spa feature race last year.

Miyata’s efforts yielded Hitech’s most positive points return of what has been a bleak 2026, with the 2025 teams’ championship runners-up moving to 96 points for the season. First place in the sprint race and third place in the feature race were, coincidentally, the exact results Beganovic scored for them the last time the team scored podiums, the feat achieved in Baku last year. Can Hitech keep the momentum going when the championship heads there in a week and a half?

Results and standings after round 11 at Madrid

Results	P1	P2	P3
Qualifying	Dino Beganovic, 1:44.331	Alex Dunne, +0.230s	Rafael Câmara, +0.522s
Sprint race (23 laps)	Ritomo Miyata, 47:21.330	Emerson Fittipaldi Jr, +2.678s	Laurens van Hoepen, +3.227s
Feature race (31 laps)	Dino Beganovic, 1:03:29.190	Alex Dunne, +7.320s	Ritomo Miyata, +14.015s

Standings	Drivers	Teams
P1	Nikola Tsolov, 177	Campos Racing, 296
P2	Rafael Câmara, 170	Invicta Racing, 260
P3	Gabriele Minì, 153	Rodin Motorsport, 209
P4	Alex Dunne, 139	MP Motorsport, 190
P5	Noel León, 119	ART Grand Prix, 159
P6	Dino Beganovic, 106	DAMS, 132
P7	Joshua Dürksen, 90	Trident, 110
P8	Kush Maini, 88	Hitech, 96
P9	Laurens van Hoepen, 72	Van Amersfoort Racing, 53
P10	Tasanapol Inthraphuvasak, 71	Prema Racing, 41

Read our takeaways from the previous round here.

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency