Alex Dunne achieved his first Formula 2 victory of the season in a Baku feature race that was marked by stoppages. He crossed the line 4.395 seconds ahead of his Rodin Motorsport teammate Martinius Stenshorne, while Dino Beganovic rounded out the podium places in third. Feeder Series spoke to the top three in the post-race press conference.

By Cliona Sheerin

A total of 495 days on from his last win in F2 in the feature race in Imola, Dunne overcame safety cars, a red flag and alternate-strategy runners to return to the top step of the podium and win from pole in the first of the two feature races around the Baku City Circuit. The result has been a long time coming, with Dunne having racked up seven podiums over the course of the season prior to this race, including a third place in the sprint race held earlier today.

Struggles with race pace meant that the first win of the year had eluded the Rodin driver. But after today, he believes these issues are now well and truly behind them.

“The pace we’ve had today is – I wouldn’t say where I expected it to be but I didn’t expect to struggle. I expected to be able to fight for where we were starting,” Dunne told Feeder Series in the post-race press conference. “At the same time, Baku and Madrid are two very different circuits to everywhere else. Street circuits you need to have a lot of confidence as a driver, you need to be comfortable with pushing it up to the walls. Maybe some of us are more comfortable and more confident at doing that than others. The car has been very good, but street tracks can be a bit of an outlier sometimes. We’ll have to wait and see if we end up in Qatar and Abu Dhabi and we’ll have a full read on if we’ve completely fixed it.

“In saying that, from what we’ve done today, there was a couple of issues that needed to be ironed out after the sprint race, and the changes we made worked perfectly, which is how it was last year. Whenever we needed to make a change, we made one and then it worked. It hasn’t been that straightforward in other rounds this year, so hopefully we’re back to our normal ways.”

There was drama before the first lap even began as Sebastián Montoya, who was due to start seventh on the grid, had a spin on the exit of Turn 2 on his installation lap. He lost the engine as he did so, resulting in a non-start for the Prema driver. 

Dunne took a page out of Nikola Tsolov’s book on the grid, pointing his car in the direction of his teammate and the first corner’s apex. And it served him well as the Irishman took the inside line ahead of Stenshorne, who was level with Noel León heading to Turn 2. The Rodin driver had the advantage on the inside of the corner and maintained his position and his team’s 1-2. 

Rafael Câmara moved up to fourth and Mari Boya to fifth, the pair having overtaken Kush Maini. Beganovic stayed seventh while Tsolov made his way up to eighth in the opening exchanges.

Dunne was already out of DRS range by the time it was enabled heading on to lap three, with Stenshorne having to look backwards rather than forwards as León lingered close behind.  

The leaders remained as they were until the pit stops, with Tsolov, Laurens van Hoepen and Tasanapol Inthraphuvasak among the first of the takers for the soft tyres at the end of lap six. But it was a nightmare pit stop for the championship leader as a delay on the left-rear tyre dropped him behind his rivals and into 19th.

While this was happening, Câmara overtook León at Turn 2 to move into the podium places. The Campos driver pitted that same lap, along with Stenshorne, and they emerged in the same order and ahead of those who switched tyres on the previous tour. 

On lap eight, with Dunne and Câmara still to pit, Boya crawled to a standstill between Turns 2 and 3, presenting the top two with a golden opportunity for a free pit stop. Dunne, Câmara and sprint race winner Beganovic piled into the pits just after the intervention, and they held the net top three positions in the race.

Alternate-strategy runner Oliver Goethe led the field back to green as lap 11 ended, with the car of Colton Herta separating Dunne and Câmara behind. Stenshorne and León had been demoted to sixth and seventh with the timing of the safety car, while Gabriele Minì benefitted from the intervention, moving up to eighth having started the race from 14th. 

Behind the top three, Câmara fell back as things got back underway, with Beganovic going through at Turn 1 and Stenshorne doing the same at Turn 2. Stenshorne then made another move at Turn 3, this time on Beganovic to reinstate a net Rodin 1-2. 

There was a great deal of trouble further back, however, as contact between Cian Shields and John Bennett caused a multi-car bottleneck at Turn 3. Also caught up in the incident and with nowhere to go were Ritomo Miyata, Van Hoepen, Rafael Villagómez, Dürksen and Tsolov, his day going from bad to worse to a retirement from the feature race. To add even more insult to injury, Tsolov was handed a five-second time penalty for crossing the pit lane entry line, which will be converted into a three-place grid drop for tomorrow’s feature race. 

The red flag was thrown to clear the carpark of F2 cars, the drivers caught up in the incident starting the debrief early as they looked on. 

After a delay of 20 minutes, the track was cleared and ready for the resumption of racing. Tsolov and Campos were frantically debating whether they could rejoin the race, presumably keen to avoid having his penalty carry over to the second feature race. The answer to their questions were no, and he was not part of the 14 cars that took the rolling start heading on to lap 14, the race now running to time. 

On the restart, with 17 minutes on the clock, Beganovic got the jump on Stenshorne before going down to the inside of Colton Herta at the first corner, completing the move into Turn 2. León got ahead of Câmara, while Stenshorne and León also dispatched Herta over the course of the lap. 

Dunne went right and then left to get by Goethe on the main straight on lap 15, but nothing doing. Meanwhile, Beganovic was now hot on his heels, the onus on Dunne to pass increasing. And that the Alpine junior did on lap 17, sweeping around the outside of the MP before the braking point of Turn 1. 

Stenshorne then got back past Beganovic at Turn 3 before setting his sights on the yet-to-pit Goethe in front. Minì channeled his inner Fernando Alonso, asking for Goethe to ‘defend like a lion’ and help him bridge the gap to the battle for the podium positions. That proved to be Goethe’s undoing as he tumbled down the order on lap 19. First Stenshorne went up the inside of Turn 1, a move that proved to be too ambitious as the Norwegian went deep and Goethe reclaimed the position. However, a lock-up at Turn 3 opened the door for Stenshorne, Beganovic and León to pass, León’s Campos making light contact with Beganovic’s DAMS as they checked up in the braking zone. 

Out front, Dunne was setting fastest lap after fastest lap, the quickest of which was a 1:55.737 set on the 23rd and final tour as he stretched his lead to more than four seconds across the line. Stenshorne finished where he started in second to give Rodin their second 1-2 of the season after the Norwegian’s victory in the Montréal feature race. Beganovic finished third for his third rostrum appearance in a row. 

Beganovic took his second podium of the day following his earlier sprint triumph | Credit: Dutch Photo Agency

Câmara snatched fourth place in dramatic last-gasp fashion, winning out over León in a drag race across the line. The 0.050s advantage he had meant he claimed 12 valuable championship points and, with Tsolov not scoring, moved into the lead of the championship for the first time by one point. 

Minì moved up eight places from his starting position of 14th to take sixth, with another of the biggest movers of the race in Bilinski behind him in seventh. Villagómez recovered from his involvement in the mid-race pile-up to finish eighth, while Hiyu Yamakoshi in ninth took his first F2 points having started from the pit lane, giving VAR a double points finish. Maini rounded out the points scorers in 10th after his five-second time penalty for speeding in the pit lane was applied. 

The gap between the top four in the drivers’ championship has now closed to 21 points. Câmara’s 182 points means he takes over the top spot from Tsolov, who has led the way since his sweep in Silverstone. Dunne’s 26 points for victory and fastest lap see him leapfrog Minì to go third, just eight points off Câmara with the pair starting second and third in tomorrow’s second feature race. Minì has fallen to fourth on 161 points. 

Stenshorne will go from pole ahead of Dunne tomorrow following Rodin’s double front-row lockout in qualifying. 

“Everyone will look into the data from today’s two races and see what we can do better,” Stenshorne told Feeder Series. “Tomorrow morning will be a bit closer to what we had this morning, so it will be interesting. Hopefully we can do the right changes and be on it for the race.”

“I would probably expect tomorrow to be one of the hardest races of the year,” Dunne said. “Because everyone has done so many laps through the weekend that, realistically, car balance, driving, you should be nearly maximised as to what you can get because we’ve done so many laps now.

“Through a normal weekend, if teams are struggling in quali, they improve themselves for the sprint race. If they struggle in the sprint race, they improve themselves for the feature race. So everyone naturally progresses and gets a little bit better through the weekend. Now we’ve had a lot of opportunity to improve and maximise on that side of things, so I expect the deficit in pace that you saw this morning in the sprint race and now in the feature race, I think everything will probably close up and in terms of pace it should be quite tight tomorrow.”

Meanwhile, Beganovic, who starts 12th, will look to revert to the setup philosophy that saw him take the sprint race win.

“The track is getting better and better after every session,” Beganovic added. “There’s loads of stuff to learn. This morning was quite good for us, a bit less good in the afternoon but we know what could have been better in the afternoon.

“We’ll start to come back to a bit of an approach that we had this morning with the car setup. It’s all the same for everybody, everybody will really optimise their car, their driving tomorrow. I think it will be a very close race and obviously mistakes and learnings from today will be applied better tomorrow.”

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency