Formula 2 Season Review

Formula 2 in 2022 did more or less what everyone expected it to. With twelve different race winners over the course of the season while still having a runaway Champion in the form of Felipe Drugovich, F2 gave us the best of both worlds.

With five race wins to his name, the Brazilian Champion sealed his title not by winning all the time (although his insanely impressive double header win in Spain was something no other driver could find an answer for) but by being consistent. There were only three races where he didn’t score any points compared to a whopping twelve races for second place man Theo Pourchaire.

Without even needing to look at anything else, the one hundred and one point gap between the two of them by the time the season ended in Abu Dhabi becomes quite easily explained. Despite this though, we’re left in the frustrating position of Felipe only being able to get himself a reserve driver role with Aston Martin for 2023 instead of a full time seat like his F2 co-competitor Logan Sargeant who finished down in fourth place and will replace Nicolas Latifi at Williams next year. But that’s a conversation for another time.

Drugovich put all of his F2 knowledge to great use this year and showed that while rookies are increasingly becoming more and more impressive in F2, the older dogs can still pull out some new tricks and show everyone else how it’s done.

Image: Charouz Media Centre

Six of the twenty nine drivers that competed in Formula 2 throughout the year didn’t score any points, although only four of these raced for a single round. This is where Tatiana Calderon comes in as she raced for Charouz in every round following the summer break. Her not scoring any points isn’t reflective of the talent she has behind the wheel though and either Charouz or another team further up the grid with a more competitive car should seriously consider signing her for 2023 if they haven’t already by the time you read this article.

I say this because it’s one thing to give a driver an opportunity to race but it’s quite another thing for them to be provided with a car that can properly extract the talent that they’ve got.

You only have to look at Daniel Ricciardo and McLaren in Formula 1 this year to see proof of this. In a field as competitive and crazy as Formula 2’s, it’s not always straightforward to gauge who the best drivers are and good drivers can get easily overlooked.

With more and more talented drivers coming out of the woodwork every year, it’s more vital than ever to take time in ensuring that none of them get overlooked simply because they don’t perform straight out of the box or aren’t given the right tools to be able to prove themselves. We all know how ruthless motorsport can be but that doesn’t mean it has to stay this way and with Formula 2 being the final step for most before F1, it’s critical that the right drivers make it the pinnacle.

Elsewhere in Formula 2 this year though, shout outs have to go to Liam Lawson, Ayumu Iwasa, Jack Doohan and Logan Sargeant. All of them also won multiple races this year and all finished inside the top six in the Championship overall. As mentioned Sargeant is heading to F1 next year which means his future is secured. Lawson and Iwasa have ties to Red Bull through their driver academy with the former subbing in for Sergio Perez in FP1 in Abu Dhabi, putting the car in an impressive P5. Surely a seat at Alpha Tauri is coming his way in 2024. Doohan meanwhile has ties with Alpine and has also driven for them in FP1 this year in Formula 1.

Image: Charouz Media Centre

His path upwards is a little tricker but with 2022 being his rookie year in F2, he has time on his side, should either Ocon or Gasly end up not being worthy of an F1 seat sometime in the next couple of years. All three will be fascinating to watch in 2023 and have to be hot favorites for the title along with runner up Theo Pourchaire. But as always, it’s important to remember that Formula 2 is notoriously unpredictable and we could always end up with someone completely different and unexpected winning the title in 2023.

The 2022 calendar was a strong one for Formula 2 with only a couple of weak links in Imola and Zandvoort that didn’t provide the edge of your seat racing that we’ve come to expect from the feeder series – see pigeon watch and crane cam from Zandvoort in particular to back this point up. If you know, you know.

Silverstone and Spa were arguably the stand out rounds in terms of racing quality although the standard was pretty high across the board, helped along by a return to just two races per weekend and the reverse top ten grid for Saturday’s Sprint Races – something Formula 1 might want to look into if they insist on keeping their own Sprints for the foreseeable future.

Controversial steward calls have still persisted in 2022 though, most notably in Austria with regards to track limits and post race punishments for this. This is something that is not an exclusive problem to Formula 2 but it needs addressing and rectifying nonetheless. As fans, we watch Formula 2 for its pure and close racing action and just because it’s not Formula 1, that doesn’t mean it becomes any less frustrating when a race result is altered well after the race is complete. Pit Stops too need to be improved as twice this season, both at the season opener in Bahrain and at the season finale in Abu Dhabi, we saw dangerous situations happening with tyres not being properly fitted to the cars, resulting in chaos for not only the drivers but for everyone else during the races.

Image: Alfa Romeo Media Centre

Both instances were unnecessary and naturally compromised the races of the drivers that it involved through no fault of their own and if Formula 2 insists on certain rules, such as limiting the number of pit crew personnel that can attend to a car during a pit stop, then better safeguards need to be implemented to ensure that these types of mistakes don’t happen again. This is motor racing that is only one step down from the highest level in motorsport and having these types of problems is simply unacceptable for a global sport. Lastly on this point, we saw once again how dangerous sausage kerbs can be at Silverstone where Roy Nissany launched Dennis Hauger over them and subsequently crashing both of them out of the race.

The contact between them may still have been race ending without the presence of sausage kerbs but with them, it became incredibly dangerous and were it not for the halo, there would have been very serious injury to Hauger at the very least.

In the same year where track modifications were made to Spa to make it safer, it seems silly to not have re-evaluated other tracks on the calendar to see if there’s anything that can be done to make them safer before something bad happens and it becomes a necessity.

Thankfully it wasn’t all doom and gloom. The racing was close and for the most part, up to the limit, not over it. We had some brilliant moments throughout the year such as Enzo Fittipaldi, Ralph Boschung and Roberto Mehri all scoring fantastic podium finishes. We got to see Juan Manuel Correa return to Formula 2 for the first time since his horrific crash back in 2019.

As mentioned, Tatiana Calderon also came back to Formula 2 and hopefully is a sign of things to come as drivers like Jamie Chadwick, Abbi Pulling and Marta Garcia, to name a few, continue to prove that they’re more than capable of racing at a higher level and simply need a team in Formula 2 to give them a chance. MP Motorsport also became Contructor’s Champions, beating the likes of Carlin and PREMA, causing a big but welcome upset to the Formula 2 hierarchy that we as fans love to lap up. It proves yet again that Formula 2 is impossible to predict and why fans, old and new, should keep coming back week after week, season after season, to see what’s going to happen next.

Image: Charouz Media Centre

In a year where Formula 1 saw domination of the likes we had hoped we wouldn’t see in a brand new regulation era, Formula 2 showed that you can have a dominant driver but the Championship can still be full of thrills and spills to keep your eyes peeled until the very last lap of the final race. Iwasa, Lawson and Drugovich were very much the living embodiment of that in Abu Dhabi. In essence then, Formula 2 is where you can have your cake and eat it too – and really, what else do we want as motorsport fans?

Author: Thiemo Albers-Daly