Photo: FIA
Joshua Duerksen did not anticipate his winning start to the Formula 2 season in Melbourne, despite feeling he had strong pace going into the 2025 season.
The AIX Racing driver ended 2024 with a feature race win, and began 2025 with victory in the reversed-grid sprint race. He started that from second place, having qualified 0.652 seconds off pole in ninth.
Despite that result setting him up for a potentially difficult feature race on Sunday, he considers it a “perfect” start so far.
“Last year when I won the race in Abu Dhabi, I was like ‘okay, this is the perfect ending’. Finishing with a feature race victory, getting into the top 10 [in the standings]. And now starting the season with a victory, that’s really great feeling, and winning in Australia is something I didn’t really think about,” he explained.
“Coming into the weekend, I knew I would be in the front, I would be on a good pace, but I don’t know why it didn’t come into my mind that I would win the first race. And then, with starting P2 today, I was thinking ‘okay, yeah, this is possible, let’s do it’.”
Duerksen took the lead off the line then handled two safety car restarts, saying “it was all under control”.
“The first safety car restart, I felt pretty good, but on the second one I knew Leo [Fornaroli] would know my strategy, so then I felt a bit more pressure because I knew I maybe wouldn’t make such a big gap. But still it was all fine. Especially on the second safety car, I was like ‘ah, no, I don’t need this’ because I had a good gap. So I was feeling comfortable, and then with the safety car of course everybody has to come close again, so I was like ‘oioi’. I didn’t like the second safety car.
“But anyway, I managed to make a good restart and then just have the tyres in temperature and then just be able to make clean laps and I think this has helped me to get the victory.”
He added that “when you create a gap, you feel a bit more relief, and then when you see the safety car, it’s like ‘oh, come on’”.
Duerksen says he had “a boost of confidence” from his end-of-2024 win and that he and his team had “this feeling for basically three months” which boosted motivation through winter when there was a lack of track action to test their work against.
There could be very different conditions to face in Melbourne’s feature race, potentially providing more validation for AIX Racing.
“Tomorrow’s going to be a really interesting race. It says it should rain a lot, so this is going to mix up a lot of strategies and just the prediction of who’s going to win the race,” said Duerksen.