Photo: Prema
Two of Formula 2’s usual big hitters struggled to adapt to the championship’s new car last year, but Gabriele Mini was not surprised to see Prema start 2025 in front.
The team went podium-free through the first six rounds of 2024, but then won in each of the next three and ended the season with five victories in total.
It ended the season fifth in the standings, and last month’s pre-season test gave away little about what to expect in Melbourne this weekend. But Mini was “not really” surprised that Prema had the pace required for him to qualify on pole.
“We know Prema historically, they are a team that won a lot and they are hungry to win even more, of course,” he said.
“Last year at the beginning they were struggling a bit, but during the season already they worked and they were fighting for big points towards the end and they understood what to do and what was not in the right direction at the beginning. And during the winter once again by analysing data and the testing and all the work we’ve done, we improved even more and very happy to be here at this point on pole for the first round.”
Mini called qualifying, his second ever in F2, an “amazing session” and he was fastest by 0.114 seconds. Only three drivers were within half a second of him.
“Every push lap we did we were within the top two or three, and on the last lap we managed to put a really good lap in and that was good enough for pole. As I already said, we’ve been working hard during the winter and it’s good to see that it pays off.”
Mini says it “gives a really big boost of confidence to start like this” with pole.
ART Grand Prix’s Victor Martins, who qualified second, had similar things to say. His team went from being champions to coming seventh in the standings last year.
“First I think it [the pace recovery] is never quick enough because I was with ART last year and we would have wanted to come back earlier in 2024 into the championship title. But I’d say I think we were quite happy with what we saw [today],” he admitted.
“Where we were last year for the second half of the season, we used that positively during the winter to always go even more, even further into some analysis. And I think also struggling a bit last year gave us like extra motivation and saying to ourselves ‘we need to react, we need to do things we were not doing before’, for example.
“Sometimes when you’re at the top, you have the tendency of let’s say not [be] pushing the boundaries. And I think we were not where we should be, and then we had some extra work to do. I’m happy about where we are, but there is still work to do because we are not on pole.”