What did drivers learn, and show, in the Dallara F2 2018’s final outing?

Antonelli said he already “had a great feeling” with the car after the opening day, despite it being very different to the FRegional car he has raced extensively this year.

“What impressed me the most were the braking and the power. The braking because in this car we have carbon brakes, so the efficiency on the braking is much higher, and the stopping is very nice. You feel a lot the stopping of the car, which is a great feeling,” he said.

“This car has a lot of power. So you need to also manage a bit on the throttle, something which I wasn’t really used to from doing in other cars.”

He also commented “I need to improve quite a bit on the phyical side, because this car is quite a bit more demanding”, which may have been a factor in his race pace deficit of 1.311s per lap to benchmark-setting team-mate Bearman who admitted “I underestimated the challenge of getting back into the F2 car” after driving in Formula 1 practice at the track last weekend.

“It’s really important to do this test because the [2024] car is not going to be much different. So it’s good to have a baseline on this car, mainly because it’s heavy,” Antonelli added, saying he wanted “to gain a bit of confidence with the car”.

“I got my first taste of trying different [tyre] compounds, which I never did before. So it was actually a really cool experience. It was really nice to feel the difference. The step between the two compounds is quite big, so at first it’s quite hard to adapt, but the testing is going to be really important to understand the difference between the two compounds in order to arrive at the races with quite a bit of knowledge and also to be ready when we change compounds.”

A key element of that confidence-building was racking up the laps at Yas Marina Circuit, and Antonelli completed 287 of them over the six test sessions. That was the sixth most, with ART Grand Prix duo Victor Martins and Zak O’Sullivan, as well as MP Motorsport’s Franco Colapinto, all surpassing 300 laps.

Post-season testing lap count

1 Martins 328   2 O’Sullivan 309   3 Colapinto 304   =4 Bortoleto & Villagomez 294   6 Antonelli 287   7 Cordeel 286   8 Aron 285   9 Marti 283   =10 Bearman & Hadjar 279   12 Crawford 272   13 Fittipaldi 267   14 Correa 258   15 Mason 252   16 Hauger 245   17 Goethe 244   18 Duerksen 241    19 Miyata 218   =20 Maini & Maloney 208   22 Verschoor 125    23 Mansell 79

Post-season testing lap count [teams]

1 ART Grand Prix 637   2 Hitech GP 571  3 Prema 566   4 Campos Racing 562   5 Van Amersfoort Racing 561   6 MP Motorsport 549   7 DAMS 530   8 Virtuosi Racing 502   9 PHM Racing 493   10 Trident 448   11 Rodin Carlin 426

Most laps – session Bortoleto D3 PM – 80   Longest stints D1 Duerksen – 25, D2 Mason – 23, D3 Martins & O’Sullivan – 25

Races before first F2 win in Dallara F2 2018 era

1 Liam Lawson, Lando Norris*
2 Felipe Drugovich, Oscar Piastri
3 Robert Shwartzman
4 George Russell
6 Jack Aitken, Christian Lundgaard
7 Ollie Bearman
8 Anthoine Hubert
9 Dennis Hauger
10 Dan Ticktum, Yuki Tsunoda, Theo Pourchaire

*Norris did two F2 races in 2017 in the final outing for the series’ six-year-old GP2 car

Although Maloney was the benchmark driver over a lap, he ‘only’ completed 208 of them as on Friday morning his car set on fire after 11 laps of running and cost him plenty of track time.

A fire is rare, but not totally unheard of, with the Dallara F2 2018 and over the years it has been engine supplier Mechachrome that has usually been the culprit for day-ending reliability problems. Despite quite a few engine failures over the years, and of course Anthoine Hubert’s fatal accident at Spa-Francorchamps in 2019, the car has proven popular. At times the high costs associated with the car, particularly with F2’s growing and more global calendar, has made the series look worse value for money and detracted drivers. And there’s a genuine question to ask about how many of the F1 juniors would have been able to afford more than one F2 campaign if they had not had access to financial backing from motorsport’s top level.

Clearly the car is one that rookies can learn quick enough to challenge more experienced drivers from the off, as over the last six seasons 14 F2 rookies have won within their first 10 races.

The key in F2, despite its use of reversed grids for half of its races, is to understand how to get the most out of the car over a whole race and on different tyre compounds rather than to be the quickest in qualifying and hope that will be enough to keep you at the front for a race distance.

F2 is the only junior series which includes the challenge of pitstops, and unsurprisingly in testing drivers did do outlaps purely to come back into the pits and practice stopping perfectly in their pit box even if no tyre change took place. Practice starts were also undertaken in various places, which led to warnings that they can only be done in a designated area.

As for the long runs, there were 111 lasting 10 laps or longer that were completed by the 23 drivers that took part in the test. Prema’s duo and Bortoleto were the only drivers to attempt them on Wednesday morning, then PHM Racing’s Joshua Duerksen did a 25-lap run in the afternoon.

Average race pace