Formula 2 heads into its Azerbaijan round with the most unusual timetable of the season and a championship that tightened dramatically at the last time of asking. The two stories are connected: an expanded Baku weekend means more points on the table than any other round this year, and a title fight separated by seven points is about to be decided across a format nobody has raced before in 2026.

At the Madrid round, Dino Beganovic won the Feature Race and Ritomo Miyata took his maiden F2 victory in the Sprint, but the defining story was at the front of the championship: leader Nikola Tsolov crashed out of the Sprint and finished only 18th in the Feature, while Câmara scraped a point to close the gap to seven. That result reshaped the run-in — and Baku’s format makes the next 72 hours of racing even more consequential.

The reason for the expansion is straightforward: Formula 2 is the only support category at the 2026 Azerbaijan Grand Prix, which frees up track time that a normal weekend — shared with Formula 3 and other series — simply does not allow. F2 has used that space to add a second qualifying session and a second Feature Race.

The Baku City Circuit has a long history of producing chaotic Formula 2 races — its combination of long flat-out straights, a tight castle section and unforgiving walls has decided junior-category outcomes many times before. Doubling the number of Feature Races on that layout, at this stage of a seven-point championship, is close to the highest-variance scenario the season could have thrown up.

The weekend runs Thursday to Saturday — itself unusual, because 27 September is Remembrance Day in Azerbaijan, which has pushed the entire Grand Prix timetable forward a day. Here is how the expanded F2 programme unfolds.

The expanded format is not just about entertainment — it materially changes the championship arithmetic. Each of the two qualifying poles is worth two championship points, and the standard Feature Race scoring system applies to both of the longer races. That stacks the maximum available haul well above a normal round.

A driver who maximises the weekend — both poles, the Sprint and both Feature Races with fastest laps — could theoretically bank in the region of 70 points from a single round, against roughly 39 at a conventional weekend. For Tsolov, that is both an opportunity to rebuild his cushion and a risk: a single Baku wall, in a season where he has already crashed out of races, could hand the championship lead to Câmara with two rounds left.

Tsolov’s seven-point lead is the headline, but the wider table matters at a supersized round: Minì (153) and Dunne (139) are close enough that a maximum Baku haul could vault either into the title fight, while Câmara has the machinery — an Invicta Racing package that has been the form car of the second half — to overturn the deficit in a single weekend. For the full breakdown of how the Madrid round reshaped this picture, see our F2 Madrid results report.

The Baku expansion lands on a 2026 calendar that has already been rebuilt once. Earlier in the year, Formula 2 lost its planned Bahrain and Saudi Arabia rounds and inserted Miami and Montreal to restore the season to its intended number of rounds. Formula 1 went through a parallel disruption, with the Bahrain race retaining its identity but relocating to Malaysia’s Sepang circuit for 2–4 October.

F2 has been explicit that the Baku format is a one-off enabled by track-time availability, not a contingency measure — and it has confirmed that its two remaining rounds, in Qatar (Lusail) and Abu Dhabi (Yas Marina), will return to the familiar structure of one practice, one qualifying session, a Sprint and a Feature Race.

Those closing two rounds are attached to F1 weekends still under scrutiny amid the unresolved situation in the Middle East, with Formula 1 yet to confirm any change to its Qatar and Abu Dhabi plans. Qatar organisers have maintained that their November event is proceeding. For the wider single-seater picture, our Formula 1 standings hub and Spanish Grand Prix report track the championship F2 supports.