Three days on from the chequered flag at the Madring, the shape of the 2026 season looks very different. Dino Beganovic’s lights-to-flag Feature Race victory — his first in Formula 2, delivered from pole with two Safety Car restarts managed flawlessly — was the drive of the weekend, and it moved the DAMS Lucas Oil driver to 106 points and sixth in the standings. Ritomo Miyata’s Saturday Sprint win, his maiden F2 victory, made him the seventh different race winner of the season and gave HitechGP its first victory since Baku 2025.

But the story that will define the run-in is what happened to the championship leader. Nikola Tsolov crashed out of Saturday’s Sprint after hitting the inside wall at Turn 20, then gambled on the hard tyre in Sunday’s Feature and finished 18th, outside the points. Rafael Câmara salvaged a single point from a penalty-hit afternoon — tenth at the flag after a pass on Mari Boya with DRS into Turn 5 — and even that was enough to cut the gap to seven.

Alex Dunne’s Sunday was the other mover worth noting. Second place and the fastest lap — a 1:46.257 on lap 29 — gave the Rodin Motorsport driver 19 points from the Feature alone and lifted him to 139 for the season, 31 scored across Monza and Madrid while Tsolov has managed ten. The rookie battle at the front of this championship has tightened into something genuinely unpredictable, the kind of run-in where the points structure itself starts to decide outcomes.

Minì remains mathematically live in third, 24 points back, but the MP Motorsport driver needs the leaders to stumble again. Dunne, 38 adrift, is the outsider with the wind behind him — and with a maximum of 39 points available per round from pole, two wins and fastest laps, nothing is settled. For a refresher on how the Feature and Sprint scales differ, our explainer on how racing championships are scored has the full breakdown.

Teams’ championship

Campos Racing led the teams’ standings at the summer break on 261 points from Invicta Racing (187), MP Motorsport (176) and Rodin Motorsport (167). Invicta and Rodin have both closed significantly since, while DAMS Lucas Oil’s double score in Madrid — Beganovic’s 25 and Roman Bilinski’s two — was the team’s biggest single-race haul of the season.

Formula 2 resumes at Baku, a street circuit that has produced more championship-altering chaos than almost any other venue on the calendar. The combination of one of the longest full-throttle runs in racing, a narrow castle section and unforgiving walls makes it the least predictable stop in the second half of the season — and with seven points covering the top two, that unpredictability now cuts in every direction.

The strategy questions are familiar ones. Baku’s long pit straight rewards the tow and punishes anyone caught without it, tyre choice between the prime and option compounds is rarely straightforward, and the circuit’s history of late Safety Car interventions means no lead is safe until the flag. Tsolov’s Madrid hard-tyre gamble is exactly the kind of call Baku punishes twice over.

While F2 pauses between rounds, the track action this weekend belongs to MotoGP. The Qatar Airways Grand Prix of Austria at the Red Bull Ring in Spielberg runs from 18 to 20 September — Round 15 of a 22-round season — and the championship picture is even tighter than Formula 2’s. For the full background on the grid’s ongoing reshuffle, see our MotoGP rider market update.

Defending champion Marc Márquez and Jorge Martín arrive in Austria tied at the top on 274 points, with Márquez holding the official lead on countback thanks to his greater number of Grand Prix wins. Marco Bezzecchi sits just 33 points behind the leaders, still very much in the title hunt, while Fabio Di Giannantonio leads a tight scrap for fourth, closely followed by Pedro Acosta and an in-form Álex Márquez.

Track profile: Red Bull Ring

Spielberg is defined by long straights and severe, heavy braking zones that test machine stability and stopping power like nowhere else on the calendar. Ducati machinery has historically excelled here, which on paper offers an advantage to Márquez — though Martín and Bezzecchi have both shown the pace to fuel Aprilia’s ongoing title charge.