The F2 title favourite who seeks consistency over wins

“At the start, I didn’t like motorsport.” As soon as our chat with Leonardo Fornaroli begins, he candidly opens up.

The Piacenza native, born in December 2004 within 200km of both Monza and Imola, did grow up around racing. His father, Valentino Fornaroli, raced competitively from 2008 to 2015 – mostly in the Italian GT Championship, with a short foray into International GT Open.

Meanwhile, young Leonardo was experimenting elsewhere. “I tried many sports, but none interested me,” he confesses. But the key – as is the case for many racing drivers – was a karting outing.

“Watching my father doing races, starting to watch Formula 1 with him on TV… I said, ‘Okay, I want to try’,” Fornaroli relates. “One day we went to try the normal go-karts – the very simple ones, electric indoor. First lap, I fell in love with it.”

Fornaroli’s karting career didn’t feature amazing highlights; his early single-seater years were quite low-key too, as he was a consistent frontrunner in Italian F4 but took just one victory over two years, then achieved many points-scoring finishes as a rookie in the Formula Regional European Championship by Alpine but didn’t make it to the podium.

In those years, Fornaroli mixed with a number of future F1 drivers: Gabriel Bortoleto, Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Isack Hadjar, and 2021 Italian F4 champion Oliver Bearman. Could he tell that these drivers were special at the time? “Of course they were!

“With Ollie Berman we had a great season in F4 together. He was very quick. We had a hard time on track trying to fight with him; a really nice fight through all the years. So that was the guy that I said, ‘OK, this guy, if he continues like this, he can actually go there in the big championship.’

“In Misano, I remember we had a great battle, both in Race 1 and Race 3. In Race 1, I won. In Race 3, he won. At the end, we both won with some gap to each other. So in the first laps of the race, we were giving everything to take the lead from each other. It was a very enjoyable fight.”

Fornaroli then graduated to F3, spending another two seasons with the Milan-based Trident outfit he raced with in FRECA – the team that has led Bortoleto, Fornaroli and Rafael Camara to the F3 title from 2023 to 2025.

“In Formula Regional, it was a quite risky choice for me to go with them because they were fully new to the category,” the Italian admits. “But because we worked so hard all together, also with my team-mates, with all the engineers together to try to develop the car as much as we could, we were able to grow a lot throughout the season. At the end, we managed to win the rookie title and finish P8 overall in the championship, which for me was a really nice result given how it was going at the start of the season.

“It shows that the method of Trident is working also in F3. For sure, in F3 they were starting in a higher position because they had much more experience in the category – but still, even if you are one of the best teams, there is always [something] to improve.

“Consistency is the key in feeder series now, because the level is so high that doing points every race can actually put you in contention for the title” Leonardo Fornaroli

“And that’s what I liked in these two years that I stayed with the F3 team: already searching for the best car, and also they were helping me a lot to try to drive as good as I can. The teamwork is amazing.”

Fornaroli’s time in F3 was a classic case of ‘one year to learn, one year to win’. The Italian’s maiden campaign yielded one pole position and a few podium finishes; then in 2024, he qualified in the top six at all rounds but one, classified in the top 12 in every single race among a 30-strong field, and achieved a crucial seven podiums – which was key to prevailing over Gabriele Mini, Luke Browning and Arvid Lindblad, all of whom enjoyed some highlights in an up-and-down season.

Was it frustrating clinching the title without actually winning any races? “No, I wasn’t frustrated at all,” Fornaroli insists. “Because consistency is the key in feeder series now, because the level is so high that doing points every race can actually put you in contention for the title. Also, I didn’t need to win a race to win the title.

The Italian achieved the rare feat of winning a title without winning a race in F3 last year

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

“Actually, winning the title without any race wins taught me how to stay calm and composed under huge pressure – because the pressure is there, because you are a championship contender. I just put myself in the best position for the main goal. At the end, I did it on my own and I achieved that.”

This calmness emanates from the 20-year-old both on and off the track. It is quite telling that he has not retired from a race in a collision or crash of his own making since his F4 days; he openly tries to “think a bit more” when he’s racing.

“Sometimes, if you are fighting for big points, it’s better to stay out of trouble and bring home the result instead of trying to do a very hard overtake to try to score a couple more points. Because if you get it well, you score a bit more points, but if it doesn’t end well, you lose so many points.” This may sound obvious, but teenage racers do tend to be accident-prone. Not him.

Likewise, Fornaroli didn’t panic when Mini, Lindblad and Browning were 19 to 26 points ahead with three rounds to go in F3 2024 – though he casually admits this was “not nice”.

“I just remained calm and said to myself, ‘OK, I know it’s only three rounds to go, but still everything can happen. So, just try to score as many points as you can, and just focus on your own things.’ In the end, we still managed to do it and I’m very proud of that. Also, it helped me this year because after Barcelona, we were P6. I don’t remember how many points to the leader, but we were still quite far. And in the end, I managed to regain the championship lead.

“It shows me that the experience of fighting for the championship last year, it’s also helping me this year on staying more calm and more focused on myself to achieve good results. Of course, the season is far from over and everything can still happen. Nothing is decided.”

This year, Fornaroli’s F2 campaign started strongly with second place in the Melbourne sprint – though he started from pole thanks to Saturday’s reverse grid for the top 10 qualifiers – and he has gradually become stronger since then.

Despite leading the F2 standings, Fornaroli has been enduring the tests of a rookie driver all the same

Photo by: Formula Motorsport Ltd

“I had some mistakes in the races due to the inexperience, like some choices in the strategy, some mistakes on the tyre management, on the pitstop, on the out-lap with cold tyres,” the Invicta driver admits, with most of these areas new to F2 rookies as there are no mandatory pitstops in F3. “It’s something that you improve race by race. Now I improved definitely under that point of view in the last races.”

Fornaroli’s breakthrough came in the Silverstone sprint race, in which he took a lights-to-flag win from reverse-grid pole position – his first victory in motorsport since his sophomore F4 campaign back in 2021, which he admittedly was “a little bit” relieved about.

Over those four years, he climbed on 21 podiums across four different championships, never reaching the top step – which is not dissimilar to F1 driver Pierre Gasly’s own winless streak separating his title-winning campaigns in Eurocup Formula Renault 2.0 in 2013 and GP2 (now F2) in 2016. At the time, Gasly had collected 16 podium finishes, taking the runner-up spot in the 2014 Formula Renault 3.5 season in the process, but his dry spell also featured a number of missed opportunities – most of which were out of his control.

And just like Gasly, the Italian took three F2 wins in quick succession once he broke his duck, snatching the lead from third on the grid in the Spa-Francorchamps sprint, then dominating the Hungarian feature race despite a five-second penalty for speeding in the pitlane.

“I did a good improvement on that compared to the first races, but still I have to help [my engineer] a bit more; also improve a little bit my feedback from the car to make his life easier” Leonardo Fornaroli

Fornaroli consequently leads the drivers’ standings going into the summer break, with a 17-point advantage over a tight four-driver chasing pack comprised of Jak Crawford, Richard Verschoor, Browning and Alex Dunne.

Irishman Dunne is the driver that has impressed Fornaroli the most so far – he wasn’t a consistent frontrunner in F3 last year – especially following a dominant display in the wet Spa-Francorchamps F2 feature race, where the McLaren junior crossed the finish line first, with a 10-second penalty for a start procedure infringement dropping him to ninth.

Two-thirds into the F2 season, Fornaroli still has room for improvement, which will be key in a competitive title race. “To collaborate a bit more with my engineer on the set-up choice,” he points out as an area he needs to look at. “I did a good improvement on that compared to the first races, but still I have to help him a bit more; also improve a little bit my feedback from the car to make his life easier.”

Despite a small scattering of wins, the 20-year-old remains a near-constant presence on the podium

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Sutton Images via Getty Images

F2 can be especially tricky in that regard with just a 45-minute free practice session preceding qualifying, with different compounds in both. “You have also to keep in mind what is going to change,” Fornaroli details. “Maybe you are going to have more front [end] and maybe you are going to have a better rear [end], or overall grip in general. The engineers have more experience on that so they know already the right choice, but it’s always a great help if the driver can do his part and make his life a little bit easier.”

Success in F2 as a debutant could fast-track Fornaroli to F1, as was the case for most rookie champions in the series – Charles Leclerc, George Russell and Gabriel Bortoleto got a seat the following year, while Oscar Piastri spent a season on the sidelines at Alpine before McLaren gave him his big break.

Yet, unlike the likes of Dunne (McLaren), Browning (Williams) and Crawford (ex-Red Bull, now Aston Martin) and Verschoor (ex-Red Bull), Fornaroli has never been affiliated to an F1 team.

“It’s a very tricky process,” he explains. “It’s not that you have a couple of nice results and automatically you enter. It’s a long thing to evaluate. You have to see what is the best thing for you. For the moment we had a few conversations, which is nice, but I try to focus on myself, and with my management I will try to go forward on that. To have some conversations is nice because it means that some teams are starting to notice what I’m doing on track.”

As to whether he’s in touch with anyone regarding a 2026 F1 seat, Fornaroli cautiously refrains from saying anything that might have the slightest chance of jeopardising his future: “I don’t know what’s going to happen. For now, I’m just focusing on the present to try to win this championship. Then we’ll see in the future.”

And if he fails to win the title this year, Fornaroli would consider a reserve F1 role – hoping for not only simulator work but also on-track tests – alongside another F2 campaign: “If I’m not going to win, instead of not racing, it can be more helpful to repeat, so I’m going to keep that in mind.”

Interestingly, this approach does differ from most other drivers. F2 frontrunners usually refrain from signing up for another campaign in the series, lest it damages their reputation if they fail to win emphatically; in the 2020s, the only drivers who returned to F2 after finishing in the top four of the championship have been Robert Shwartzman and Theo Pourchaire, both of whom improved in their last attempts at the series – the Russian was fourth as a rookie and second as a sophomore, while the Frenchman went fifth, second, champion. But none of them made it to F1.

Pourchaire stuck around in F2 to eventually win the title – but it didn’t help unlock a spot in F1

Photo by: Alfa Romeo

If Fornaroli ever does reach F1, he’ll get to race alongside one of his childhood role models – he was impressed with Lewis Hamilton and particularly liked Sebastian Vettel in the 2010s – though the family hero is MotoGP legend Valentino Rossi. “Because my father started with motocross, he’s a big fan of motorbikes as well. Apart from F1, we’re watching MotoGP so much and cheering for Valentino. I mean, we have so many gadgets of him here at home! And I actually had the opportunity to meet him this year – it was like a dream for me.”

While Italy’s riders have had plenty of success over the years, maybe the likes of Andrea Kimi Antonelli and Leonardo Fornaroli will eventually bring home a first F1 drivers’ world title since Alberto Ascari in the early 1950s. It’s about time for such a major nation in racing.

With Antonelli reaching F1 and Fornaroli on the ascendency, Italy’s grand prix representation is finally starting to glow again

Photo by: Joe Portlock / LAT Images via Getty Images