Alexander Dunne held the lead of Baku's Feature Race 2 to the chequered flag and was classified third. A five-second time penalty for crossing the white line at the pit entry, handed down during the race and applied at the flag, dropped him behind two cars he had beaten on the road and handed the win to Rafael Camara. On the Formula 2 feature-race scale that is the difference between 25 points and 15, so the line cost Dunne ten, and it is the reason he leaves Azerbaijan eighteen points off the championship lead rather than one.
Baku was an unusual round before any of that happened. Formula 2's drivers' standings table carries 29 race columns across a 14-round calendar, and the extra one sits on Azerbaijan: the header runs Sprint then Feature twelve times, then a second Feature, then two ordinary pairs for Lusail and Yas Marina. Every driver's row confirms it with three Baku cells rather than two. Three races, and three different winners.
Dino Beganovic won the first of them, Friday morning's Sprint Race, for ten points. Dunne then converted pole into Feature Race 1 that afternoon, his first win of 2026, leading Martinius Stenshorne home for a Rodin Motorsport one-two while Beganovic held off Camara for third. The race ran 22 laps and Dunne crossed the line to begin the last of them, which the series notes was far enough for a full points payout.
Formula 2 announced the format on 14 September: a second qualifying session and a second feature race, at Baku only. "As Formula 2 is the only Support Event at the Azerbaijan Formula 1 Grand Prix, together with the promoters, we have opted for a supersized F2 race weekend," said Bruno Michel, the series' chief executive, adding that "this is the only weekend where the Timetable allows the additional sessions." Lusail and Yas Marina revert to one sprint and one feature.
Dunne left Friday expecting more of the same. "We're both going from the front row tomorrow so if we can bring home another good result and hopefully another 1-2, that would be nice," he said after Feature Race 1, having just taken pole, the win and the fastest lap from a single afternoon.
Nikola Tsolov scored nothing in that race, and it flipped the championship. Tsolov had gone into the weekend seven points clear of Camara, 177 to 170, and eleven clear after the Sprint. Camara's fourth place in Feature Race 1 moved him to 182 against Tsolov's 181, a one-point lead and the only change of leader the weekend produced. Dunne, meanwhile, went from 38 points behind the leader to eight.
Stenshorne led the field away in Saturday's Feature Race 2 from pole, with Dunne second and Camara third, and the Safety Car was out within two laps after John Bennett was tagged into a spin and Rafael Villagomez stopped at Turn 1. Racing resumed on lap 3. Camara tried the outside line at the first corner and Dunne held him off. Tsolov had dropped a place off the line and was back to his starting eleventh by Turn 3, past Ritomo Miyata, which the series flagged at the time as significant in the title fight.
The stop is what decided this one, and the timing of it ran through two separate Virtual Safety Car periods. Rodin called Dunne in at the start of lap 7, moments before Miyata stopped on track and brought out the first. A stoppage for Inthraphuvsak at Turn 16 then brought in Stenshorne, Leon and Mari Boya, and the second Virtual Safety Car was called just after they rejoined, which let Dunne jump his own team-mate for the effective lead. Camara, Tsolov and Laurens van Hoepen waited until lap 11 and the return to green, and the series is explicit that they "gained time on their rivals" by doing so. Camara came out in front.
Dunne took the place back using DRS into Turn 1 once his tyres were up to temperature, and Invicta Racing told Camara over the radio that it was happy for him to stay behind. Dunne's five-second penalty came shortly afterwards. By the closing laps the instruction had reversed, with Invicta telling Camara to try to overtake Dunne to defend from Tsolov. He never got past, and second on the road became first once the five seconds were applied.
Tsolov, fourth after the stops, set the fastest lap of the race, took Stenshorne for third with DRS on the main straight after being held off at Turn 1 on lap 20, and had closed to within DRS range of Camara by lap 27. He finished second on the road and second on the classification, nineteen points for the afternoon once the fastest lap was added, having started eleventh.
The penalty's effect on the title is narrower than it looks, and the arithmetic below is this site's own, recomputed from the published cells rather than taken from anyone's report. Without it, Dunne scores 25, Camara 18 and Tsolov 16, which would read Camara 200, Dunne 199, Tsolov 197. Camara would still lead. What the white line changed was the size of the lead, from one point to seven, and which of his two rivals sits second.
Behind the top three, Stenshorne finished fourth, van Hoepen fifth, Boya sixth, Beganovic seventh, Leon eighth, Mini ninth and Roman Bilinski took the last point in tenth. Camara's own assessment was flat: "Not the way we wanted P1 but overall it was a good race, good points for the championship and very happy with this weekend overall."
The published standings after Baku are Camara 207, Tsolov 200, Dunne 189 and Gabriele Mini 163. Beganovic is fifth on 137, and that figure deserves a note: Formula 2's own Feature Race 2 report gives him 139, while its standings table gives 137. The table is the one that reconciles, three ways over. His 25 scored cells sum to 137, the Feature Race 1 report puts him on 131 after that race, and seventh place in Feature Race 2 is worth six. Among teams, Campos Racing leads on 333 from Invicta Racing on 297, with Rodin Motorsport one point further back.
Formula 2 does not race again until Lusail on 27 to 29 November, roughly nine weeks after Baku, and then closes at Yas Marina. Camara goes into that break with a seven-point lead and a win he led part of on track and finished second in, and Dunne goes into it having scored 50 points across three races, more than anyone, and lost the one that would have made him the story.