The FIA Formula 2 Championship returns to Europe this weekend at the Circuit de Catalunya, Barcelona in Spain for the second round of the 2017 campaign, the location for the first pre-season test and a circuit known well to the teams and drivers alike as they look to grab as many points as possible to get their title fights underway.

Artem Markelov (RUSSIAN TIME) and Charles Leclerc (PREMA Racing) took the honours in the first round feature and sprint races respectively in Bahrain, with the Monegasque driver leading the standings from the Russian and Oliver Rowland (DAMS), providing an early target for the rest of the grid.

In the teams' championship RUSSIAN TIME have a small lead ahead of PREMA and DAMS, but after one round 7 of the 10 teams scored points, pointing to the fine margins between the various teams and promising a tight battle to the end of the season. With all of the grid having so
much experience of the Spanish circuit, the fight for second round honours should be even tighter than it was for the first.

Mario Isola, Pirelli: "We witnessed an exciting start to Formula 2 in Bahrain with tyre strategy playing an important role, most notably in Charles Leclerc's unprecedented and spectacular sprint race victory. With Barcelona being such a demanding circuit on the tyres, we can expect this to be the case again: nominating the hard and soft tyres should help produce some action on a track that is hard to overtake on."

Johnny Cecotto: We have a good car in Barcelona, and in testing we were very quick. It's a wonderful circuit because you have high speed, medium speed, slow speed, so you have the whole palate in one place. It's quite difficult because there is a lot of high speed at the start of the lap, so you really have to be ready with the front tyres, but then also be not too aggressive in the warm up so you've still got rear tyres in the last sector, which is really important. It's a tricky track but it's really nice to drive, even though it's very technical.

"The trick is really to manage your tyres, so you can attack in the first sector but have some tyres left for the last sector, and it's not easy: we do a lot of testing there but it's always 15 or 20 degrees lower than when we race, so you arrive there and think you know everything about the circuit, but actually you know nothing! It starts all over again, so you just have to empty your mind and try to focus on the differences, not on the things you know from experience: if you are too focussed on what you experienced before then you lose out on the reaction you need.

"Many of the corners you don't see the apex or the exit, they are very blind and it makes it very tricky, so you have to be really precise to hit the lines. There are several things to know, like how you have to adapt if it's a performance run or a long run because there are quite different lines from one to the other: you can gain a lot of time in a corner in qualy but if you do that for 3 or 4 laps in the race then you'll just kill the tyres, so you have to change your driving style a lot. For some reason Barcelona never worked out for me for a while, even though I was always quick in parts, but then I won the race from P16 so I hope I know the magic trick now!"

Notes

This week is the second round of the FIA Formula 2 Championship, and the first to be in Europe following the opening round in Bahrain.

The first of 2 pre-season tests was held at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya on 13-15 March. The honours for the 6 sessions across the 3 days were shared evenly: day one was dominated by N obuharu Matsushita (ART Grand Prix), topping the afternoon ahead of teammate Alexander Albon after Johnny Cecotto (Rapax) set the pace in the morning, Albon denied the Venezuelan the honours the next morning as Rapax teammate Nyck de Vries topped the afternoon, while day 3 saw Norman Nato (Pertamina Arden) top the qualy-style morning session from Rowland, with Luca Ghiotto (RUSSIAN TIME) claiming the afternoon.

Nato topped the test session with his best time on day 3 of 1:27.834, just 0.05 ahead of Rowland and a tenth up on Albon.

There will be one driver change as Roberto Merhi joins Campos Racing in car No 12 for this event.