Four Red Flags in Half an Hour: Inside F2’s Chaotic Qualifying That Handed Beganovic Pole

Thirty minutes of qualifying, four crashes. Formula 2’s debut at the Madring delivered exactly what everyone had been quietly dreading since the first comments started circulating about this circuit: walls sitting far too close, razor-thin margins for error, and a session that ended up feeling more like a survival test than a flying lap. In the middle of all that chaos, Dino Beganovic walked away with pole on a 1:44.331, but the real story of this qualifying session is written by the four cars that didn’t make it through in one piece.

Maini Opens the Tally, Almost Immediately

Barely six minutes had passed since the green light when Kush Maini lost control of his ART Grand Prix and collected the wall. First red flag of the afternoon. Almost at the same time, Sebastian Montoya had a scare of his own in his Prema after clipping the walls, though the Colombian managed to get back to the pits under his own power, no recovery truck needed.

With Maini’s car cleared, the session resumed with 23 minutes left on the clock, and that’s where qualifying really got interesting.

Varrone’s Crash, Right As He Was Fighting for Pole

Nico Varrone had been flying. The Argentine, who’d already been the second-fastest driver in the previous practice, had the pace to genuinely challenge Nikola Tsolov for the provisional top spot, with the Bulgarian holding the best time at that point on a 1:46.328. Varrone matched him almost sector for sector through the first two splits, just tenths separating them each time. Everything pointed toward him breaking into the fight up front.

And then, exiting the tunnel, he lost the car. The impact against the wall was hard enough to end his session right there, though he was able to climb out and walk away unaided. Second red flag, and with it went what had been, up to that point, one of the most promising laps of the afternoon.

Bennett and Herta Close Out the Chapter of Scares

The session resumed, but the calm didn’t last. With five minutes to go, John Bennett went off with his Trident in a section close to where Varrone had crashed, forcing the third stoppage of the afternoon. And once the clock had already hit zero, with drivers squeezing the last bit of track limits to improve their final times, Colton Herta provided the fourth and final scare: he spun his Hitech and ended up stranded alone in the middle of the track. This time no red flag was shown since the regulation time had already run out, but the message was clear either way: four incidents in thirty minutes says a lot more about the circuit than it does about the drivers.

A Warning That Was Already There

None of this caught anyone completely off guard. Just that morning, in the category’s only practice session, Tasanapol Inthraphuvasak had already been involved in a serious crash that left his car on fire, and Laurens van Hoepen had also clipped the barriers in that same session, though with far less damage. Formula 3 had its own share of trouble too, with Nicola Lacorte crashing into the barrier on the exit of Turn 9.

Even the Formula 1 drivers had been warning about this. Pierre Gasly had said, with a fair amount of dark humour, that he’d bet his money on a red flag showing up, and that he’d already clipped every single wall on the track in the simulator. In hindsight, he wasn’t exaggerating much.

Beganovic Takes It All Amid the Chaos

With that many interruptions, the session ended up running well past its scheduled thirty minutes. In the end, Dino Beganovic took pole with a 1:44.331, ahead of Alexander Dunne by 0.230 and Rafael Câmara by 0.522. Martinius Stenshorne and Tsolov himself, who’d been at the centre of the action before the second crash, rounded out a tightly packed top five. Joshua Dürksen, the Paraguayan driving for Invicta, finished 17th, well off what his team was probably hoping for.

For Maini, Montoya, Inthraphuvasak and Varrone, the afternoon ended without a valid time to show for tomorrow’s grid, a tough blow, especially for Varrone, who’d been showing exactly the pace needed to fight up front before the wall cut that hope short in an instant.

Is this Madring going to keep claiming cars weekend after weekend, or was this qualifying simply the price of debuting a track nobody knew? Tell us what you made of this session in the comments.

QUALIFYING — F2, 2026 SPANISH GRAND PRIX (MADRING)

Sources: Infobae, RacingNews365, Pit Debrief, Speedcafe