Joshua Durksen walks away from the 2025 season with one final first place finish after starting from eighth on the grid. The Paraguayan completes his second Formula 2 season with AIX Racing but will depart the squad to join this year’s teams’ championship winners, Invicta Racing, alongside newly crowned Formula 3 champion, Rafael Camara.
After the eventful Feature Race, how did Durksen feel he performed compared to the rest of the grid?
“I know we have a strong car here and I was super motivated to get the win here today because it’s my last race with AIX Racing so I wanted to give them the best way to say thank you with a race win.”
“Yeah, super motivated and we were quite confident that we could have a good race because we showed it last year also. Everything just went really well and I’m really happy to finish this chapter with them like this.”
This race in Abu Dhabi saw five drivers DNF over the 33 laps, with a large majority of the race held behind a virtual or regular safety car. This made overtaking a difficult task for drivers like Durksen who continued to try and climb in the standings to clinch the final few points.
By beating Roman Stanek and Gabriele Mini to the highest podium position, he agreed that his trust in the car made this result possible.
“The car was really good. For sure, it was a bit tricky to have the cars in another strategy in front of me. I had to overtake them on track and I lost a bit of time there because, of course, I was getting slower because I have more tyre wear from more laps with those tyres.”
“I had to push quite hard because I know that Dino was also overtaking the guys so I needed to make sure that I was always one step in front which didn’t make it easy for the tyre management to be honest. But it paid off and the car just felt really good.”
Durksen had achieved a win in the first Sprint Race of the season, and was yet to repeat this in a Feature Race until today, closing off the season with a near-perfect conclusion in ninth place in the championship standings. Alongside eight podiums across all 28 races, his consistency has made him a prime candidate for a positive 2026 season that kicks off in Melbourne, Australia.
But how has he reflected on his 2025 campaign?
“Has been a season with a lot of ups and downs, I must say. We started really well, I think it’s really fun that I started the season winning and I finish the season winning, that’s really cool!”
“But yeah, we had many up and downs mid-season, many race weekends that we did not score any points. I think this is what hurt us the most, but I’m just really happy that we could finish the season like this, I think after now six podiums in the last eight races or something like that so we came in a really good strength and the car was just feeling always better.”
“I think we slowly started to find the sweet spot and it’s a really nice way to finish the season. For sure, I’m not really happy 100% because I was expecting to be a lot higher in the championship standings, but yeah it’s part of racing, the tough moments, at least I maximise the learning of it and I hope I can be much better next year.”
Formula 2 wraps up for the 2025 season, but will be back in Australia on the 6th of March 2026 to kick off the 14 rounds in order to look for the next rising star.
Photo by James Sutton – Formula 1/Formula Motorsport Limited via Getty Images
