FIA Formula 2 Championship leader Frederik Vesti has been competing without race engineer Pedro Matos for the past two rounds at Silverstone and the Hungaroring, but PREMA Racing boss René Rosin insisted that the situation had not caused significant disruptions to the team from an operational standpoint.

Vesti and Matos, a one-time Formula Ford racer, reunited in 2023 after the Danish driver moved back to PREMA from ART Grand Prix. Matos had previously engineered Vesti in 2019 for his successful Formula Regional European Championship title bid and again in 2020 in his first season of FIA Formula 3, both with PREMA.

Having finished ninth in 2022, Vesti now leads the championship on 153 points with four wins and three further podiums entering Round 11 of the F2 season at the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps.

Personal circumstances, however, kept Matos away from the paddock at Silverstone and for part of the Hungaroring weekend. PREMA team manager Guillaume Capietto served as Vesti’s race engineer in the interim, with Rosin moving over to fill Capietto’s role.

At a virtual media roundtable Thursday, Rosin spoke to InsideF2 about what the changes meant for PREMA’s operations.

“The situation has been quite a sad one because a relative to Pedro was sick and passed away, but the team managed to be sticking together.

“Of course, the easy way was to put in Guillaume into the race engineer and me stepping up from team principal as team manager just to keep the same people working alongside the drivers.

“On the other hand, it worked pretty okay. Pedro was there in Hungaroring, the first part of the weekend, so everything was okay, managed and under control.”

While Matos was out, Vesti took victory in the Sprint Race at Silverstone and finished second in the Feature Race in Hungary. He did not score in either of the two races in between.

Image: PREMA Racing