JOHN BENNETT SCORES STUNNING POINTS FINISH FROM MANIC MONZA

Rising British motorsport star John Bennett secured a long-overdue points finish with an electric recovery drive through the field in the latest FIA Formula 2 Championship event at Monza last weekend (06/07 September).

The Salisbury-based youngster enjoyed strong showings during recent visits to Spa-Francorchamps and Hungaroring, edging closer to points finishes as his rookie Formula 2 campaign continued on an upward trajectory in the second half of the season.

After a rare and much-welcomed summer break, Van Amersfoort Motorsport's Bennett headed to Italy for his latest event at the famous 'Temple of Speed', Monza - one of the fastest circuits in the world of motorsport, and home of Ferrari in front its passionate Tifosi - alongside the Italian Grand Prix.

Backed by partners Pangea Insurance, StreetSharp Ltd, Lonetree Limited, Lewco Holdings Limited and FIS Facades, Bennett took to the 3.6-mile track on Friday morning for what would be his first ever experience of Monza. He immediately found his groove in free practice, setting top-15 pace and lapping not far from the ultimate marker up front.

He turned his attentions to qualifying, which was interrupted several times by red flag stoppages. That unfortunately truncated some new tyre runs, with Bennett ending the day 17th on the grid for both of the weekend's races.

The first of those came on Saturday afternoon under sunny skies, and it proved a topsy-turvy 21-lap contest. Bennett maintained P17 before a safety car emerged, but lost out to Sebastian Montoya on the restart as he went on the attack of Victor Martins ahead of him. A Turn 1 escape road trip put him into a fight with Amaury Cordeel, and he soon caught and passed the Rodin Motorsport driver and Cian Shields quickly afterwards.

As drivers soon began to fall out of the race, he capped off the race with a neat pass on Jak Crawford on a Virtual Safety Car restart to complete a great recovery drive to P14 having briefly been eased down to as low as P20.

Starting from P17 on the grid for the longer feature race the following morning, Bennett was quick to go on the offensive at the first chicane as he went side-by-side with team-mate Rafael Villagomez. The first of a string of safety car interruptions cost Bennett places as he double-stacked behind his team-mate in a flurry of pit stops, but he gained back six of those places after another incident-packed restart to climb to P13.

He progressed again on the next restart which resulted in another safety car, climbing to P12 and two places away from the points-paying positions. He made a spot up on Oliver Goethe at the second chicane when action resumed and then on the final lap, a great move on Crawford secured him 10th place and his first points finish of the 2025 season.

John Bennett: "I'm really happy with how the weekend developed. It's always fun learning a new track personally, and Monza is certainly a cool circuit. It's very fast, lots of slipstreaming and quite tactical with the low downforce settings.

"The races were good. It started off with a tricky few laps in race one, but it eventually started to come back to us and we recovered ground. Race two was much better and we had solid pace throughout, but it was another case of recovering after we had to stack in the pits.

"Luckily we stayed out of all of the drama and the incidents, and made some moves late on which felt good. We finally got the points finish we deserved, and a credit to the team to come away with a great result on Sunday."

The next two FIA Formula 2 Championship races will be hosted at Baku in Azerbaijan across the weekend of 19-21 September.

Images from James Gasperotti.