RUSSIAN TIME BACK AS FORTEC POSTPONES

FORMULA 2 HAS FINALISED A 20-car grid for 2018 following a pre-season entry shuffle.

Fortec Motorsports, which revealed last November that it would join F2 from the defunct Formula V8 3.5 series, will now postpone its entry for one year after reaching an agreement with championship boss

Bruno Michel.

“We’re not prepared to do it half-heartedly, we’d rather go out there and be strong,” said Fortec team boss Richard Dutton. “We’ve been working with Bruno on it and between us we decided it would be better, rather than go out there and not look good, [to postpone the entry]. We’ve got all the right people to do it properly, we just didn’t perhaps have the drivers with the budgets to do it properly, so we’ve shelved it for a year.”

Fortec’s decision to step back for a year has opened the door for reigning F2 champion squad Russian Time to carry on for a sixth successive season in GP2/F2, despite being absent from the original team-entry announcement. It will run 2017 runner-up Artem Markelov (below) for his fifth campaign, along with Honda protege Tadasuke Makino, who steps up from European Formula 3.

Joining Fortec on the F2 sidelines – albeit without a stated return date – is Racing Engineering. A second-tier stalwart since the inaugural GP2 season in 2005, the Spanish team switches to the European Le Mans series for this year, with Norman Nato listed as its first driver on the championship’s entry list.