As the 2025 F2 Championship finished six rounds, few drivers have endured a campaign as frustrating as Oliver Goethe. The Red Bull Junior and MP Motorsport driver entered the season with high expectations, buoyed by strong winter testing and his growing reputation as one of the more composed figures in the paddock. Yet, as he leaves Barcelona and heads into the summer stretch, starting in Austria, Goethe’s season has been one marked more by inconsistency than headlines.
A quiet start down under
Goethe’s full F2 journey began in Melbourne, with the Albert Park Circuit playing host to the first round of the season for the first time. The high-speed, semi-street layout presented a unique challenge for rookies, and Goethe approached the weekend with a measured, composed attitude. However, the results did little to reflect his efforts.
Qualifying proved difficult as Goethe struggled to extract the maximum from the car, ending up outside the top ten, in nineteenth. With overtaking at a premium and the midfield tightly packed, he was unable to make significant progress in either race. The Sprint yielded no points, while the Feature Race was cancelled due to bad weather and rain delays. This left Goethe with no further chance to race for points.
Steady ground in Sakhir
If Australia was an exercise in finding footing, Bahrain offered Goethe a small but important breakthrough. Topping the timesheets during Free Practice, Goethe already showed promise on the challenging track. Under the lights of Sakhir, he secured his first points of the season with a clean and measured drive to P7 in the Sprint Race. While the Feature wasn’t quite as rewarding—he finished P11 after running just outside the points—it showed a driver learning to handle race management and strategic complexity.
The MP Motorsport car has not been a standout in terms of raw pace this season, and Bahrain showed that Goethe was capable of maximising the machinery available to him. While not headline-grabbing, it was a quietly competent weekend that kept him in the conversation.
Misfortune in Monaco
The chaos of Monaco produced one of Goethe’s most memorable weekends of the season—and arguably the most frustrating.
“It’s an amazing track. It’s a track that you need to get qualifying right, so that is where are full focus lies on. But just going to send it and hope for the best,” Oliver Goethe said ahead of the F2 Monaco GP 2025.
Qualifying left him outside the top ten again, condemning him to start mid-pack in both races. In the Sprint, Goethe was caught in a messy first-lap collision with Joshua Dürksen that brought out the Safety Car. Later in the race, a clash with Victor Martins at the Nouvelle Chicane earned Goethe a 10-second time penalty, dropping him to P12 and out of the points.
The Feature Race was no less unpredictable. A red flag and a series of incidents turned strategy on its head, and despite an early pit stop and decent race pace, Goethe finished P10—earning him one point. While disappointed, he took a reflective stance.
A breakthrough in Imola
The Imola weekend marked a small turning point, with Goethe finally earning his first Feature Race points. A decent qualifying performance saw him start P8 for the Feature Race, his first top 10 Qualifying. Starting third for the Sprint Race after the reverse grid format, a difficult launch from the start dropped him through the field to an eventual 10th-place finish. This left him outside the points.
But Sunday was where Goethe improved. Despite a slow start to the race, that saw the German driver fall to P12, Goethe managed to fight his way up the pack. He kept a cool head under pressure, managed his tyres expertly, and avoided trouble while others faltered. When the chequered flag dropped, he finished in seventh, earning him points.
Oliver Goethe’s frustration was evident when speaking about his start line struggles, which prevented him from capitalising on MP Motorsport’s strong race pace. “I feel that I made the most out of the situation and was starting in a strong position for both races. Unfortunately, in the races, the starts were really bad, I was losing a lot,” he said.
“We are trying to understand why now on data, so that it doesn’t happen again. But I lost a lot of positions at the start and after that I managed to make those positions back, but who knows how the races could have been if I had a good start.”
Back to Earth in Barcelona
Unfortunately for Goethe, the improvement of Imola didn’t carry into Spain. At the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, Goethe looked out of sorts. He qualified only P13, once again missing out on the reverse-grid pole, which set the tone for a challenging weekend.
The Sprint Race was a write-off, ending in P18 after struggling with grip and balance. The Feature was marginally better, but not by much—Goethe crossed the line in P16 after an uneventful run, never quite in contention.
Mid-season verdict
Oliver Goethe’s 2025 F2 season so far has resulted in mixed results. He has demonstrated flashes of pace, most notably in Imola and Bahrain, and has generally avoided major unforced errors. However, he remains plagued by inconsistent qualifying performances, which have too often left him out of position and unable to capitalise on his race pace.
Points finishes have been few and far between, and he sits outside the championship’s top ten. Nevertheless, the potential is there, and with the summer rounds offering more conventional circuits and opportunities for overtaking, there is a sense that Goethe’s best form may yet lie ahead.
Much will depend on whether he can improve his one-lap pace and find more consistency in execution across a race weekend. For a Red Bull-backed driver, results are the currency that counts—and the second half of the season will be crucial in determining how long he stays in the driver academy’s good books.
