From pacenotes to pit boards: Rovanperä clocks first serious F2 miles with Hitech at Jerez
Two-time World Rally champion Kalle Rovanperä has taken the first proper bite out of single-seaters, completing his maiden official Formula 2 test with Hitech at Jerez — and by all accounts, he didn’t look out of place.
The Finn’s flirtation with circuit racing has been public for a while — we’ve seen him in a single-seater at a Red Bull promo last year — but this was different. No cameras, no donuts. Just a serious F2 programme, a real car, and a stopwatch the team cared about. While no lap times were released, sources familiar with the running suggested Rovanperä cleared the internal benchmarks Hitech laid down for a first outing.
“First F2 test done! Can be quite happy with the test days,” Rovanperä posted afterwards. “We got some valuable seat time and finally real feeling with the car! Next week it’s time for Rally Japan!” It was his first time in the real hardware after recent simulator work to understand the basics — aero load, braking windows, tyre prep. The stuff no gravel stage teaches you.
This is Rovanperä’s pivot year. He remains in the title picture with two WRC rounds to go — Japan and Saudi Arabia — still capable of turning three rally wins so far into a third crown in four seasons if the final results break his way. But once the champagne’s packed away, the 25-year-old is putting rallying in the rear-view mirror to chase what he calls “the highest level of circuit racing.”
The roadmap is ambitious and, crucially, staged. He’ll move to Super Formula in 2026 with KCMG — a brutal proving ground and, in raw pace terms, the closest thing to Formula 1 — before targeting a full F2 campaign in 2027 to stack Super Licence points and racecraft. It’s an unusual order for European drivers, but for someone with world titles on the dirt, it’s a smart way to compress learning while getting serious mileage in quick cars.
Rovanperä isn’t sugarcoating how steep this is. “I’m practically starting from zero, so I’m behind a lot of others in the beginning,” he told Finland’s MTV3. “I’m mentally prepared to get my ass kicked in the beginning and that’s how it should be.” That’s not false modesty; it’s a sober read of the gap between a rally Yaris dancing on the edge and an F2 car that punishes imprecision. Different sport, same brain. Now it has to run a different software.
Toyota Gazoo Racing will stay in his corner — he remains under a long-term deal — and he’s well aware some fans think this switch is too much, too late. “I understand that this move is surprising, bold, and very ambitious,” he said when announcing the plan last month, adding that TGR’s backing gives him the latitude to “head into the unknown” with conviction. It helps when the factory that helped make you a champion believes there’s another summit worth climbing.
Not everyone is convinced, and that’s fine. Mika Salo — who knows Japanese single-seaters from the inside — called it “a really big challenge,” noting how foreign formula cars will feel to a rally driver. He’s right: GT cars would be a gentler hop. But making the hard jump is the point here. If you want to know whether the elite rally instincts translate to apex speed and tyre whispering, you have to go where the margins are thin and the stopwatch cruel.
The early signs? Encouraging, not headline-grabbing. Which, frankly, is what you want on day one. Jerez is a tidy place to learn: technical enough to expose bad habits, forgiving enough to build rhythm. Hitech will keep him busy with more private running across the winter, the focus less on outright pace and more on consistency, braking confidence and getting on top of tyre life — the currency of every F2 weekend.
From an F1 perspective, the timing is long play, not lottery ticket. Super Formula will harden him up in cars that bite; F2 in 2027 will give him the yardstick against a field living and breathing single-seaters. If he’s genuinely quick by then, people will notice. They always do.
For now, consider this first test a clean launch. No fireworks, just a fast learner getting comfortable with a very different kind of speed — and sounding like he’s ready for the bruises that come with it.
