“We’ve just put it on hold for one year,” Dutton told. “It’s not that we’re not going to do it, it’s that we’re not going to do it in 2018 because the drivers that we were working with don’t want to race in Europe this year and they’re going to race in America”. About the performance, Dutton doubted his team was enough competitive and finally added: “We would like to compete in F2 to be strong”. That would be other reason for the postponement.
When asked if the team had come close to signing any drivers, Dutton replied: “Yeah, we did. We came very close to signing two very good drivers but it didn’t happen in the end, so we weren’t prepared to compromise. We were either going to do it properly or not at all. We’d already got engineers from Formula 2 signed up and we were ready to go, but it just gives us a lot more time now to do it better for next year. We’re already working on next year now.”
Although it has delayed its F2 entry, Fortec will be in the Formula Renault 2.0 Eurocup, Euroformula Open, BRDC British Formula 3 and British Formula 4 championships this year. Dutton recognized they were thinking use Formula V8 3.5 cars. “We’ll most probably use those as test cars in preparation for 2019 when we’ll come back to Formula 2, all being well.
This season, F2 will feature 10 teamps in its grid. Finally, current champion Russian Time will continue after it was left off the initial entry list. On the contrary Racing Engineering won’t be in the category because the team will participate in the European Le Mans Series.