Formula 2: Season preview

It's really happened - an entire championship from birth to opening round in under nine months. This weekend, 25 Formula 2 cars have made it from the drawing board to Valencia's Ricardo Tormo circuit for the first race of the series' revival.

The concept has had its critics since it was announced last year, and now it will finally get the chance to answer back. There have been plenty of areas of doubt over the winter - some questioned whether the ambitious brief to create an international championship with a running budget of £200,000 was even possible.

Any fears that the cars wouldn't be quick enough have been dispelled, depending on your interpretation of where the championship fits into the ladder. The performance is some way off that of GP2 or Formula Renault 3.5, and any hopes that it will rival those series - particularly GP2 - are extremely bold, at least at this early stage.

Far more realistic is its place alongside Formula 3 and Formula Master, the latter with which it shares the World Touring Car support bill, and lap times across those three categories are in the same ball park.

Its affordability will ensure that it attracts drivers from all other categories as fewer are able to meet the seemingly ever-escalating budgets, while the prizes on offer at the end of the year make it more than a match even for GP2.

The biggest question is whether a series with centrally-run cars, minimal set-up changes and roving engineers sharing three drivers at each race, can hope to give a young driver anything like the education he would receive going down the established F3, GP2 route. Probably not, but a lot of drivers are coming into F2 in 2009 with plenty of experience in other championships already behind them, and they rightly begin the year as the favourites.

Andy Soucek

But you can't have it both ways. This format is here to offer drivers an opportunity on a much more realistic budget. For that money, you don't get the same technical depth or testing time as elsewhere.

But there are up sides as well. The car has been designed - by Williams no less - with a very clear aim in mind, and 400bhp with relatively little aerodynamic performance from the wings should allow the cars to run closer together and give drivers more opportunities to overtake each other.

So what they don't learn pouring through pages of complex data on a laptop, they might make up for by getting a thorough education in racecraft, spending their 40-minute races three abreast!

The safest looking bet at this point appears to be Andy Soucek, who is putting his GP2 and FR3.5 experience to good use. But don't expect him to have it easy, Red Bull's trio of drivers - Robert Wickens, Mikhail Aleshin and Mirko Bortolotti - have plenty of experience elsewhere, as do the likes of Sebastian Hohenthal, Julien Jousse and Milos Pavlovic.

In fact, you could make a decent argument that the depth of talent in the field at least matches year's class of British F3 and isn't far off Formula Renault 3.5. And that's for a debut season when a lot of drivers were no doubt skeptical about committing to something that didn't exist at the time.

It will take a few rounds before anyone really knows the true picture, and even then a lot will depend what the champion goes on to do in 2010. But for now, sit back and watch the action unfold.