ART's Nyck De Vries sealed the FIA Formula 2 championship with victory in the Russian Feature Race at the Sochi Autodrom.
The Dutchman's season has been one of consistency as he showed at the start of the race with a tremendous start to pull away from the field in the opening laps.
On Lap 2, a short VSC period arrived for the stranded BWT Arden of Artem Markelov who was in the wall at T9, which allowed the Supersoft tyres to take a short breather before racing resumed on the third lap.
De Vries looked after his Medium tyres to ensure he claimed the victory and series' title before he heads off to race in Formula E with Mercedes at the end of the season.
DAMS' Nicholas Latifi was De Vries' nearest challenger in the championship and the race, but couldn't overhaul his title rival over the 28 lap distance despite shadowing him closely.
Louis Deletraz snatched the final spot on the podium on the final lap of the race for Carlin, with a courageous move around the outside into Turn 13 on UNI-Virtuosi's Luca Ghiotto.
Ghiotto decided to take the alternate strategy but his Supersoft tyres fell off the cliff in the final half of the last lap which allowed the Swiss driver to fight back and take third place.
The pair were lucky not to tangle in the braking zone as the Italian locked up heavily.
Sergio Sette Camara led a rather anonymous race in fifth position, unable to keep pace with the leaders, finishing 11 seconds behind De Vries but was nine seconds clear of Nobuharu Matsushita in sixth.
Jack Aitken performed well to finish sixth after a shakey qualifying session saw the Anglo-Korean start from 12th on the grid for Campos Racing, finishing just ahead of ART's Nikita Mazepin in eighth.
Callum Ilott and Guanyu Zhou rounded out the top 10 after a tough race with high tyre wear.
Prema's Mick Schumacher was the only other retirement from the race after an engine failure. The German had made an impressive start making up four places on the opening lap.
On lap 18 the problem struck, but Schumacher tried to continue racing on despite smoke pouring from his engine, before he eventually retired the following lap after the engine cut out as he made his way to the pits.
Sunday's Sprint Race is scheduled to get underway at 11:15am local time.
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