Arvid Lindblad claimed his fourth win of the season during a dramatic Formula 3 race completing back-to-back wins on home soil. Gabriele Mini and Callum Voisin completed the podium.
During the formation lap, several cars went into the pits to switch to slick tyres after starting on wets, including Santiago Ramos, Dino Beganovic, Oliver Goethe, Tim Tramnitz, Gabriele Mini, and Lindblad.
It was an unusual grid as half of the boxes were empty as a result of the cars that decided to make their way into the pitlane.
Luke Browning was able to safely keep the lead on the race start, leading Leonardo Fornaroli and Max Esterson.
Cian Shields provoked the first Safety Car of the session as he stopped into Turn 1.
The race resumed on Lap 3, with Esterson and Voisin fighting for third.
The latter claimed the position and swept Fornaroli for second in just a couple of corners. But the Rodin driver didn’t stop there, as he moved into the inside of Browning to take the lead of the race.
Chaos took over again as Sophia Floersch hit the barriers ahead of Turn 5 after contact with Dino Beganovic, summoning another Safety Car. The clash was triggered when Alex Dunne went off-line coming out of Village and hastily rejoined the Wellington straight, temporarily going airborne as he hit a sausage kerb.
That prompted Floersch to jink left, tagging Beganovic in the process.
The rain started to fall harder, with Tim Tramnitz stopping again during the first lap of the Safety Car.
Voisin, who was leading the race, received a five-second time penalty for leaving the track and gaining an advantage in his pass on Esterson earlier on and the penalty was increased to 10-seconds shortly after. Meanwhile, more cars kept stopping for wets as the rain intensified.
The race returned to green on Lap 8 as the Safety Car was called into the pitlane, with Voisin leading but carrying two penalties.
Browning quickly tried a move into Turn 1, getting it done and re-taking the lead.
Voisin dropped to third as Fornaroli also passed him. The Rodin driver kept losing places, moving down to 11th in just a couple of corners as he hard tyres struggled to cope with the increasingly wet conditions.
Another big crash occurred on Lap 9, with Dunne, Sebastian Montoya, and Joshua Dufek crashing into each other and going into the barriers right behind the pit entry.
The incident translated into the third Safety Car of the race.
The rain stopped under the Safety Car laps but the track was still quite damp. Nonetheless, some radio messages suggested that the intensity would pick up again in a matter of minutes.
Mini reported that the rain started to fall again into the circuit as the lap count was replaced with a timed countdown, a consequence of all the caution periods.
With a lot of uncertainty about the climate conditions, the race resumed with 13 minutes to go and Browning defending his lead.
The Williams Academy Driver safely did so and kept the lead of the race, but just behind Sami Megatounif and Joseph Loke made contact causing damage to each other’s cars.
Noel Leon swept Esterson to move into a provisional podium position with 10 minutes to go. Shortly thereafter and using his DRS, he successfully launched an attack on Fornaroli to claim second place.
Voisin, who had fallen out of the top-20 as the rain intensified, climbed back to fourth in the space of a couple of laps as the race went dry once again, enabling him to lap seconds faster compared to the wet tyre runners.
With five minutes to go, he took the lead from Browning, but he was still carrying a 10-second penalty. Lindblad and Mini also overtook Browning using their tyre advantage compared to the Hitech driver.
Lindblad was effectively in the lead of the race, but his teammate was only a few tenths behind him. The team asked Mini “to be smart” with his teammate to not give Voisin the gap he needed to win. The gap between the top three and the wet-tyre runners was up to 15 seconds with two minutes to go.
On the penultimate lap, Lindblad went wide but was able to keep the position from Mini. Voisin was just less than a second ahead, so Lindblad was on for winning the race.
Prema completed its 1-2, led by Lindblad, ensuring he scored a home-double after the Voisin penalty was applied after the chequered flag. Nonetheless, Voisin was able to stay on the podium due to the gap built to the wet-tyre runners.
Van Amersfoort’s Tommy Smith took fourth with Piotr Wisnicki completing the top five, cementing a strong Rodin result.
Oliver Goethe, Fornaroli and Browning took sixth, seventh and eighth respectively with Nikita Bedrin and Noel Leon completing the top-10.
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