Formula 2: Pole wins Lawson, but could lose him

The Formula 2 round in Monaco is unique in that the qualification for the youth series takes place in two phases. The riders are divided into two groups so that there are no more than 11 cars on the track at the same time, this prevents too much traffic and the participants in the races interfere much less with each other.

As always on difficult urban circuits, the riders gradually increased their speed, and the first more or less representative time in Group A was shown by the championship leader Felipe Drugovic, an MP Motorsport racer.

A few minutes before the end of this part of qualifying, Ralph Boschung, who was back racing after injury, was on the second line, Marcus Armstrong on the third line.

Drugovic had no intention of calming down and continued to improve his own result, taking it to 1:21.348. Boschung also wanted to lap faster, but got stuck at the stop and damaged the car. Carlin’s New Zealand rider Liam Lawson climbed to second in the group, while Jack Duane was third so far.

When the session time was already up, Drugovich tried to add more in the last attempt, but to no avail: he drove to the last sector of the circle with an improvement in his own schedule, but Antony Nogues overdone it in the corner , his car skidded and hit the left rear wheel quite hard. The suspension was clearly damaged and Felipe had to stop at the start-finish line.

In the meantime, a number of riders managed to complete their last laps and Lawson took the intermediate post from Drugovich, who set the best time in group A: 1 min. 21,229 seconds. Ayumu Iwasa gave way to him quite a bit, pushing Drugovich into third. But at the same time, at the end of the session, yellow flags were put up on the last sector of the track because of the same Brazilian, so the stewards immediately went to investigate and there was a risk that someone’s results would be canceled.

Then the participants of group B started to fight for pole position, they too had 16 minutes at their disposal, during which they had to have time to “shoot” towards the track and then try to complete the lap as fast as possible.

In the first five minutes the riders accelerated before Clement Novalak, Drugovic’s teammate, claimed pole position but was more than two seconds slower than the fastest participants in Group A.

American Carlin racer Logan Sargent improved his time by 1.664 seconds in one go, reaching the first line of protocol, and Enzo Fittipaldi was second at this stage of the session, but not for long.

The experienced Jehan Daruvala was the first to break 1m22s, but his result was immediately improved by Theo Purscher, Jüri Vips and Enzo Fittipaldi.

No one has been able to beat Purscher’s time of 1:21.535 in this session, and here’s why: With just over a minute to go before the checkered flag, Jake Hughes had a serious accident, making a mistake in the corners in the pool area.

The Brit was driving quite fast, but he didn’t calculate anything, approached the first “esque”, his car drove up the curb, jumped into the air, went completely out of control and crashed into the opposite bump. The rider did not appear to have been injured, which cannot be said of the vehicle of the Belgian Van Amersfoort Racing team: the Dallara with tail number 25 was quite destroyed.

Of course, the session was immediately interrupted by red flags and there was no time to resume the races.

For example, Liam Lawson will start from pole in Sunday’s race, with Theo Purcher’s car, which set the best time in Group B, in second place, unless of course the results of qualifying are revised after the investigation. of the stewards.