MP Motorsport driver Franco Colapinto won the Formula 3 sprint at Silverstone on Saturday. Together with him Trident’s Gabriel Bortoleto and Campos driver Christian Mansell climbed to the podium.
On Saturday morning, the Formula 3 participants were met by cloudy weather and a few minutes before the start it started to rain, delaying the start of the warm-up lap by ten minutes. During this time the rain stopped, as the track hadn’t gotten wet enough, so almost everyone except Gregoire Sosi decided to start on slicks.
Sebastian Montoya kept the lead at the start, while Johnny Edgar, who started second, dropped back to fourth behind Taylor Barnard and Franco Colapinto. On the second lap, Edgar continued to lose ground and fell back to sixth. Gregoire Sosi rolled back to penultimate place on wet tyres.
On the third lap, Edgard rolled back past the top ten. Montoya tried to create a lead over Barnard, but Jenzer was consistently a second behind the leader.
Gabriel Bortoleto was the most active in the top ten. He pressured Gabriele Mini for fifth for several laps and took the lead in sixth after Mini made a braking error and locked the front wheels at turn sixteen.
On the eighth lap it started to rain quite heavily in some parts of the race ring, and the safety car came out on track so the young drivers wouldn’t crash the cars onto the slicks. Beganovich, Bedrin, Tsolov, Flörsh, Gray and Faria went straight to the pits for wet tyres. Browning, Aaron, Marty, Goethe, O’Sullivan, Edgar, Boya, Esterson, Cresswell, Villagomez and Frederick later pitted.
Montoya, Barnard, Colapinto, Bortoleto, Mini, Fornaroli, Mansell, Barter, Collet and Cohen stayed on track, betting that the rain would stop. Driving the slicks was easy at low speed behind the safety car.
The safety car left the track at the end of the twelfth of eighteen laps and the drivers continued to fight. On the first corner restart, Barnard sent Montoya into a spin, allowing Colapinto to take the lead. Barnarod himself also missed Bortoleto and Montoya returned to the race in 18th. In the course of the circle, Barnardo made another mistake after leaving the track and rolled back past ten.
Racers on wet tires gained an advantage over slick rivals and quickly reclaimed positions. By the fourteenth lap, Paul Aron had moved up to fourth and Beganovich to sixth.
However, the track gradually dried up and the advantage passed to those running on slicks. On lap sixteen, Beganovich lost two positions, missing Mini and Barter. His partner Paul Aron also lost positions – two laps from the finish the Prema riders were already in ninth and tenth place, missing Montoy. This left Aron and Beganovich out of the top ten and Paul didn’t get an extra bonus point for the best round.
Franco Colapinto confidently led the race to victory, taking his first win of the season and the third of his Formula 3 career. Gabriel Bortoleto secured another title win to finish second. Australian Christian Mansell finished third and climbed to the podium for the first time in his career.
Of the riders who took the first five places in the individual classification, in addition to Bortoleto, Mini (5th) and Marty (10th) also earned points. Nikita Bedrin finished eighteenth.
Results are being prepared
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
