Formula 2: Berman won qualifying in Jeddah

In the first phase of the season in Formula 2, Zane Maloney achieved two victories in a row – in the history of the youth series, starting with GP2, there have never been such precedents in which one driver dominated at the beginning of the championship. It was of course interesting to see whether the representative of Barbados, driving for the Rodin Motorsport team, would continue to maintain the dominant position in Saudi Arabia.

However, a week ago, Maloney was only dominating in the races, and during qualifying, despite being in fairly high positions, he was still not on pole. Unfortunately, the weekend in Jeddah did not start in the best way for him – during qualifying some technical problems occurred with his car, which prevented him from fighting for good results.

But he wasn’t the only one having problems: at the very beginning of the session, Franco Colapinto hit a barrier and damaged the car’s rear suspension. The MP Motorsport team tried to do something and the Argentinian managed to return to the track, but his Dallara lost speed and he could not claim high positions.

Dennis Hauger was the first to set a good lap time, Paul Aaron was only slightly behind him – in Bahrain the Estonian Hitech racer climbed to the podium in the main race of the weekend and took 3rd place in the individual classification.

In the first half of the session, Oliver Berman, a Prema rider, was in third place on the timesheet for quite some time. The Italian team is traditionally considered one of the favorites of the championship, but in Bahrain it clearly disappointed, the cars were not very fast, so Berman and his new teammate, Andrea Kimi Antonelli, mainly kept a low profile. It seems that Prema has been able to solve the problems and in Jeddah they plan to rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of their fans.

Speeds gradually increased, but it was not possible to immediately remove Hauger from the front line, and only after the teams installed new sets of tires on the cars did the picture begin to change. Oliver Berman climbed to first place with a time of 1:42.217 and was only a few hundredths behind Kush Maini, who posted the best time in qualifying in Bahrain but was later disqualified.

Jose Maria Marti and Victor Martin were not too far behind the Indian Invicta Racing driver, but the Spaniard quickly moved ahead of Jack Crawford. Martin also improved and moved up to 4th, and Enzo Fittipaldi completed the top five.

At the end of the session, many riders made attempts to dislodge Berman from pole, but no one succeeded and his time remained the best – of course to the cheers of the Prema team. Maini will start from second position in the weekend’s main race, the cars of Crawford and Martin will be on the second row, and Fittipaldi and Antonelli will be on the third row. The Italian Formula 2 debutant is considered one of the most talented representatives of the younger generation of drivers, and you have to assume that Kimi is gradually starting to ‘get into the groove’.

And tomorrow’s sprint starts from pole position by Paul Aron, who showed the 10th result in qualifying – these are the rules of Formula 2, where a partially reversed starting order is used during the short weekend race.

Qualifying results