Estonian 19-year-old Jüri Vips leads the Red Bull Junior trio to Spa with his sights firmly set on the FIA F3 Championship. Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda have their own battles to fight and don’t count them out for a race win but it is Lawson who has a great shot at the big prize with six races remaining.
“It rained yesterday but it is dry this morning,” said Lawson on Thursday. “Some rain would be nice, we really haven’t had much this year and I would like to see some, it should even things out a bit and give us a bit more of a chance.”
“It’s a really nice track, I love driving round here and having done the Euroformula race obviously helps with circuit knowledge but the F3 car is so different that there is still a lot to learn, the power and weight make it quite different,” explained the MP Motorsport driver.
“Sections that in the Euroformula car are flat are not going to be in the F3 car, plus you are driving that car flat out through the race while in the F3 car you have got to do a lot more tyre management so it really is all very different and I know that I am still learning.”
No one has won more than two of the first ten races this season and Vips has done that. He is second in the title chase, 12 points off the lead. 17-year-old New Zealander Lawson has a 3rd from Race 2 at Silverstone and Tsunoda, the 19-year-old Japanese, was 6th last time out in Hungary.
At 7.004km Spa-Francorchamps is the longest circuit on the FIA Formula 3 calendar and it is the final time we will see Pirelli’s medium compound tyre this season, with the final two races of the season in Italy and Russia both using the soft compound.
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