Carlin’s Liam Lawson kept his cool in an action-packed FIA Formula 2 Championship Sprint Race at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to take his first win of the season and his third consecutive podium finish. The New Zealander overcame three Safety Car restarts to win out over Hitech Grand Prix’s Jüri Vips and Van Amersfoort Racing’s Jake Hughes.
“The car was really, really fast, so a massive thank you to Carlin and everybody,” commented Lawson. “Hopefully we can do something similar tomorrow.
“Well pretty much the whole race was just about just trying to keep as much break and tyre temperature under those Safety Cars because of those crashes that were happening. There were some quite slow Safety Car laps, and in these cars, it’s really, really hard to keep temperature.
“When we did have green flag laps the car was really fast. I thought Jake was going to be in a great position, to be honest, because we didn’t have many racing laps, and as you said and he was on softs but I was able to stay with him in those first couple of laps and then stay within DRS and make the pass.
“So it’s promising. We need to take this into tomorrow, make a few tweaks to the car and hopefully grab another good score of points.”
Fellow Kiwi Marcus Armstrong had been competing for a podium but unfortunately retired in the latter stages of the race.
Lawson now leads the Drivers’ Championship on 34 points, with Vips in second on 27 and Pourchaire third with 25. Drugovich is fourth with 19 points, ahead of Boschung in fifth with 18.
In the Teams’ Championship, Carlin are first with 43 points, ahead of Hitech on 37 and ART on 25. MP Motorsport are fourth with 19 points and Campos fifth with 18.
After taking pole in Friday’s qualifying session, Drugovich will start from first place in Sunday’s Feature Race at 4.35pm local time (2:35am Monday NZ time).
Sprint Race Results
1/ Liam Lawson, Carlin
2/ Jüri Vips, HitechGP
3/ Jake Hughes, Van Amersfoort Racing
4/ Felipe Drugovich, MP Motorsport
5/ Calan Williams, Trident
6/ Richard Verschoor, Trident
7/ Ayumu Iwasa, Nissan e.dams
8/ Ralph Boschung, Campos Racing
9/ Jehan Daruvala, Prema Powerteam
10/ Marino Sato, Virtuosi Racing
11/ Roy Nissany, Nissan e.dams
12/ Enzo Fittipaldi, Charouz Racing System
13/ Clement Novalak, MP Motorsport
14/ Frederik Vesti, ART Grand Prix
15/ Theo Pourchaire, ART Grand Prix
16/ Olli Caldwell, Campos Racing
17/ Dennis Hauger, Prema Powerteam
DNF Marcus Armstrong, HitechGP
DNF Logan Sargeant, Carlin
DNF Jack Doohan, VirtuosiRacing
DNF Amaury Cordeel, Van Amersfoort Racing
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