Christian Lundgaard dominates day 1 of testing-Tops both sessions.
Written by: Divyank Rane Edited by: Daniel Yi & Tanishka Vashee
From a foggy early morning which were later replaced by bright blue skies, the Campos Racing were the first team to get a feel of the circuit followed by MP Motorsport.
The opening hour was interrupted by the two red flags caused by Carlin’s Jehan Daruvala and later by PREMA’s Oscar Piastri on two different occasions.
Post red flag, Lundgaard set the benchmark time of 1:29:606 which was later improved to 1:29:594. Juri Vips followed up with a time of 1:29:988.
A third red flag was caused by Campos’ Gianluca Petecof as he spun and went into gravel.
Felipe Drugovich surged to 2nd place by setting a time of 1:29:772 ahead of Juri Vips, Liam Lawson and Lirim Zendeli.
Lundgaard continued his strong form in the afternoon notching a time of 1:29:827 ahead of two rookies Richard Verschoor and Theo Pourchaire.
Marcus Armstrong was fourth ahead of Lawson, Ralph Boschung and Zendeli, who caused a red flag 15 minutes into the afternoon running.
Meanwhile the championship leader, Guanyu Zhou, placed 6th and 18th in the morning and afternoon sessions respectively
Rookie Verschoor tops day 2 of testing:
After two top 5 finishes in Bahrain, Richard Verschoor set the fastest time of the day of 1:28:280 in the final hour of the morning session.
His lap time was 1.3s faster than the one set by Christian Lundgaard on Friday.
In the second hour of the morning session, teams opted for the medium compound as Oscar Piastri and Felipe Drugovich enjoyed stints at top of the time sheets.
As the session progressed, Verschoor shot to the top ahead of Boschung, as Drugovich dropped to third.
Armstrong was 4th fastest fractionally ahead of Bent Viscal who was bidding to earn a second round at Monaco.
Gianluca Petecof got things back underway in the afternoon, taking Campos to the top of the timesheet with a lap time of 1:30.684 in the early stages.
Teams opted for a long run simulation in the afternoon as the times started to drop with Drugovich in 2nd and Matteo Nannini in 3rd.
There were three stoppages in the afternoon session as Alessio Deledda spun twice while Robert Schwartzman stopped at turn 3.
After the session restarted, Charouz Racing System went 1-2 on the timesheet with a lap times of 1:29.324 and 1:29.510 set by Davide Beckmann and Guilherme Samaia respectively.
Verschoor finished 3rd with Petecof dropping to 4th followed by Drugovich and Zendeli.
Drugovich goes fastest on Day 3 as well as topping the overall testing:
The UNI-Virtuosi driver was the only driver to keep the lap times under 1m28s on all the three days of testing and also the only one to dip into the 1m27s.
Drugovich was ahead of the rookie Oscar Piastri and Friday’s topper Christian Lundgaard.
Following in a similar pattern to Saturday, the faster times arrived in the morning session as teams focussed on qualifying simulations on the medium tyres. Only eight tenths of a second covered the top 10 in the morning session.
Bahrain winner and F2 rookie Liam Lawson (Hitech Grand Prix) was fourth fastest in the morning just 0.010s faster than team-mate Juri Vips.
The session was red flagged twice, first by HWA’s Alessio Deledda stopping on track early on before Carlin’s Jehan Daruvala came to a halt in the final minutes of the morning session.
The afternoon session timesheet was topped by Trident’s Viscaal with a lap time of 1:30.280.
Viscaal edged HWA’s Matteo Nannini by 0.066s with the Trident of Marino Sato in third.
Deledda was fourth in front of DAMS’ Marcus Armstrong, Zendeli, Roy Nissany (DAMS), Shwartzman, Lawson and Piastri.
The afternoon session was interrupted by two stoppages caused by Lawson and Saturday’s pacesetter Verschoor.
F2 will return to action at the Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix for round two on 20-22 May.
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