The new season of the FIA Formula 2 season kicked off spectacularly during Friday afternoon’s sprint race. Chassis modification proved to be a good decision, with cars being easy to follow and overtake. Rodin Motorsport’s Zane Maloney comfortably won the season’s first race.
Albeit new regulations demonstrated a step forward compared to Dallara F2018, the “Mecachrome moment” also continued with the new machines. PHM’s Joshua Dürksen stalled on the grid and had to start the race from the pit lane.
The Sprint race start showed how young drivers were still far from fully understanding new cars, hence various slow and good starts pretty easily mixed up the grid before braking into turn 1. The biggest winner of the first lap was ART’s rookie Zak O’Sullivan, who jumped into 3rd place with hard tires. PHM’s Taylor Barnard had a terrible start and was quickly overtaken by 8 cars to end up in 10th place by the end of lap one.
Contact between Hitech’s Amaury Cordeel and Van Amersfoort’s Rafael Villagomez caused the first Virtual Safety Car of the season. The former had to retire from the race after just 4 corners, while the latter driver suffered a puncture, and from the get-go, the race was done for the young Mexican.
VSC’s demise started an overtake-galore race. Victor Martins was unable to jump Jak Crawford for the first place, which ultimately created a gap between the first and the second.
Behind race leader, Jak Crawford, both ART cars, Isack Hadjar, Zane Maloney, and Enzo Fittipaldi fought for the 2nd and 3rd place respectively. A battle which lasted for a couple of laps. In the meantime, “a boy from Barbados” silently passed the mentioned group of drivers and was ready to hunt the DAMS’s outfit in the leading position.
Lap 8 saw the final position change for the top step of the podium as Rodin’s hopeful overtook American Crawford and rode off into the sunset, while battles behind his back continued until the very end of the race.
In the meantime, Zak O’Sullivan and Prema’s drivers tumbled down the order as hard tires weren’t performing better than soft tires in the latter stages of the race. Their tires did not heat up to the optimal temperature, and especially ART’s driver started to lose places pretty easily.
The final position of the podium was yet to be solved. The first change in the standings occurred in the 16th lap when Hadjar overtook fellow Frenchman Martins with the assist of DRS heading towards wide turn 4.
Ultimate podium positions were settled down in the 20th lap when Pepe Marti similarly passed his teammate to take his maiden F2 podium.
Additionally, Zane Maloney won the race from 8th, which puts him in an advantageous position for tomorrow’s feature race, starting from 3rd place.
The feature race will start on Saturday at 11:30 CET with the current F3 champion Gabriel Bortoleto taking a pole position after his teammate, Kush Maini, got disqualified for performance infringement amid a qualifying session.
Bahrain GP Sprint Race results (top 8)
| 1. Zane Maloney | Rodin Motorsport | 42:13.726 (10) |
| 2, Jak Crawford | Lucas Oil DAMS | +5.490 (8) |
| 3. Pepe Marti | Campos Racing | +7.057 (6) |
| 4. Isack Hadjar | Campos Racing | +9.783 (5) |
| 5. Paul Aron | Hitech Pulse Eight | +18.188 (4) |
| 6. Gabriel Bortoleto [PP] | Invicta Racing | +18.320 (3) |
| 7. Zak o’Sullivan | ART Grand Prix | +20.135 (2) |
| 8. Dennis Hauger | MP Motorsport | +21.032 (1) |