GP3 Austria: Luca Ghiotto wins his first feature race

The first GP3 feature race after six long weeks was won by Trident’s Luca Ghiotto who started the race from pole. After a great GP2 race which was claimed by Stoffel Vandoorne , the GP3 feature race started at 17:20PM GMT+2 with Luca Ghiotto on pole. The formation lap was completed without the issues, unlike the start which was immediately yellow flagged because of a crash between Kevin Ceccon and Samin Gomez and a stall from Mitchell Gilbert. Before the yellow flew, Ghiotto lost the lead to Esteban Ocon. As the damage was extensive and the debris were all over the start-finish straight, the cars went through the pits as marshals and safety crew removed the cars from the track. The race restarted on lap 5 and Ocon went wide on lap 1. Ghiotto didn’t take advantage of the mistake, but managed to overtake Ocon and take the lead. Seb Morris was issued a 10s penalty for speeding in the pit lane.

Halfway into the race, Ocon was 3.2s behind Ghiotto, so the focus of the race shifted to Sandy Stuvik who was attacking Emil Bernstorff to take the fourth. On lap 15, Fuoco overtook Stuvik and went on to attack Bernstorff, and made a great move to overtake him, as well as Kirchhofer on lap 16. On lap 18, Fuoco went to second by overtaking Ocon. Bernstorf kept the pace up in his efforts to catch up on Ocon and overtake him, but he didn’t make it, finishing the race in fourth, in front of Jann Mardenborough. Kirchhofer finished sixth with Stuvik, Boschung, Tunjo and Fontana behind him. The more detailed results are the following: