Felipe Drugovich started Race 2 in ADAC Formula 4 from Pole Position, ahead of yesterday’s winner Lirim Zendeli and yesterday’s big surprise, Andreas Estner.
The start ran quite smoothly and Drugovich quickly got a big gap to Lirim Zendeli and the Championship leader Juri Vips, who had overtaken Andreas Estner for third.
After the roll yesterday, we didn’t have Nicklas Nielsen on the track today. The car was too damaged for the team to be able to repair for today’s races. That effectively sent him out of the battle for top-3 in the Championship, with those guys around 75 points ahead of him, he would need 3 victories and three times zero points for the other guys.
After just 10 minutes of racing, the Safety Car had to be deployed, when Cedric Piro had something that looked like brake failure going into turn 1. First we saw a locked wheel, and when he released the brake, the car didn’t want to brake again and he went into the tires at high speed. Thankfully there was several layers of tires, but the doctors didn’t take any chances and wanted to extract him gently from the car. Race Control went on to throw the Red Flag so they had the opportunity to work on the car without any time pressure, plus there was a need for the tirewall to be rebuild too. The initial reports was that he was fine, but of course he had to be checked after the high-speed impact that he could feel in his body.
Race Control decided NOT to restart the race again, since the schedule would get too much out of order if that happened. So Race 2 was just to be a 10 minutes race.
Felipe Drugovich won the race ahead of Lirim Zendeli and Juri Vips. Vips thus defends the Championship lead ahead of Drugovich, while the third placed driver, Marcus Armstrong, lost vital points since he only finished 8th.
Race 3 will be run at 16.35 CET.