Vandoorne Take Record-Breaking Win

Stoffel Vandoorne took his seventh win of the season, beating Pastor Maldonado for the record of most wins in GP2 with his eleventh victory of his career. He had matched the Venezuelan with ten GP2 wins but his victory today sees him surpass the record, now holding it on his own. Vandoorne made a good start, managing to keep within DRS of Gasly off the start and getting the pass on the Frenchman not long after. After a mishap with tyre degredation he managed to climb back through the field to take the top step of the podium, with Trident’s Raffaele Marciello second and Russian Time’s Mitch Evans finishing where he started in third.

Wanting to rectify his winless season, Gasly was defensive on the start, managing to squeeze Vandoorne to the apex of turn one and hold the lead on the outside. He defended hard but Vandoorne was keeping him within DRS range and lined him up to make the pass on lap four. In the same lap, Mitch Evans, who had been keeping close to the lead fight, took a bold move up the inside of turn twelve to push the pole sitter even further down the order. Evans looked to be on the charge for the lead but when everyone who had started on the soft compound of tyre started falling off the cliff the race changed rapidly. Vandoorne and Evans had enough of a lead for the sudden drop off not to harm their races too much but Gasly, who had been in the thick of the mid field traffic, was in the wrong place at the wrong time, slipping swiftly down the grid as he limped the car back to the pits.

Lap five saw all of the front-runners on the soft compound under drastic threat from those behind on the medium compound. They all had to pit for the harder compound as soon as possible so as to not loose too much time to the medium starters. Vandoorne lead Evans into the pits, and it looked like Evans was going to make up some time in the stop, but a problem with the from left saw him stuck in the traffic of the other softs starters entering the pits as he tried to leave. It lost him about five seconds in the pits as he had to wait for them all to pass before he could chase down Vandoorne.

The situation got worse as most of the early-pitting cars left the pits the virtual safety car was brought out for Nicholas Latifi and Norman Nato who had come together at the second-to-last corner. The restart saw Vandoorne down in P14 with a forty-second gap to leader Marciello. However, the entire field ahead of Vandoorne still owed their pit stop. Markelov and King, respectively second and third, continued their battle for position, with the Russian driver holding his ground expertly. But it wasn’t to be as Markelov began to slow on track, trying a “switch it off and on again” to try and get the car back running didn’t work and he was forced to retire, coming to a stop on the side of the track.

Vandoorne, Evans, Rossi and Gasly threaded their way through the field as the medium starters began to feel the degredation of their own tyres. Gasly was handed a five-second penalty for speeding in the pit lane which put an end to his victory hopes. There was a short period of time where Rossi looked to be making the move on Evans but his tyres also began to go off and he had to back out of the attack to make sure he had enough tyres to the end. Evans was doing a great job of staying on top if his tyres and defending his position but, as he admitted after the race, he didn’t have the pace to catch up with the ART of Vandoorne. Vandoorne went off in pursuit of Marciello, who pitted on lap 26 for the soft compound, and managed to gain enough time on him to beat him out of the pits. Wanting to fight Vandoorne for the lead, now on the faster tyre, Marciello’s team warmed him against pushing too hard as they were aware of just how quickly the soft compound would drop off the cliff and Evans was only just over a second behind the Ferrari Junior Driver.

Vandoorne won by a staggering nine seconds, with Marciello nursing his tyres home to keep second from the advancing Evans.Rossi was fourth after he had pulled the same move Vandoorne pulled at the start on Gasly to demote him fifth. Once the penalty was added to Gasly’s finish time he just about clung onto fifth, with King and Haryanto fighting for sixth until the chequered flag, and finishing respectively. Alex Lynn secured reverse pole for tomorrow’s sprint race, with Andre Negrao and Nathanael Berthon finishing off the top ten. Tomorrow’s sprint race begins at 10:15am GMT where we shall see if Lynn can convert his pole into a race win or if Vandoorne can do the double and win his first sprint race of the season in his final GP2 race.

(Image: www.gp2series.com)

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