After a week's break for our drivers, we have seen a return to racing action with round 3 of our championship happening at one of the most (in)famous racing circuits in the world, Imola. The track officially called the Autodromo Internazionale Enzo e Dino Ferrari, has been a place of many sad moments in its racing history, where many of us can still remember that sad racing weekend of 1994. The Formula 1 race happening at the track that year has seen the loss of two of the drivers on the grid in that year, Roland Ratzenberger and Ayrton Senna, after their horrific crashes.
The track layout has since then changed quite a bit, but it's still a high paced and very technical circuit, with some big braking zones ideal for overtaking, which also proved to be the case in our latest championship round. But first things first, let's take a look at how qualifying went in both racing classes.
We have seen another super close qualifying session, at least at the very top of the field overall, and in the Gold class with that as well. The gaps grew larger further down the grid we go, but the pole position time was once again set by Hugo Boucher, with a lap time of 1:40.607, taking the second pole position in a row, ahead of Abe Santema by just 38 thousands of a second! Third place went to Olivier Breniaux, with 1:40.810 (+0.203), with another good qualifying performance this time around.
Over in the Silver class, the pole position went to Phil Clarke, who set a lap time of 1:41.217, just shy of 4 tenths of a second ahead of Yannis Bouguerra (1:41.587), and in third we found Jeff Buell (1:41.605), another 18 thousands of a second further back! These lap times meant that they found themselves very high up the grid overall as well, sitting in fifth, sixth and seventh position respectively, which just proves how competitive even the Silver class is!
This time around, we had a 60 minute race ahead of our drivers, with many opportunities for overtaking, and once again, we have seen a lot of racing action throughout the whole race! In the end, the overall win went to Santema, with a rather convincing win, ahead of the pole sitter, Boucher, by over 12 seconds, and Damien Bosc completing the podium in third place.
The Silver class has seen Paulo Tempera climb to the top of the class from starting in fifth position, ahead of Alexandre Carlier and Mike Landreth in second and third. Carlier managed to jump up a couple of positions, onto the podium, while Landreth gaining a lot of ground, after starting in ninth! The overall positions weren't all that bad from them either, Tempera placed 7th, with Carlier in 9th and Landreth 15th on the leaderboard!
After this intense race, our drivers will once again be taking a week's break, followed by a 90 minute race at one of the longest race tracks on this season's calendar, Spa-Francorchamps. Another iconic race track, with long straights, followed by hard breaking zones, ideal for overtaking! Let's hope we will see another great race there on 7th August, but until then, you can check out the highlights of the third round over on our YouTube channel, as well as the full Twitch stream replay to go with it! See you all in Belgium for the next race!