Photo: Dutch Photo Agency
Gabriel Bortoleto acknowledges that the penalty that denied him the victory in the Formula 2 feature race at Qatar was “fair” and is looking forward to a final-round decider.
The Invicta Racing driver had already committed to pit when he realised that the virtual safety car had been deployed. He bailed out, but he had already passed the bollard that marked pit entry, which earned him a five-second time penalty that demoted him from first to third place in the race classification.
The McLaren junior heads into the season finale with a half-point advantage over second-placed Campos Racing’s Isack Hadjar and 25.5 points ahead of race winner Hitech GP’s Paul Aron.
“Obviously disappointed by having the penalty, but it’s part of the game, that’s racing,” the Brazilian told media including Formula Scout after the race. “I think Paul did a good job today, Isack as well. Fair play to them. P3 is not bad at the end of the day, we got some good points. It’s going to be very fun in Abu Dhabi, it’s always nice to fight for a championship.”
He then added: “I need to re-watch the race and analyse what happened exactly. The penalty was fair and I just found out when I was already over the bollard that is where we are permitted to quit.”
Bortoleto pitted under safety car the lap after and was first of the drivers who had already changed tyres at the restart. However, he couldn’t build a big enough gap to offset the penalty.
“It depends when there are drivers who are on different strategies,” Bortoleto explained. “They knew they were not fighting with me apart from Isack’s teammate [Pepe Marti] that was defending for his life. He is his teammate so it’s part of his job, I believe. It was quite tough to overtake him, I lost a few corners. I managed to just put him in a bad position and cross him in the middle of the high speed, it was very nice. It was a nice move.
“Then you’ve got the car of Duerksen as well, he defended in a way that was tough at the end of the straight, I almost crashed because I had the DRS on, I moved and then he moved and then he realised he didn’t move enough, he kept moving and I almost went into the wall because the DRS was open. The rear becomes very loose, but I managed to make it turn. It was very close.
“After that, it was quali lap after quali lap, trying to make a gap to Isack. I knew that to Paul it was going to be difficult because he was very fast this weekend, through the race from yesterday and today. So my target was just to finish five seconds ahead of Isack. For a moment I thought that I had it because I couldn’t see him in the mirrors out of T9. He did a very good job not to make any mistakes at this end, and got the place.”