British F4’s Alex Connor joins Evans GP for Asian F3’s in-season test

Asian Formula 3 points leader Pierre-Louis Chovet set the pace in the in-season test at Dubai Autodrome, which featured a few debuting names.

Driving the Evans GP car previously raced by Casper Stevenson was British Formula 4 racer Alex Connor, while David Vidales took over from Dino Beganovic in Abu Dhabi Racing by Prema’s #16 car. Connor ended up 15th fastest in his first F3 test.

Despite announcing Amna Al Qubaisi and her father Khaled would be sharing an entry, with only the latter expected to contest the season’s remaining two rounds, both were in action in seperate Abu Dhabi Racing-run cars during the two Wednesday test sessions.

Pinnacle Motorsport’s Chovet laid down the benchmark pace in the morning session, setting a 1m56.013s lap that put him up 0.431 seconds up on Prema title rival Guanyu Zhou and 0.718s up on Hitech GP’s Roman Stanek in third.

Only the top six drivers were within a second of the leading pace, and Mumbai Falcons’ Kush Maini didn’t even set a lap.

BlackArts Racing’s Cem Bolukbasi failed to record a time in the session session, while Maini did get on track, and this time it was Hitech’s Roy Nissany who set the pace.

The Formula 2 regular went to the top early on and remained there for 20 minutes before Evans GP’s Patrik Pasma briefly took over first place on the timing sheet. Zhou then went fastest with 11 minutes to go of the hour-long session, but further improvements brought Nissany back on top by a tiny 0.065s ahead of Stanek and 0.067s ahead of Zhou.

Chovet failed to improve on his morning best but remained fastest overall, while Motorscape’s Roberto Faria and Nicola Marinangeli were also unable to recapture the pace they showed in the morning. Absent from the test action was Chovet’s team-mate Matthias Luethen.

Test results