Caranta wins Stevenheydens duel in French F4 at Magny-Cours

Photo: FFSA Academy/KSP

Jules Caranta passed French Formula 4 title rival Yani Stevenheydens on a restart to win the first race of the weekend at Magny-Cours.

The field has been boosted to 25 cars this weekend by the addition of 14-year-old French karter Lisa Billard. With the backing of the Alpine Formula 1 team’s female-focused ‘Rac(H)er’ programme she came third in France’s junior championship and seventh in the FIA Karting Academy Trophy last year, and through 2024 she has been doing F4 tests to prepare for her race debut.

Billard did however prop up the timesheet in practice on Friday morning, 3.291 seconds off the pace of Caranta who set a 1m40.626s to top the times by 0.026s over Taito Kato. There was then a sizeable 0.557s gap to Montego Maassen in third, with 0.542s covering third to 13th place.

Points leader Stevenheydens was eighth fastest, but became the driver to beat during qualifying later in the day. He lowered the pace to 1m40.119s, going fastest by 0.305s over Maassen. Caranta was a further 0.09s behind, Augustin Bernier was 0.42s off pole in fourth and Kato was 0.475s back in fifth. The top 10 were split by less than a second, and Billard made a huge improvement of 2.007s on her personal best from practice to qualify 22nd for her debut.

At the start of Saturday morning’s race, Stevenheydens kept the lead off the line, but Caranta immediately launched into second and then attacked the leader down the inside of the Adelaide hairpin, only for Stevenheydens to fight back into the Nurburgring chicane.

Stevenheydens built a gap of 1.3s over Caranta before the safety car was deployed. Billard had got caught up in a four-car incident on lap 5 that took her, Edouard Borgna and Louis Schlesser all out of the race, with Borga’s car needing to be recovered from the track.

Six minutes were left on the clock at the restart, and this time Stevenheydens took a defensive line into Adelaide that allowed Caranta to take the cut-back and get ahead into Nurburgring.

Caranta had to fend Stevenheydens off through the rest of the lap and wasn’t able to pull away thereafter, but held on to take victory by 0.669s and close back up to within four points of the championship lead, even as Stevenheydens took bonus points for pole and the fastest lap.

Maassen was moved back to fifth on the opening lap as the third championship contender Kato took third place and Augustin Bernier finished fourth. Arthur Dorison put a late pass on Leonardo Megna at Adelaide to take sixth.

Chester Kieffer, who is fourth in the standings, qualified 1.482s off the pace down in 20th place and recovered to finish just outside the points in 11th.

Race results (12 laps)