Del Pino pips Ho in practice for Eurocup-3 finale as Boya returns

Photo: Eurocup-3

MP Motorsport’s Bruno del Pino pipped Campos Racing’s Christian Ho to top spot in practice for the Eurocup-3 season finale at Barcelona.

Preceding Saturday morning’s practice session was a pre-event test session on Friday, in which Ho set the pace.

He set 29 laps in total, and after going purple in all three sectors he set a 1m36.202s that put him just 0.029 seconds ahead of Drivex School’s Nikita Bedrin.

The Russian came 19th in the FIA Formula 3 Championship this year with PHM Racing, and won the sprint race at the Hungaroring. He also raced for the team in Formula 4 United Arab Emirates, where three victories from a part-time campaign put him fifth in the standings, and he also did an incomplete Formula Regional European Championship campaign with MP.

Two sixth places were his best results from that programme, and helped put him 16th in the points table.

Eurocup-3’s car is based on the same chassis used in FREC, and Bedrin is debuting in the series as the latest driver in Drivex’s ‘Russian’ car. Georgi Zhuravskiy piloted the machine in the non-championship event in March then the first six rounds of the season, before the Russian switched to MP’s line-up.

His place was then taken by compatriot and FREC race-winner Michael Belov for round seven, and now Bedrin is in the car for the season-ending round eight.

The top six in testing were covered by just 0.182s, with Campos’s Jesse Carrasquedo Jr 0.102s slower than Ho in third, MP’s Owen Tangavelou and Javier Sagrera both 0.161s behind in fourth and fifth, and Drivex’s Victoria Blokhina doing an impressive job to be sixth.

A gap of 0.08s split Campos’s Michael Shin in seventh and Sainteloc Racing’s Daniel Nogales in 10th, and they were within 0.4s of the pace, while Palou Motorsport’s Everett Stack was the last driver within a second of Ho down in 20th.

Joining Bedrin and Stack as debuting guest drivers this weekend is Drivex’s Preston Lambert and Sainteloc’s Matteo Quintarelli. Also ineligible for points is FIA F3 race-winner Mari Boya. He was runner-up in the inaugural Eurocup-3 season last year with Campos, winning five races, and rejoins the grid for a cameo with the Global Racing Service team.

The pace was slightly slower in practice, with the cooler conditions countering the fact that the track was now more rubbered in, and del Pino set a 1m36.262s to lead Ho by 0.167s.

Tangavelou was 0.388s behind in third, with team-mates Emmo Fittipaldi and Sagrera 0.635s and 0.688s off the pace respectively in fourth and fifth. No other drivers lapped sub-1m37s, although Shin and Bedrin were both within a second of del Pino. Boya was eighth.

Drivex’s Linus Hellberg and Quintarelli had no laptimes on the board, despite both spending time on track, and 4.099s split first and 25th place.

Sagrera goes into today’s race with a 26-point championship lead over Ho, with del Pino a further 10 points behind.

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