Gabriele Mini tops first morning of F3 in-season testing in Barcelona

Photo: Prema

Prema’s Gabriele Mini topped an incident-free opening session of FIA Formula 3 in-season testing at Barcelona.

The start of the session was delayed one hour due to a power supply issue in the pit building. Therefore, running times were revised with the morning session extended to 1 pm, shortening the lunch break.

Little running took place during the three hours despite there being no interruptions, due to a dirty track and the usual allocation of eight sets of the hard compound for the whole test. PHM Racing’s Nikita Bedrin and Joshua Dufek clocked the most laps, a total of 28.

The whole field immediately headed out for installation laps as the track went green, checking everything was in place after engines were reconditioned ahead of the test.

MP Motorsport’s trio inaugurated the actual running with qualifying runs one hour into the session. Tim Tramnitz was the fastest of the three with a laptime of 1m29.587s. PHM’s drivers were next out on track and Bedrin went fastest, bettering Tramnitz’s early benchmark by 0.225 seconds.

The track got busier as the last hour of running approached and several drivers rose to the top spot of the times. Trident’s Leonardo Fornaroli was fastest with a laptime of 1m28.831s once all had completed a run. However, he didn’t hold on to it for long as MP Motorsport went out again and Alex Dunne lowered the benchmark by three tenths of a second.

Mini would go fastest minutes later, with few drivers improving their laptimes afterwards as the focus switched away from performance runs.

Morning session