Kirchhofer secures race three victory at Nurburgring

Photo: formel3.de

Championship leader Marvin Kirchhofer has succeeded in extending his points advantage in the standings as he took the victory in race three of German F3’s second visit to Nurburgring.

Kirchhofer was the poleman for the race but, into turn one, it was Performance Racing’s John Bryant-Meisner who jumped into the lead from the second row of the grid. It seemed like the perfect start, but “jumped” ended up being the keyword as the Swede was very soon forced to serve a drive through for a jump start, which saw him give up the race lead.

As such, Kirchhofer was back into first, albeit the race was far from over, as he was closely followed by teammates Artem Markelov and Emil Bernstorff. The German didn’t succeed in creating a significant gap and, as the leading trio approached traffic, Kirchhofer was bogged down and nearly ended up giving the lead to the Russian.

However, having kept a cool head through the couple of turns when Markelov was right on his back, the championship leader was back on pace and confidently drove to his eighth win of the year. Markelov finished in second, while an unpleasant surprise awaited Bernstorff, who was deemed to have ignored yellow flags and was awarded a drive through.

The Brit served the penalty of the penultimate lap, giving third to Gustavo Menezes with Bernstorff falling back to fourth. Thomas Jager was fifth ahead of Nabil Jeffri and Matteo Cairoli.

Freddy Killensberger picked up the class win in eighth, with Jordi Weckx and Sheban Siddiqi rounding out the top ten.

The race went from bad to worse for Bryant-Meisner as, after serving his penalty, he attempted an overly ambitious move on Thomas Amweg, which saw the latter spin out of control, while the Swede himself found his car’s suspension irreparably damaged, forcing him to retire. Sebastian Balthasar was another driver to have a bad day, as he retired from the class lead midway through the race.

Race result