Mansell beats Lindblad to claim Barcelona F3 pole

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Christian Mansell edged out Arvid Lindblad to claim his first Formula 3 pole position in an extremely close qualifying session at Barcelona.

With one of the last laps of the session, ART Grand Prix’s Mansell denied Prema rookie Lindblad by just 0.036 seconds. Mansell’s team-mate Nikola Tsolov was only 0.003s further back in third, with Luke Browning also less than a tenth from pole in fourth for Hitech GP.

Lindblad’s more experienced team-mates Dino Beganovic and Gabriele Mini are set to share the eighth row for both races.

After drivers completed just a handful of laps each in practice, they all followed a similar strategy to each other in qualifying with three solitary flying laps across three sets of tyres.

The Prema trio of Beganovic, Mini and Lindblad took turns at the top of the times but it was ART’s Laurens van Hoepen out front after the first flying laps, ahead of Leonardo Fornaroli and Mansell.

Browning went from fifth to first on his second set of tyres, with Mari Boya falling just 0.006s short of matching his time – a strong recovery for the local Campos Racing driver after crashing due to an apparent brake failure in practice without logging a representative time. Mansell was third once again.

In the final shootout on the third and final set of tyres, Browning lowered his benchmark by nearly four tenths of a second, only for Lindblad to better that by two hundredths.

With the ART cars running later on track, Tsolov then just fell short of matching Lindblad’s time before Mansell posted a 1m28.463s to claim pole as one of the last drivers across the line.

Oliver Goethe took fifth for Campos in front of Fornaroli. Martinius Stenshorne was seventh followed by van Hoepen, Alex Dunne and Sebastian Montoya. Sami Meguetounif is set to start the sprint race on reversed-grid pole with Boya lining up alongside.

Mini was unable to improve on his last lap and fell from fifth to 16th, one place behind Beganovic, who lifted himself up from 29th to 15th on his last attempt. He had run well wide over the kerbs on his first two flying laps and had his second effort deleted for exceeding track limits at Turn 9.

Qualifying results