Masson fastest as track limits catch out Eurocup-3 drivers at Jerez

Photo: Eurocup-3

Campos Racing’s Esteban Masson topped the first three Eurocup-3 sessions of the week at Jerez, which all featured lots of laptimes being deleted over track limits abuse.

Track action began with a test session on Friday, and Masson was fastest by just 0.095 seconds over MP Motorsport’s Mari Boya. Although it was a closely contested top four, with Campos’s Tasanapol Inthraphuvasak and MP’s Bruno del Pino 0.191s and 0.205s off the pace respectively, only three other drivers were within a second of Masson’s benchmark laptime.

Two 40-minute practice sessions followed on Saturday, and Masson was fastest in both. In FP1 he had an advantage of 0.289s over Drivex School’s Nick Gilkes, and in FP2 was fastest by 0.103s over GRS’s debuting Nikola Tsolov. Only five drivers improved their pace in FP2, with Boya the highest placed overall of those in the combined timesheet as he was eighth fastest in practice.

The stewards took a lot of actino against drivers for track limits in the two sessions, but it did not stop drivers from continually going beyond the white lines.

Masson and Miron Pingasov were black flagged in FP1, and three-minute stop-go penalties were issued to Dario Cabanelas (driving for the debuting Sainteloc Racing team), Pingasov and the debuting Niels Koolen before red flags waved after Campos’s Suleiman Zanfari came to a stop in the final sector.

When action resumed with 10 minutes to go, Masson was in sixth place and over a second slower than the pace-setting Tsolov. He went fastest by 0.014s with four minutes left of practice by setting a 1m38.399s, then later improved to 1m38.310s to be exactly 0.4s slower than he had been in FP1.

Free practice results