Prema’s Leon sets the pace on day one of FIA F3 pre-season testing

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Prema’s Noel Leon set the pace in the afternoon on day one of FIA Formula 3 Championship pre-season testing at Barcelona.

First out of the pits the three-hour session was Campos Racing’s Tasanapol Inthraphuvasak, but representative laptimes did not appear until Rodin Motorsport’s Louis Sharp posted a 1m27.898s.

Despite many drivers going quicker than him in the first two sectors, the time gained by Sharp with a traffic-free final sector kept him in top spot through the first 55 minutes of track action.

However circuit activity was minimal through much of that period, and MP Motorsport and Hitech GP opted to keep their drivers in the garage throughout the opening hour.

Rodin’s 1-2-3, with Sharp leading Roman Bilinski by two tenths of a second and with Callum Voisin just behind him, was ended when Prema’s Noel Leon set a 1m27.711s. Less than two minutes later, Campos’s Nikola Tsolov slotted into third with a lap 0.3 seconds slower than the new benchmark.

Leon’s time would go unbeaten, as drivers focused on longer runs rather than extracting absolute pace.

Campos’s Mari Boya improved from 13th to third towards the end of the second hour, during which time there was rarely more than 10 cars on track at once, and in the final hour there was minimal action too for a while.

The highlight in that spell was MP’s Tim Tramnitz leaping from 11th to second place with a 1m27.862s, set with 38 minutes to go, and his team-mate Alessandro Giusti went ninth fastest.

With 17 minutes to go there was a queue of cars heading, and improvements in pace were made. ART Grand Prix’s Tuukka Taponen and James Wharton had been 25th and 26th with their previous bests and jumped to seventh and ninth, both making gains of over five seconds.

Prema’s Ugo Ugochukwu went from 23rd to 11th, and Laurens van Hoepen had not even driven at a representative pace before posting a 1m28.231s late on that put him ahead of his ART GP team-mates in seventh. Soon most headed back to the pits though.

Out of the 30 drivers it was Bilinski that clocked the most laps with a tally of 47. At the lower end of the mileage chart was DAMS, whose three drivers collectively completed 70 laps in the afternoon and had not recorded any laptimes in the morning session. Trident racked up 126 laps with the new car in the afternoon, but none at a representative pace.

Afternoon session results