FIA F3 in Spielberg
The fifth round of the 2023 FIA Formula 3 Championship took place at the RedBull Ring, surrounded by mountains and lots of forest in beautiful Styria in Austria. The 4.3km circuit only has 10 corners, but is nevertheless very demanding for our young drivers. McKenzy Cresswell replaced Piotr Wisnicki for Spielberg and Silverstone. He had his seat fit just a few days before the event. In 2022 and 2023 he raced in the GB3 Championship and already scored two podiums this season there.
Free practice and qualifying were both held in dry conditions, so the drivers could learn a lot and improve their cars with the engineers. Especially for McKenzy who drove the car for the very first time, it was important to get as much running as possible to get used to the new car and team. He did very well and improved a lot from his first laps. In the end he was 23rd in qualifying, just 9 tenths of a second behind pole position. Nikita Bedrin was 4th in the end just a few hundreds behind pole position, but unfortunately his time was deleted because of track limits, which was a big problem for many drivers around the circuit.
The sprint race was held on a wet track, which were completely new conditions for the drivers this weekend. Taylor Barnard driving for Jenzer Motorsport had an issue with the gearbox and because of that stalled at the grid and to be pushed back to the pitlane, losing a lot of time. After that Taylor showed very promising pace and in the end had the 4th fastest time among all 30 drivers. Another big change for McKenzy were the longer races in the FIA F3, before he was only used to races maximum 25 minutes long. Already the sprint race was 34 minutes long.
Roberto Faria showed strong pace and a few great overtakes on the wet circuit finishing P24 after starting 30th.
For the feature race on Sunday morning the circuit was dry again. Unfortunately Nikita Bedrin had a similar issue like Taylor Barnard, which the Jenzer Team couldn’t fix in time and he had to start from the pitlane. He drove a strong consistent race without mistakes finishing just outside the points in 13th place. Sophia Flörsch had a good start to the race and was directly in the flow making up a lot of positions starting from P21 and finishing the race in 9th place. During the post-race inspection the stewards found that the end plates of the front wing of Sophia’s car were too close to the ground and she was disqualified from the race. The team did nothing wrong there, the front wing was set up right in the legal range. But because of the characteristics of the Red Bull Ring with a lot of bumps and aggressive curbs, the front wing bent too much in the race, resulting in the illegal condition. Sophia never had a performance advantage because of that in the race. She absolutely deserved the points after that great drive and overtaking in the race. There isn’t much the PHM Racing Team could do about that. It’s a really unlucky situation losing the first points for Sophia and the Team this year like this.
The team and drivers learned a lot this weekend and also showed the improvements on track. It’s only the first weekend of McKenzy in the car and he showed promising pace and results, we can build up from. We will keep this positive momentum up for the next round at Silverstone already this weekend.
