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Victor Martins endured an agonising 26-minute wait while stewards deliberated the Formula 3 title outcome, after the final race was stopped early and abandoned.The ART driver went into this morning’s season finale with a six-point lead. He was in third place behind title rivals Zane Maloney and Oliver Bearman, but poised to win the title, when the race was red-flagged.
“When I saw the Safety Car, I already thought about it like, ‘please, no Safety Cars during that race.’” Martins recalled. “I knew the job was done to stay third, even if I was not winning, it was fine.
“I have been through that many years in the past where I always wanted to win and I lost the championship because of that. So I just wanted to keep P3 and then there was the red flag.”
However while the drivers waited to learn the outcome of the race Martins discovered he had been given a five-second time penalty for track limits violations, which put his race position in doubt and his championship potentially in jeopardy.
“I was trying to stay focussed, not trying to think about anything, how I would need to approach the restart. I was trained to switch off, to not think about what was around me, who was behind me, also what position I needed to be in. I was on a mode that I was going to look ahead, going to make some moves because when you make some moves you kind of defend yourself from behind also.
“No one told me [about the penalty]. I saw it from the mechanics, my brother they were starting to look out on the phone and see the five-second penalty. At first I got really upset and angry at my team, to be honest.
“If I’m honest, in this moment, you kind of react badly and instinctively. So I would say I was a bit angry at why I didn’t know before that I had some track limits because I think they they told me that that was also an issue.
“I think the FIA took a lot of time also to make it show on the TV that I got some track limits [penalty]. So in the end, I think the last [track limits violation] I probably did was already too late when the team told me. So it was was just a horrible moment.”
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Martins admitted he feared a repeat of the controversial conclusion to last year’s Formula 1 season, when Max Verstappen passed Lewis Hamilton after a last-lap restart to win the championship, if the race resumed. “I was like, ‘no, it cannot happen.’
“If it was…
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