Jak Crawford pulled off an aggressive strategy by making an early switch to hard tyres to win the Barcelona feature race.
The Aston Martin junior driver successfully executed a soft-hard strategy to jump ahead of Paul Aron and win ahead of Williams junior Franco Colapinto.
After losing his third place finish in Saturday’s sprint race, Juan Manuel Correa charged back onto the podium in third place. Providing no more post-race penalties come his way, Correa has scored his first top-three finish in five years in F2.
Despite rain falling at the end of the earlier F3 race, the circuit was completely dry when the F2 field assembled on the grid. But before the race began, Mercedes junior driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli appeared to stall his Prema, meaning he missed the formation lap and had to be pushed to the pit lane to start.
Pole winner Aron held the lead at the start with Crawford and Colapinto both retaining their starting positions in second and third, respectively. The Safety Car appeared soon afterwards as a result of a turn two collision between Dennis Hauger and Victor Martins that put both out of the race.
Once the race resumed, Aron continued ahead of Crawford and Colapinto. The top five drivers had all started on the soft compound with sixth-placed Josh Duerksen the highest positioned driver on hards.
Crawford was the first of the leaders to pit for hards, until Hitech called the leader in at the end of lap 11. Aron emerged directly in front of Crawford, but the DAMS driver took advantage of having warmer tyres to drive by the Hitech around the outside of turn three to take the net lead of the race.
Aron tried to stick with Crawford and keep him under pressure, but a major moment of oversteer in the final corner saw him run off onto the gravel, dropping several places as a result. Aron was briefly investigated for rejoining the circuit in an unsafe manner, but the stewards determined no further action was necessary.
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Duerksen assumed the lead of the race ahead of several other drivers on hard tyres, including Correa, Kush Maini and Richard Verschoor. However, Duerksen suddenly slowed out of turn five with an apparent problem bringing out the Virtual Safety Car and handing the lead to Correa.
Correa pushed on his hard tyres until eventually pitting for softs at the end of lap 27. Once all of the hard runners had pitted, Crawford assumed the lead with Colapinto in second and Aron back in…
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