Safety Car and Pourchaire makes for the Formula 2 story at Imola

Théo Pourchaire won an incident-filled Formula 2 feature race at Imola in which several of his rivals crashed out. Jüri Vips had taken pole during the disrupted, dark and mixed conditions qualifying session on Friday, Ayumu Iwasa lining up alongside him with Jack Doohan and Ralph Boschung on the second row.

Boschung was immediately into the lead off the line, only to be passed by Roy Nissany, up from sixth, into the first Tamburello. Iwasa held on to third, Vips relegated to fourth while Doohan was immediately out of contention with damage from colliding with first Dennis Hauger and then the rear of Vips’ car.

Vips lost it into Villeneuve on lap six, hitting a polystyrene board and ricocheting back across the track to end his race in the barriers. Another Safety Car was called, with drivers on supersofts immediately heading into the pits at the start of lap eight. Daruvala inherited the lead and took the restart on lap 10, with sprint race winner Marcus Armstrong and Liam Lawson behind him.

The top ten on the restart was made up of drivers who had started on the medium tyre, bar Nissany in tenth, who effective still held the net lead of the race.

Daruvala came into the pits on lap 27, coming out 14th with eight laps to try and take advantage of his supersoft tyres to re-join a points position. Drivers who had started on the supersoft had, at this point, been running their medium tyres for twenty laps and some drop-off was becoming clear.

The chequered flag was shown behind the Safety Car, with Bernd Maylander leading the drivers home. Pourchaire’s victory takes the lead of the championship for him, from Drugovich, while Fittipaldi’s second place is his first podium and first points finish of the season, Boschung moving up to fourth in the championship with third.