PREMA Racing has tough luck in eventful Jeddah Sprint Race
PREMA Racing faced another challenging race today at Jeddah Corniche Circuit. A mishap during the second safety car of the Sprint Race saw Dennis Hauger lose out on a chance to fight for the win after leading the event.
The early part of the race saw the safety-car on-track twice. During the second neutralisation, the race control monitor instructed the teams to go through the pit-lane. A few seconds later, a contradictory message reported that the pit-lane was closed.
After the pit-lane closed message, the team asked the race director for clarification, and the race director reiterated that the cars had to go through the pit-lane. Hauger complied with the order, but he was the only driver to do so, which caused him to lose the lead. In addition to that, he was later penalised with a 10-second stop and go which demoted him to P18.
Starting from P13, Jehan Daruvala showed great pace and gained positions. Unfortunately, with only a few green flag laps between the two full safety cars and one Virtual Safety Car, he could only manage P9 at the end.
# 1 - Dennis Hauger
“I had a good start from pole. Tried to make a bit of a gap in the first couple of laps and managed to do so quite OK, I wasn’t 100 percent pushing, but the pace wasn’t looking too bad. The restart from the first safety car wasn’t the best I would say, I had a plan but didn’t work out, but I still managed to stay in front. The safety car came out again quite early on. Then it was just frustrating. We got confirmation from race control that we were supposed to go through the pit lane. We did so and got a penalty for listening. It feels a bit unfair, after losing the chance to fight for my first F2 win. Anyway, we have another race tomorrow, it’s not going to be from P1, but we know that we can fight a bit and get some points out of the weekend at least.”
# 2 - Jehan Daruvala
“Not too much to say about the race, obviously there were a lot of safety cars, I think we only had three or four racing laps. I think I overtook one or two cars, the other ones just spun or stopped. In the end, it was obviously a disappointing result overall for the team, regarding the situation with Dennis. However, not much more we could do as we didn’t have many laps. Hopefully tomorrow there will be more racing laps, and we can make something from where we’re starting.”