PREMA experiences dominant weekend at Red Bull Ring
Coming to Red Bull Ring for round 2 of the Euro 4 Championship, Freddie Slater grabbed two wins and a third place at the Austrian venue, fighting back to championship contention after an up-and-down opening weekend at Mugello. The series delivered three action-packed races in different weather conditions with multiple positive aspects all around for the team.
Slater dominated a dry Race 1 in front of two teammates, rookie winner Tomass Stolcermanis and Kean Nakamura-Berta. For PREMA it was a full lockout that extended to the rookie podium. Stolcermanis had a breakthrough weekend, as he posted his maiden pole and consistently had good results and pace. Lining up from P1 in Race 2, he fought with Slater, which resulted in a 5-second penalty for the Briton that eventually did not affect his placing. On the other hand, Stolcermanis bounced back with a third place in Race 3.
Despite coming from a tough qualifying run, Nakamura-Berta got to the Race 1 podium with a very promising recovery, and achieved additional points in Race 2 before being involved in a multi-car contact in Race 3.
Rashid Al Dhaheri continued to perform impressively. The Emirati got his first Euro 4 podium with a second place in Race 3, which adds more weight to his positive Italian F4 showings.
Both Alex Powell and Dion Gowda experienced improving weekends despite some early struggles. Powell posted a rookie win in Race 3 and an overall top-5 finish to wrap up the event, while Gowda managed to find his way into the points after qualifying outside the top-20.
With PREMA now in the lead of the Team Championship and Slater only 11 points away from P1 in the Driver Championship, Euro 4 will be back in two weeks for the 2024 finale at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya.
#14 RASHID AL DHAHERI
"Quite an up and down weekend. It was interesting with the changing weather, you would wake up in the morning and see what the conditions were. I think we did an excellent job of adapting. Race 1 was very unfortunate for how it ended but we showed we had a great pace in the dry. We put everything together in the last race, gaining a lot of positions and overall doing a good job."
#27 FREDDIE SLATER
"The team gave me such a mega car all weekend in every condition we had, and my engineer did an amazing job staying cool under pressure. We had wet, dry, and then slicks in the rain, not easy conditions at all, but the team was great. We bounced back from Mugello and we look forward to going to Barcelona in a couple of weeks and see if we can get the championship wrapped up."
#33 TOMASS STOLCERMANIS
"The performance from me and the car was really good since practice. Conditions for qualifying were new, but we had a great speed, finishing third and first in Q1 and Q2 respectively. That pole position means a lot to me as it is my first in Formula 4. Race 1 went well too, starting from third and going up to P2. I battled for the lead but I didn't have enough to win. In Race 2, I started first but made a couple of mistakes and finished fifth. In the last race, I started third and even got into the lead, but I went off which cost me some positions. Not the best way to end the weekend but we definitely made some progress."
#50 DION GOWDA
"We struggled with pace a little bit in qualifying, and we were on the back foot for that. However, we made up good places in all the races, and always moved forward. We managed to get again into the points in the last race from P22 and that was a positive. Hopefully, we can find more pace in Barcelona."
#51 KEAN NAKAMURA-BERTA
"We were on a back foot after we struggled for pace in qualifying. Then in Race 1 we went from P9 to P3, I was quite happy with how it ended up, and in Race 2 we had a pretty solid drive from the mid-pack to P7 in the wet. In the last race, I was caught in a first-lap incident. Starting at the back there are a lot of things that can happen. Qualifying put us in a tough place for the rest of the weekend, but overall it was quite an okay one."
#80 ALEX POWELL
"It has been a super tough weekend in general as we have had a few difficult rounds as of late. I'm happy to have finished such a challenging weekend in a positive place with a rookie win and a P5 finish overall. We have quite a lot of work to do, look in depth into the data to find what we went wrong and figure out a few things. That's what we will do in the weeks off we have before Barcelona and we look forward to the next round with a positive and open mind."