F3 - RICCIARDO ON FRONT ROW AT OULTON PARK
- 27 May 2013
West Australian Red Bull Junior driver, Daniel Ricciardo, has claimed a front row grid position for both races in the opening round of the British Formula 3 championship at OultonPark. Having dominated practice on Friday Daniel was second in both qualifying sessions in his first British F3 outing.
British Formula 3 title favourite Daniel Ricciardo got his first race weekend of the season off to the perfect start by setting the fastest time during official testing today. The Australian Carlin Dallara-Volkswagen driver lapped the Oulton Park International circuit a full half a second quicker than Nick Tandy's JTR Mygale-Mercedes during three 50 minute sessions.
Reflecting on his most dominant testing performance in British F3 to date, Formula Renault Eurocup graduate Ricciardo said: "The car feels really good in both wet and dry conditions and we have been very quick in the all the sessions, so that should allow me to sleep a little better tonight. It's only practice of course, but if I can drive like I did today for the rest of the weekend then we should be in pretty good shape."
British Formula 3 veteran Max Chilton claimed a surprise pole position from Australian team-mate Daniel Ricciardo - five tenths inside reigning champion Jaime Alguersuari's 2008 pole time and 1.5s under the lap record.
Pre-season title favourite Ricciardo led the timesheet for much of the session, which was punctuated by a red flag 10 minutes in when Victor Correa went off at the Brittans chicaine, tore off the front wing and damaged the left front suspension on his Litespeed SLC Mugen-Honda.
When the session resumed, Ricciardo, Chilton and Fortec driver Riki Christodoulou all took turns at the head of the times – shaving thousandths of a second off each other's times, all in the 1m28.1s bracket.
With five minutes left, Ricciardo banged in a 1m28.105s lap and thought he'd done enough to take the top spot, until Chilton milked his moment of inspiration.
"There wasn't much more to come from the car," admitted Ricciardo. "It was good before the red flag, but afterwards I think the tyres went out of their operating window and the track got away from us a bit. I had some high-speed understeer and wasn't great at picking the gaps in traffic, but we're still on the front row and hopefully we can go better in the next session."
Austrian racer Walter Grubmuller claimed pole position for race two while Australian Carlin driver Daniel Ricciardo found only 0.002s of a second compared with session one, but his 1m28.103s lap was good enough for another front row start.