Jehan Daruvala has won the opening European Formula 3 race at Spa in an action-packed event where a retirement for Marcus Armstrong lost him his championship lead.
Daruvala started the race from pole but a slow start allowed Alex Palou to briefly take the lead, before Daruvala came back at the Hitech driver to retake the position after the safety car period caused by first corner contact between Nikita Troitckii and team-mate Sacha Fenestraz.
After being leapfrogged by Palou at the start, second-on-the-grid Marcus Armstrong’s race went from bad to worse when he was forced to retire from a puncture caused by contact with Ben Hingeley.
The pair were battling for third when the incident occurred, which also dropped Hingeley down to 18th.
Third went to Prema’s Ralf Aron although there was a substantial gap to the leading pair, which was enough to put him into the championship lead.
He was beginning to be put under pressure from the charging Dan Ticktum in the closing stages of the race but the Brit ran out of laps to make the move.
Ticktum began the race in 13thbut battled his way up to fourth, ahead of Mick Schumacher who had a similar charge up the field from 16thto fifth.
The pair benefitted from not only the misfortunes of Armstrong and Hingley but also a puncture for Guanyu Zhou who had been running fourth for much of the race, as well as contact between Aron and Enaam Ahmed which left Ahmed with broken suspension.
Ahmed was making a move for third when the pair touched and he was forced to retire from the damage.
Robert Shvartzman finished in sixth ahead of Juri Vips who was relegated to seventh after losing places to both Schumacher and Ticktum towards the end of the race.
Marino Sato, Artem Petrov and Fabio Scherer rounded out the top 10.
