- Hitech racer on wrong side of tiny qualifying margins
- Sprint and feature races blighted by additional setbacks
Dino Beganovic left round six of the FIA Formula 2 Championship without adding to his points tally after flashes of opportunity went unexploited in Barcelona.
With the F2 field being well familiar with the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, qualifying was always expected to be an acutely close-fought affair at the Spanish venue, which hosted the official pre-season tests earlier this year. That also proved to be the case, with 21 cars covered by less than 1.2 seconds in Friday’s grid-deciding session.
Beganovic unfortunately wound up on the wrong side of the miniscule margins, ending up 12th fastest – just 0.360s off the front row, and crucially a mere 0.030s shy of P10, which would have rendered reverse-grid pole for Saturday’s sprint race.
Instead lining up in the tightly-packed midfield, Beganovic ran in ninth when a safety car was called with just eight laps to go in the sprint race. It opened up an opportunistic window that saw all the cars behind, and one of those ahead, pitting for soft Pirelli tyres.
Beganovic, however, was not brought in for new rubber and was unable to defend from his fresh-shod rivals once the race resumed. He finished in 15th place.
“Starting off the weekend, I was not quite comfortable and quick enough in qualifying, and it left me just outside the top ten,” says Dino Beganovic. “We’re talking very, very small things, but when the margins are as fine as this, it adds up. It put us on the back foot for the rest of the weekend, but then a great opportunity presented itself in the sprint race and in hindsight clearly we should have pitted.
“That would have left me P2 in the group that did, and looking at how fast the new tyres were, there is every opportunity we could have made a podium out of it. It’s in the past now, but it’s something we can draw some strategic lessons from.”
In Sunday’s concluding feature race, Beganovic then suffered a technical issue that caused his Hitech machine to lose power on several occasions mid-race, adding up to a time loss of between 10-15 seconds. For the second day in succession, the Swede found himself 15th at the flag.
“We started on the alternative strategy on the hard tyres, and after the issues mid-race, we decided to just try and go as long as possible and hope for a safety car,” Dino Beganovic concludes. “A tough weekend in many ways. It’s nice to have a little bit of a break now to look through these last few races and analyse where we can improve. It’s still more than half the season to go, so all still to play for, and we’ll push on as hard as we possibly can.”
Following an intense triple-header of back-to-back events, the FIA Formula 2 Championship now heads for a short break. Racing resumes at Spielberg, Austria, on June 27-29.
RESULTS
FIA Formula 2 Championship
Rd. 6 – Barcelona (ESP)
Race 1 (Sprint Race)
1: R. Verschoor (NED), MP Motorsport
2: A. Dunne (IRE), Rodin Motorsport
3: R. Villagómez (MEX), Van Amersfoort Racing
—
15: D. Beganovic (SWE), Hitech
Race 2 (Feature Race)
1: A. Lindblad (GBR), Campos Racing
2: S. Montoya (COL), PREMA Racing
3: R. Verschoor (NED), MP Motorsport
—
15: D. Beganovic (SWE), Hitech
CHAMPIONSHIP STANDINGS
FIA Formula 2 Championship
After 6/14 rounds
1: A. Dunne (IRE), Rodin Motorsport, 87 p.
2: R. Verschoor (NED), MP Motorsport, 84 p.
3: A. Lindblad (GBR), Campos Racing, 79 p.
4: J. Crawford (USA), DAMS Lucas Oil, 73 p.
5: L. Browning (GBR), Hitech, 73 p.
—
10: D. Beganovic (SWE), Hitech, 29 p.
