Pietro Fittipaldi has taken his second win in the Protyre Formula Renault Championship at Donington Park after dominating the first of three races in the second meeting of the season. The MGR Motorsport driver capitolised on a slow start for Fortec Motorsport’s Alex Gill to leave the pole sitter in his wake heading into Redgate Corner, from then on no-one could dislodge him from control of the race.
The #21 machine carried Fittipaldi to an impressive 1.4 second lead after the first lap, which grew over the course of the race to a 4.2 second margin of victory. Pietro grabbed the two points for fastest lap to boot, which put him to the top of the championship table after four races.
Icing on the cake came in the form of the new class lap record for the Donington Park National layout, set by the Brazilian on the final lap of the race.
Fittipaldi explained his strategy post-race saying, “The most important thing we talked about before the race was getting the lead into Turn One, you can do that here at Donington from second on the grid and that’s what we did, We were consistent, everything came together and we got the win. I can’t thank the team enough, they prepare the car and they did a great job, and my sponsors for giving me the opportunity.”
With Fittipaldi gone away Gill was forced to defend from a determined Colin Noble Jr in the #45 MGR Motorsport run machine in the early stages. Later the pressure doubled as an impressive run from seventh on the grid put Piers Hickin from Scorpio Motorsport in the fight for the podium spots.
Hickin pounced on Noble as the trio started their third tour. A move into Redgate corner put the round 6 pole sitter into third and on the tail of Gill. Setting blistering lap times, of a level to rival Fittipaldi let alone the struggling Alex Gill, Hickin used his favoured Redgate rout to knock the #7 car back to third. The #9 car’s advance then halted but the hard work was done, Hickin continued his unbroken streak of podiums in 2014.
Gill couldn’t relax even after Hickin made the pass. He came under pressure again from the Noble Nissan backed #45 who led his MGR team mate Matteo Ferrer home for fourth and fifth respectively. Cliff Dempsey Racing’s TJ Fischer grabbed sixth almost six seconds ahead of the final MGR entered Tatuus FR2000 in the hands of Tarun Reddy.
Rapid Greek Dimitris Papanastisou took eighth place ahead of Patrick Dassault and the best of the SWB Motorsport runners Atte Lehtonen. Hayden Edmonds yet again got the better of Milton Keynes based Sam Oram-Jones for the battle of the SWB new drivers while the perennial back marker was Jersey racer Jack Butel.
