Ferdinand Habsburg has taken an impressive maiden victory in the FIA European Formula 3 Series as he worked his way up through the field from eighth place on the grid, race 1 winner Lando Norris exited on the first lap after getting caught up in an incident.
In a near carbon copy of the opening race of the weekend, Lando Norris led the field away from pole position and as the field approached Les Combes, the Prema Motorsport pair of Callum Ilott and Guanyu Zhou overtook the Carlin driver. As the cars bunched up there was contact, pitching the Chinese driver in to a spin.
David Beckman was also caught up in the incident but managed to get back to the pits along with Zhou, Norris however was out of the race.
Thankfully this time there were no safety cars needed as the competitors cleared the track. Further around in the opening lap Maximilian Günther overtook Ilott with ease.
While Günther started to pull away, a battle for second place was breaking out between Ilott and Jake Hughes, trading positions numerous times. Behind this fight, Habsburg and Jehan Daruvala were having a battle of their own.
As the race hit the halfway point, Ilott caught and passed Günther, and it wasn’t long before the German was back in charge of the race and the British driver was left to defend from Habsburg.
The Austrian manage to ease passed Ilott in to second place and while this was happening Hughes was closing in, in the space of five minutes Ilott had dropped from challenging for the lead to fourth position.
With 6 minutes left of the race, Habsburg passed Günther whilst Ilott lost another position to Joel Eriksson. As the clock counted down, Habsburg pulled out a lead of 2 seconds over one lap. By the time Ilott rounded the start/finish line he had lost another place as he dropped to sixth place.
On the penultimate lap Eriksson moved in to second pace with Günther hanging on for third place. Habsburg crossed the finish line to take his first European F3 victory with an advantage of 2.117 seconds over Eriksson and Günther.