Ivan Taranov has made an impressive start to his return weekend in the Protyre Formula Renault Championship, topping the timesheets in pre-event testing ahead of the championship’s final rounds this weekend at Silverstone.
Despite sitting on the sidelines for the best part of three months, the Russian showed no sign of rustiness as he improved on sixth quickest during the morning session to set the outright best for the day in session two, producing a best lap of 56.436s in his Scorpio Motorsport-prepared FR 2.0.
Newly crowned 2013 champion Chris Middlehurst was second fastest, 0.124s adrift of Taranov, with Sam MacLeod close behind, just 0.057s slower than the champion.
Pietro Fittipaldi ran well to end the day fourth fastest, while an equally impressive run came from Piers Hickin, the first-year driver going sixth fastest on his first weekend with Scorpio.
Weiron Tan split them to end up fifth as he heads into the weekend aiming to cement his second place in the championship, with his Fortec Motorsport team-mate Wei Fung Thong seventh ahead of Jake Cook, Jorge Cevallos and Henrique Baptista.
Core Motorsport’s Ashley Crossey was the quickest of the newcomers in fifteenth position, lapping just 0.1 seconds fastest than fellow newbie Alex Gill.
Qualifying for the weekend’s races takes place tomorrow (Saturday 28th) at 10:25.
