MGR Motorsport’s Matteo Ferrer is celebrating his first ever race win after claiming victory from pole in the second round of the Protyre Formula Renault Championship for 2014. The Italian racer streaked away after holding off his team mate Pietro Fittipaldi at Speedway 1 on the first lap. Never headed in the 16 lap encounter, Ferrer took his first win by an astonishing 7.633 seconds.
The only blight on his race was a late turn of speed by second placed driver Alex Gill. He turned in the fastest lap of the race on lap 12, after battling race long with the #9 Scorpio Motorsport machine of Piers Hickin. Gill is working on a recovery plan for his season after he failed to finish the first round when his Fortec Motorsport run car took damage at Deene hairpin. There were no such problems for the sixteen year old today.
Hickin took third place after running in second for much of the early part of the race. While unable to impact on the pace of Ferrer, the Briton did manage to keep ahead of Gill and Fittipaldi. His pass on the #21 MGR machine took a lap to set up, with a failed attempt at Tarzan on the first lap followed by a successful dive to the inside at Deene on lap two.
From then on attention was riveted on the rise of Alex Gill who started down in fifth and piled early pressure on his targets to progress. First to fall was the #45 Noble Nissan backed entry of Colin Noble Jr, who fell to a long range lunge at Tarzan. Next up was Fittipaldi who was duped by a similar move at the second corner. Finally Hickin fell, after a forceful resistance at Deene, to almost a photocopy of Gill’s move on Noble at Tarzan.
Fittipaldi held on to fourth place at the line despite taking a hit from his team mate Noble Jr. The Radical SR1 Champion lost aero in the slipstream from the Brazilian, lost the car and subsequently dropped from fifth to ninth by the flag due to a missing front wing. That left Ben Barnicoat to take fifth place ahead of Wolfgang Reip, which put all three Fortec drivers in the top six.
Cliff Dempsey Racing will also be celebrating a strong finish after American racer TJ Fischer took seventh and Canadian Patrick Dassault finished in tenth place. Splitting the two Cliff Dempsey drivers was a brace of MGR cars, Tarun Reddy leading home the lamed Colin Noble.
SWB Motorsport’s Atte Lehtonen pipped Circulation Motorsport’s Niklas Tiihonen to eleventh in one of the closest finishes of the race. Dimitris Papanastasiou had a lonely race at the back after an off on Steel Straight. The Hillspeed driver only bettered the #96 machine of Jack Butel, who finished thirty-one and a half seconds further back
