After taking his maiden GP2 series pole position in Hungary on Friday afternoon, Alex Lynn crossed the line to take his first feature race victory ahead of Pierre Gasly and Sergey Sirotkin.
The DAMS driver had managed to keep his head down from the start and drove a clean race throughout in order to come home first in the heat of Budapest ahead of his team-mate.
Gasly made a quick start when he jumped from fifth to second before the first corner, with the Frenchman taking advantage of the poor start from championship leader Stoffel Vandoorne. The Belgian driver suffered on the start when he was not only jumped by Gasly but also by Arthur Pic and Raffaele Marciello.
Vandoorne would pit immediately when the pit window opened, but found himself and his ART Grand Prix team under investigation for an unsafe release after the Belgian was released from his stop directly into the path of Carlin driver Julian Leal. Although Vandoorne found the pace, he had to settle for fifth in the end.
Using an alternative strategy to Vandoorne, Lynn led for a long stage before his own pit stop, exiting the pits on the faster soft tyre in fifth before making a number of relatively simple overtaking moves on Mitch Evans, Alexander Rossi and Pic to move into second, before catching and passing Vandoorne for the lead.
Gasly pitted a lap later than Lynn, but was able to follow his team-mate through into second, while Sirotkin left his move for the final podium position late when he made a bold move down the inside of Campos Racing driver Rio Haryanto, the Russian making contact with Haryanto as the Indonesian failed to defend the move, losing the position which pushed him down into fourth.
Jordan King finished behind Vandoorne in seventh in the Racing Engineering machine. Despite his tremendous start, Marciello finished the race in eighth just ahead of ART Grand Prix’s Nobuharu Matsushita. King and Marciello saw themselves respectively move into sixth and seventh when Vandoorne took his five-second time penalty for the unsafe release.
Robert Visoiu managed to finish ninth for Rapax, whilst Daniel de Jong rounded out the top ten for MP Motorsport to take the final point. Those drivers who made early starts having started on the soft tyre and switching to the medium struggled at the end, with Rossi dropping to twelfth ahead of Pic, while Evans was only seventeenth.
It was an unfortunate day for Sergio Canamasas when he took a knock from Nicholas Latifi on the second lap and found himself in the barriers, which saw the safety car deployed. The Spaniard climbed out the car, frustrated by the incident which saw his hard work at the start of the race undone. His team-mate Nick Yelloly also had an unfortunate day when the British driver retired with nine laps to go, meaning both Hilmer Motorsport drivers didn’t finish.
The second race of the weekend in Hungary takes place on Sunday morning with the sprint race, Matsushita starting from pole alongsite team-mate Vandoorne.
