Luca Ghiotto was able to claim his best Feature race finish of the season with second place at the Hockenheimring on Saturday, a result made more remarkable after starting down in fourteenth after a disappointing qualifying session where the young Italian was expecting so much more.
The Trident driver was able to pick up a number of places by making his rear tyres last longer than many of his rivals, passing them one-by-one, although he was unable to keep Sergey Sirotkin behind him on fresher tyres.
Ghiotto was able to pass Oliver Rowland to move into the podium positions, and then passed Raffaele Marciello for second late in the race.
“At the start I also lost some positions, so it wasn’t the key of the race!” said Ghiotto to the official GP2 Series website. “But we had a car which was managing the rear tyres well, which I think is the key at this track, and we could go a bit longer on the soft tyres, which I started on, so that was already a good thing.
“And I could overtake a lot of drivers too, on the medium tyres, and everything went well: the pit stop went well, fast, so maybe allowed us to overtake some cars in the pits, and I could manage the tyres well in the second part of the race.
“Okay, Sergey was too fast with the new tyres at the end, but compared to the others on the same strategy, like Marciello or Rowland, I was much faster and could overtake easily.
“So everything worked well, and after the VSC periods I could attack, and honestly I’m not surprised about this podium looking at the pace: of course I’m surprised because I started P14, but yesterday qualifying was not where we were supposed to be, because in Free Practice I was P4 and it’s my first time here in Hockenheim, so I thought we would fight for the top two rows in qualifying.”
