Robert Shwartzman ended the year with a dominant lights-to-flag victory at the Hockenheimring to jump into third place in the Drivers’ Championship, while Mick Schumacher ended his championship-winning campaign with a second-place finish.
In what is the final race in the current guise of the FIA European Formula 3 Championship, Shwartzman held the lead from pole position into turn one and was thereafter untroubled, clinching his second victory of the season by 10.511 seconds from his Prema Theodore Racing team-mate.
Schumacher finished second but a couple of mistakes, much like the ones he made during Saturday’s second race at the Hockenheimring, left him under pressure from behind, with Hitech Bullfrog GP’s Alex Palou and Prema Theodore Racing’s Ralf Aron finishing on his tail.
Aron was later penalised for a first lap incident that saw his Estonian countryman Jüri Vips spun around at the hairpin, with the twenty-seconds relegating him from fourth down to fifteenth overall. He had been alongside Palou on the run down to the turn only to seemingly misjudge his braking point, tipping Vips into a spin.
Aron was lucky to avoid immediate retirement as Sacha Fenestraz found himself unable to avoid him, with the Carlin driver riding over the rear wheel of the Prema car before heading to the pits to retire due to the damage.
Daniel Ticktum was the first beneficiary of Aron’s penalty as he moved up to fourth for Motopark, with the result confirming him as the runner-up in the championship behind Schumacher, albeit by fifty-seven points at the end of the thirty-race season.
Guanyu Zhou ended his season with a five-placed finish for Prema Theodore Racing ahead Carlin’s Ferdinand Habsburg, with both passing Motopark’s Jonathan Aberdein who claimed seventh in his final race of his rookie campaign ahead of Hitech Bullfrog GP’s Enaam Ahmed.
After his first lap rotation, Vips was one of the stars of the race as he climbed through the field, with the Motopark driver finishing tenth on the road, which became ninth with Aron’s demotion. His last move on Sophia Flörsch got him into the top ten but he was too far away from Ahmed to make any further gains.
Flörsch should have inherited the final point for Van Amersfoort Racing but also took a penalty for avoidable contact, promoting her team-mate Artem Petrov into the top ten.
Jehan Daruvala was running fourth early on but a mistake exiting the final turn saw his suspension break, leaving the Indian as a spectator for the rest of the morning.
Hockenheimring Race 3 Result
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