R-ace GP drivers Tuukka Taponen and Zachary David started and finished first and second in the first Formula Regional Europe race of the weekend on Saturday before post-race penalties dropped David and R-ace teammate Enzo Deligny, the original rookie winner, down the order.

By Michael McClure

While the Finn sailed to victory from pole by 3.142 seconds, the Filipino-Maltese racer had to spend the end of the race defending from a queue comprising Van Amersfoort Racing’s Brando Badoer, Deligny, ART Grand Prix’s Alessandro Giusti and Prema Racing’s Rafael Camâra, all of whom were hungry for second place.

In attempting to keep second place on lap 17 of 19, David struck a kerb at Turn 7 and momentarily lost the rear of the car as the faster Badoer closed in.

The Van Amersfoort driver tried a move around the outside of Turn 9, but both drivers went wide on the exit and rejoined with Deligny right on their tails. David then held the inside line at Turn 11 as Badoer tried another move and again ran wide.

Then Deligny found himself in the wars as he battled with Giusti and pushed him wide exiting Turn 14. This sequence of events helped series leader Câmara, who started eighth, close up to the pack and overtake the ART Grand Prix driver down the start-finish straight.

The Ferrari junior attempted a second pass around the outside of his Red Bull junior counterpart, who responded by running wide in Turn 1 and sending his rival even further off track.

Deligny then locked up and ran wide on his own entering Turn 2, ceding positions to both Giusti and Câmara. He crossed the line sixth, less than a second ahead of rookie championship rival Evan Giltaire.

The results were set to represent a season high for the team, which had only taken three podiums from the first six races and had struggled to match the pace of runaway points leaders Câmara and Prema at times in 2024.

Team principal Thibaut de Mérindol said he thought the team’s upturn in pace on Saturday was not down to track characteristics or the rain that affected qualifying in the morning.

“I don’t believe it’s related to the track, to be honest. I believe it’s more deep analyses and understanding of what we might have done wrong in the first three events and putting more everything together,” he told Feeder Series Saturday evening in the Hungaroring paddock.

He praised Taponen for having “managed the race from the start to the end” en route to his second victory of the season and his seventh at the Formula Regional level from 22 starts.

The race on Saturday was “very good until minute 28,” De Mérindol said, referencing the sequence of incidents that began with David’s error in Turn 7.

Those incidents earned his drivers numerous post-race penalties, spoiling any hopes of a first 1-2 of 2024 and voiding Deligny’s first appearance on the podium in Formula Regional competition.

The move on Badoer at Turn 9 earned David a five-second post-race penalty, and he received another for moving before the start lights were extinguished. The combined penalties meant he was eighth when Feeder Series asked him about his race in the afternoon.

“It was pretty well managed until the end,” he said. “Things got a bit messy in the end, and it didn’t work out for us.”

David admitted that he had “been feeling better in general” about the car this weekend and said he “didn’t really care so much about the tyres” while holding off those behind him.

“We’ve been working pretty hard back in the factory, us drivers, the engineers, the whole team, and I think we’ve found a couple of things that are working for us. Obviously, there is still things that need to be improved, but we’re getting there.”

Deligny also received five-second penalties for each of the incidents with Giusti and Câmara. These dropped him out of the points.

“It’s a bit unfortunate for them, obviously, but also for the team because we lose important points for the teams’ championship,” De Mérindol said. “Overall, I’m satisfied anyway because we’ve been struggling a bit with the pace since the beginning of the season, and this weekend we feel that we have much better pace than we had at the previous rounds.”

David promised to approach Sunday’s track action “with the same mindset as today”. While De Mérindol believes the two penalised drivers “need to turn the page and start a new day” mentally, what does he make of the team’s chances to sweep the weekend?

“This weekend we have the pace to fight for pole of groups and for wins, so I would say that’s the goal, but at the end of the day, you can also miss for only a few thousands or few hundredths, and it doesn’t mean that you did a bad job. So what I’m looking for tomorrow is that we operate good, the drivers perform good on track, the car performs good,” he said. “We are confident in the pace for all of them, the three drivers.”

Later in the evening, David and Deligny were both promoted one place in the classification after the Saintéloc trio of Enzo Peugeot, Théophile Naël and Matteo de Palo were disqualified for not having a diffuser fixing screw on the right side of the car.

Saintéloc has appealed the results, which remain provisional. The disqualification of Peugeot, who had been sixth, promoted David to seventh and Deligny to 14th.

Taponen’s win put him on 88 points helped him close the points gap to Câmara to 63 points. In the teams’ title race, second-placed R-ace are on 136 points, 54 behind Prema.

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency