On a very wet Friday, Formula 3 put on a show in the penultimate qualifying session of the season. At the end of a thrilling session, it was championship hopeful Pepe Martí who managed to claim an ever-so-important pole position around the legendary Belgian track of Spa-Francorchamps. With championship leader Gabriel Bortoleto down in fifteenth position, the Spaniard now has a big opportunity to gain points and approach the final race weekend of 2023 in Monza as a clear championship contender. But with two tough races in changeable weather conditions ahead of him, the Campos driver still has a lot of work to do in Spa. Feeder Series had the chance to speak to the Spaniard after one of the best qualifying performances of his FIA F3 career.

By Daniele Spadi

In what can only be described as a session full of emotion and uncertainty, Martí showed amazing composure as he punched his ticket to the front row thanks to a last-minute wonder of a lap that handed him his second pole position of the season, his first since Barcelona back in May.

“Obviously, we went out quite late,” Martí said when talking about his final lap that gave him pole. ”It’s obviously a great feeling, obviously coming from quite a tough July, I would say.”

The Spanish driver looked competitive right from the beginning, but with a drying track and many variables ready to shuffle the standings, it was difficult to predict who would come out on top in such an eventful session. Though Italians Gabriele Minì and Leonardo Fornaroli were able to set impressive lap times right at the end of the session, Martí went fastest by 0.016s to take pole, a crucial result for his title hunt, given the fact championship leader Gabriel Bortoleto only managed to put his Trident in fifteenth position. 

“I’m focusing on myself. That’s the main thing for now. There’s a lot of things that can change from day to day, and anything can happen during the race weekend. I may win on Sunday and Gabriel may not take points, or it can be the other way around, he has a great race and scores more points than I would.”

Tricky conditions

Conditions were tricky for the penultimate qualifying of the 2023 season, the drying track giving plenty of drivers some trouble during the session, and many understood from the first few laps that pole would be decided at the very last second. Martí was on a good lap towards the final third of the session but decided to abort it in order to go back to the pits and wait for the track to improve until the very last second, a decision that eventually granted him the perfect track position for his final run.

“In Budapest actually, we took the decision the other way. We went quite early and did a double push, and it turned out to be the wrong decision,” the Campos driver told Feeder Series. “When I saw four minutes to go coming across the line, my engineer told me that maybe it’s better to maintain track position and go a minute earlier. I decided myself. I said, ‘I think today, let’s just wait,’ you know, wait a bit and do the lap time a bit later. Looking back, I’m happy to have taken that decision.” 

And it wasn’t an easy decision for him, as he was out of the top twenty with roughly five minutes left on the clock. “Obviously it’s a big risk: a red flag comes out, and you’re sitting in P25. It’s a risk that you take. Sometimes, it goes your way, sometimes it doesn’t, so I’m really happy that today didn’t go away, because obviously we got pole, but I felt like we had pace throughout the whole session.”

Ready to attack

Though qualifying gave the Spaniard a huge advantage for the rest of the weekend, his job is far from done. With now 42 points to gain on Bortoleto to be crowned the 2023 FIA Formula 3 champion, Martí needs every single point he can grab in the last four races of the season, and that’s why his approach to Saturday’s Sprint Race will be slightly different than usual. 

“I’d like to say full send! I think that tomorrow is the day to go forward,” the Spaniard said when talking about his strategy for the first race of the weekend, in which he will start from P12. “Especially as we saw in Budapest, I think that tire conservation and being nice to the tyre is something that naturally I’ve always done pretty decently […] so I feel like both tomorrow and Sunday are days to score good points like in Barcelona.”

The Campos driver knows that the races will be tough, especially with the weather being this difficult to predict. Although the sprint race will likely be wet, Sunday could see some dry running, which is something that no one has had the pleasure to try around Spa this season. 

“I think it would be tricky. We’ve basically had no experience, no running [in the dry],” Martí said when asked about a possible dry race after only driving in wet conditions so far this weekend. “For sure it’s going to be something that is going to be quite difficult to manage. […] It would be very difficult to understand how much you can push or where you can push.”

Though the conditions will likely be one of the main factors to consider, Martí knows this is a great opportunity to score the points he needs to gain on Bortoleto to take the fight for the title to the very end. 

“Obviously as much as I like to say that it’s not on my mind, the championship charge is on my mind. It would be nice to get to Monza in real contention. To be completely honest, if P2 is twenty-something points behind Gabriel I think it’s pretty much [impossible]. But if it’s ten, fifteen points, we’re talking a real different game.”

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency