SJM Theodore Prema Racing driver Gabriele Minì was untouchable in both practice and qualifying on Thursday as FIA F3 cars returned to the Guia Circuit in Macau for the first time in four years. Feeder Series was on site to capture the action from the opening day and speak to the key players in the brewing battle between Theodore Prema and Hitech.

By Michael McClure

The first practice session on Thursday morning was also the first occasion that 22 of the field’s 26 drivers got to drive the 6.120-kilometre, 24-turn street track. Remarkably no major incidents occurred until the midway point of the 40-minute session, when ART Grand Prix’s Laurens van Hoepen crashed at Lisboa.

Minì held the lead of the session at that point and continued to do so until Luke Browning went quicker with eight minutes to go. MP Motorsport’s Marcus Armstrong and Theodore Prema’s Dino Beganovic enjoyed brief stints at the top of the timesheets before Browning bettered his previous benchmark by two seconds with 4:24 to go. Minì, however, eclipsed the Hitech Pulse-Eight driver by 0.429s with 35 seconds to go, becoming the first driver to breach the 2m07s barrier over the four-day weekend with a 2:06.871.

“At the beginning, we were still very quick,” the Italian explained to Feeder Series. “It’s just that after a red flag on the first two push, we couldn’t get a lap in, so in the end, we didn’t have a competitive time and we dropped back [to 13th place]. And then, on the last opportunity, it was a decent lap – very clean and no big mistakes.”

Minì revealed he was aided by a significant slipstream in the flat-out sector one. But the fourth sector – a challenging section that includes Police, Moorish, Dona Maria and the Melco hairpin – was where Minì excelled in both sessions, setting sector times several tenths faster than what anyone else did.

In the first of two qualifying sessions to be held this weekend – drivers will be ordered for the qualifying race on Saturday according to their fastest time across both sessions – the Alpine junior ended with a 0.497-second advantage over Browning. He had found 1.35 seconds between the two sessions, though others further down the field made even bigger gains.

Minì also had a much tighter grip on the lead in qualifying, only losing it for a few minutes at the end. Hitech’s Alex Dunne sprung a late surprise to go fastest with 2:40 to go before teammate Browning usurped him. At one moment, a Hitech 1-2 appeared inevitable, but Minì retook pole position with his final flying lap, while improvements from Beganovic – who reported having DRS issues on his fastest lap – and Dennis Hauger knocked Dunne down to P5, one spot ahead of the third Hitech of Isack Hadjar.

With lower stakes on Thursday and no championship pressure all weekend, the normally intense F3 paddock had a palpable lightness and buzz. Drivers who are normally blasé with media lightened up as they reflected on the experience of driving at Macau after months, if not years, of anticipation, and the more than doubled pre-race track time relative to a standard F3 weekend also mitigated the ramifications of mistakes.

Finding – and exceeding – the limit

Thursday’s running was as much about building confidence and momentum as it was about not crashing, Browning said about his approach to qualifying. The British driver came close to losing it all, though, saving a conspicuous moment of oversteer in the penultimate corner early in qualifying.

Others, however, weren’t so lucky. A few minutes before, Campos Racing’s Sebastián Montoya had crashed at Lisboa seven minutes into qualifying in an accident reminiscent of Van Hoepen’s, bringing out the first of three red flags and rendering him unable to continue in qualifying.

“The accident changes a lot. It really changes the approach for the rest of the weekend,” Montoya said. “Around here, it’s a lot more tricky than, for example, Monaco, where for example if you push the [Nouvelle] chicane, you have a little bit of runoff. Here, a lot of the exits, you can see that you have the tyre barriers. You think that you have more room than you actually have, and the next thing you know, you’re in the barriers.”

After re-watching the onboard footage of his accident that evening with his team, Montoya said he realized he may have been overconfident.

“My teammates, they both said… ‘It seemed like you were going to make the corner.’ It was just a little bit too much a little bit too early.”

Seven minutes after the session resumed, Trident’s Ugo Ugochukwu ran wide at Lisboa and stalled, bringing out the second red flag. A third and final one came out with 10 minutes to go after Zane Maloney hit the wall at Police corner and parked up exiting Moorish with a broken left-rear suspension.

Maloney, the 2022 F3-runner up, returned to Rodin Carlin F3 machinery after having raced for the British outfit in F2 this year. But given the lateness of the crash, the Barbadian driver was less worried about the consequences of the incident.

“I think it’s a good thing that I crashed today [to] get it out the way,” he explained. “We have a long weekend here in Macau. It feels short, but then you realize how long it actually is, and today really means nothing for anyone. It’s cool to be fast today because it means you’re fast – which we were – but I mean, Q1 is never faster. It’s always going to be [about] Q2.”

Maloney participated in the post-season F3 tests at Jerez and Barcelona in October before coming to Macau. How much did that added track time help him?

“I think any car testing on any track won’t prepare you for what Macau’s bringing. I realized that straight away in practice, so I don’t think the testing helped me much,” he answered. “We’re all starting from under the limit to build up to it, so I think whatever car you’re coming from, of course there’s adaptation. I mean, someone doing the season in F3 this year is in a better place, but I feel like it’s been a good day of adapting to the car on track.”

A breakthrough for Dunne

Not all drivers have the advantage of either in-season experience with the Dallara F3 2019 or official post-season test days in the car. The least experienced driver in that regard is Dunne, whose sole day of testing came on the rain-affected second day at Imola.

The Irishman was 10th in the dry morning session and fastest in the wet afternoon session there, but even with some additional preparation time in the simulator, he didn’t expect to be so far up the field on his first day at the Guia Circuit.

“If you told me I was going to be P5 after Q1, I probably wouldn’t have believed it! I definitely exceeded my expectations, I think, never being here before and it being my second time ever in an F3 car,” Dunne told Feeder Series after the session.

“I’m surprised to be as quick as I was, to be honest. Obviously, I believe in myself and I know that I’ve been quick in other things in the past and I was quick at the test in Imola, but I think to be this close to the sharp end at a track like this, with the little bit of experience I have in the car, is something to be pretty happy about.”

Having three cars in the top six and one on the provisional front row satisfied Hitech F3 team manager Paul Bellringer, but he believes more is on the table – not least a repeat pole position after Jüri Vips led the way for the team in 2019.

“We’d be happier if it was 1, 2 and 3! But on balance, I think 4, 5 and 6 is good considering it’s a new track for the guys and no one’s been here since 2019,” Bellringer told Feeder Series.

“I think all three did a good strong job. Luke this year was quick in Monaco, he was quick in Melbourne and he does like the street circuits. For Isack, obviously he’s driven the F3 car for a season, but now he’s just done a season of F2, so to step back in with no testing and that, there’s a bit of readjustment of getting used to that. And then for Alex to step in, he’s only done one day of testing when it was at Imola. To step up and do what he’s doing in the F3 again, he did a good, really good, strong, solid job as well.”

Managing tyre allocations and red flags

Hitech took a notably different approach to most teams in qualifying, pitting all three of their cars midway through the session to put on new tyres. The team then switched back to their original tyre set for the final run.

Bellringer explained that the decision reduced the chances that the team would be compromised by traffic.

“I think the problem was because of the red flags and the way that we sort of planned our session to be, we were mindful of the fact that we didn’t want to get out of sync with everyone else – that if we were going to run on the new tyres, we didn’t want to find ourselves trying to go for push laps when everyone else was on an out lap, a warm lap or a cool lap,” he explained.

“I wouldn’t say it was cat and mouse, but it was a little bit of a waiting game just to try to get back in sync with everyone else.”

Theodore Prema followed a more standard strategy of having each driver use one set for all of Thursday. This translated into first and third for Minì and Beganovic and 12th for Paul Aron, who had a difficult day after hitting the wall at the outside of the Melco hairpin late in practice.

“Tomorrow is the day that counts,” team principal René Rosin said. “But we have to build it up to make sure that everything goes in the right direction. Of course, Gabriele and Dino have done a mega job considering that we didn’t put new tyres. Some others have put new tyres – the three Hitechs, [Nikola] Tsolov have put new tyres.”

The challenge, of course, is that teams are only allocated four sets of the dry-weather tyre, which for this event is the medium-compound Pirelli also used in the main FIA F3 Championship this year.

Drivers must ipso facto use one of those new sets in practice and teams usually allocate one set for the main race, leaving teams with a compromise to take: sacrifice speed in the first qualifying session to have two sets for the second, or use a new set in the first qualifying but then only have one new set for the second, in which times are traditionally faster.

Rosin’s approach is clear. “It’s been quite a normal strategy in Macau to keep the tyres for later. Of course, we would like to have new tyres for the final race. [For qualifying 2], we’ll have new tyres for sure. We’ll have two sets, I think.”

But at Hitech, who went for the second alternative, more will depend on what happens in tomorrow’s qualifying session.

“It very much is dictated based on how the session goes. As we saw today, there’s a fair degree of red [flags], and you can certainly find yourself on the wrong side of what was a good strategy through no fault of your own,” Bellringer said. “It’ll be very much a prepare for all options thing and play our hand as it pans out.”

Clarification, 17 November, 6:15 CEST: The Hitech drivers set their fastest laps in qualifying on used tyres after switching back to their original set during the third red flag period.

Header photo credit: Macau Grand Prix Organizing Committee