Hitech Pulse-Eight driver Luke Browning will start from pole position for Saturday’s qualifying race at the Macau Grand Prix after beating Thursday pacesetter Gabriele Minì to pole by just six thousandths, the closest qualifying margin in event history. Feeder Series was on pit lane to capture all the action from Friday’s running at Macau’s Guia Circuit.

By Michael McClure

It took only about six minutes and 30 seconds for the first red flag to fly in F3’s second free practice on the Guia Circuit Friday morning. Theodore Prema driver Paul Aron went deep at Melco and failed to round the corner, causing a carpark to form behind him as drivers struggled to drive the suddenly narrowed line through the 20 kph hairpin.

It was a portentous opening to the day, which continued similarly through the rest of practice two and qualifying – stop, start, stop, start, stop, green and red flags alternating in a rapid, almost mocking cadence.

Browning and Alex Dunne had both clipped the wall at the same corner moments before – the former damaging his front wing, the latter his left-front suspension ­– and Browning, Mari Boya and Tommy Smith all went off at Lisboa once the session resumed.

But before anyone could set a competitive lap, Nikola Tsolov struck the barriers at Moorish with 16 minutes to go, parking up further down the lap and bringing out another red flag that lasted until six minutes remained.

It then became functionally a two-lap shootout for drivers to set competitive times. Minì and Dennis Hauger, two of Thursday’s leading lights, threw in the towel and joined their teams in spectating from pit lane. But others pushed a bit harder. Having each found the limit in their own ways during the session, Aron, Browning, Boya and Dunne made up the top four of the session – an ironic if largely academic statistic.

For Aron, finishing first offered a much-needed confidence boost after a separate incident at Melco at the end of free practice yesterday set him back for the rest of the day.

“We changed some stuff on the car from yesterday and it made a massive, massive difference,” Aron told Feeder Series. “Straight away from lap one, I felt much more confident, which is a key point on this track, and then I just started to build my speed off of that because to be honest, yesterday we were struggling a lot, and there wasn’t much to build on.

“It was just a good session and we managed to end it in first place, but we still knew we had a lot of margin. We knew exactly where to find it, so going into qualifying, we were pretty confident.”

But confidence, as Aron and others learned the hard way, doesn’t always translate into results with four red flags and a lot of desperation up and down pit lane.

Four red flags interrupt qualifying

Nobody had yet managed to set a lap when the first red flag came out 3 minutes and 52 seconds into the session. Tsolov had suffered another crash, heavily damaging the freshly rebuilt left side of his Alpine-liveried ART Grand Prix car by losing the rear at Police and hitting the wall.

With no cranes in the immediate vicinity of the incident, the Bulgarian’s car had to be loaded onto a flatbed truck and brought back to pit lane, causing a 15-minute delay. Unlike in practice, though, the red flag stops the clock in qualifying, meaning the ending of the session just got pushed later and later.

But teams did manage to complete their first runs and pit for fresh tyres before the next red flag came out with 11 minutes and 35 seconds to go. While completing out laps and wrmimg up their new tyresa, Isack Hadjar spun at Moorish and Sebastián Montoya got stuck at Melco shortly thereafter.

MP Motorsport’s Marcus Armstrong led comfortably at this point, setting a 2:06.072 before then going quicker with a 2:05.732 as the only driver under the 2m06s barrier. The 2023 IndyCar Rookie of the Year award winner, who has raced at Macau twice before, explained that he had been taking a more gradual approach to building speed across the weekend.

“It was a good session. This was the only session this week that I’ve really pushed properly,” Armstrong told Feeder Series. “We were pretty fast in the first run of Q2, but we also weren’t in a slipstream either. We were just out front, which is generally pretty difficult in Macau because it’s such a long straight.

“And then the second run, we didn’t find enough time on the first lap. Then I brushed the wall on the exit of turn nine. [There’s] a bent something over there – nothing bad at all but enough for me to basically not be able to do a better lap time,” he continued, gesturing in the direction of the mechanics repairing his car.

Forced to abandon his second flying lap, Armstrong parked up in Dona Maria with five minutes to go, around the same time as Trident’s Ugo Ugochukwu – who had sprung a surprise to be eighth fastest in his first race weekend outside of F4 – hit the wall at Police and rolled to a stop at Moorish.

The two stopped cars brought out the third and perhaps most decisive red flag of the session with five minutes remaining. A new order had taken shape, largely determined by who had pace and track space to improve on their original laps.

Williams junior Browning, with a 2:05.435, now led Alpine junior Minì by six thousandths having eclipsed the Italian’s benchmark from Thursday by nearly a tenth, guaranteeing that pole position would go to the fastest qualifier in session two. The second Theodore Prema of Dino Beganovic and the second Hitech of Isack Hadjar had also snuck in front of Armstrong, who was 0.023s ahead of the third Hitech of Dunne, the last car inside the 2m05s range.

Five minutes offered drivers enough time for a warm-up lap and, if unimpeded, a final flying lap. But the prospect of a one-lap shootout quickly faded when Hadjar had another incident at Moorish, this time destroying the left-rear corner of his car and facing backwards. The red flag came out for the fourth and final time, securing Browning pole position. The timesheets released by grand prix organisers later showed that Hadjar’s ideal lap time would have given him pole by two thousandths over Browning.

How Browning won pole – and Minì lost it

Browning undertook an extensive preparation regime to try to learn the Guia Circuit, but he explained that there was no substitute for track time.

“I [did] close to 1000 laps on the simulator at home, walking the track, looking at as many onboards as possible,” he explained in the post-session press conference. “You can do all this, but ultimately, this place is an animal, and when you turn up, it’s just about turning it on.

“I think no amount of preparation can prepare you enough for what you’re going to experience out there. I think I did as much prep as I possibly could have. I came into the event thinking there’s no more really that I could have done. I worked on every area of my life considering last year’s performance wasn’t exactly where I wanted it to be, so coming in first, pole in F3 at [Macau], it feels special.”

Browning’s upturn in pace came after he, like Beganovic, had problems with DRS in qualifying 1 yesterday.

“Every session up to this point was a mess. We had DRS not working in the first qualifying, and we didn’t use the second set of tyres [on the fastest lap yesterday]. We were still running on the same ones as FP. We knew we were going to be in a good place coming into qualifying, and we thought we were almost sandbagging before it. And luckily, we pulled it together in Q2,” he said.

“You can’t attack this place. You’ve just got to build up to it and massage yourself in.”

Hitech also took pole in 2019 courtesy of Jüri Vips, who went on to win the qualifying race before finishing second in the main race. That made for a useful reference for Browning even if his pole time was 0.438 seconds slower than the Estonian’s.  

“It definitely helps knowing that and seeing the data of last [race’s] pole position, but I mean every time you come here, we’re quite a lot slower than they were then,” the Briton told Feeder Series in the press conference. “The track changes so much. You’ve got the street cars going around in between the races, in between the days. We turned up to the FP2 today and it was very slippy.”

Minì attributed his loss of time to starting the lap too slowly, which put him on the back foot for the rest of the lap even as he made up time later.

It was a good lap, just started very slowly as we had to do the last corner in first gear. That’s already one tenth only in the main straight, and I guess that’s where we already lost pole. But we had another chance. We had two more laps, but we got red flags both in the middle of the fourth sector. I was going really quick, but for sure, everybody was on an improving lap,” he explained.

“It’s a bit like Monaco but three times harder and much longer of course. There are many more places where you can do a mistake and just end up in the wall. We know it’s not going to be an easy race.”

Balancing strategy and unpredictability

Not every driver was so lucky when it came to setting a fast lap. Friday practice pacesetter Aron encountered traffic on his second run, which meant he failed to improve on the time he had set on his first set of tyres. The Estonian wound up 14th in the combined order.

“Q2 was obviously a disappointment result-wise. I basically didn’t get a lap. The lap I got on the first run was filled with traffic, and after that, I didn’t complete a single push lap in the second set,” he said.

“Looking at the corners, compared to my teammates, I’m the reference, which shows that we had the pace clearly, but I was never able to complete a lap due to red flags. The one lap that everybody got, I had a driver lock up in front of me and basically I followed him, so that was that.”

As today’s running proved, teams and drivers face a race against time to set fast laps before the red flags inevitably come out. Pit lane position plays a major factor in determining who gets clean air and who doesn’t.

For this weekend, the order, from the start of pit lane to the end, is MP, Hitech, Rodin Carlin, ART, Trident, Theodore Prema, Jenzer, Campos and Van Amersfoort. Those at the end face several disadvantages in qualifying, explained VAR’s Marc Giannone, the team’s chief F2 engineer who is also supervising the F3 team this weekend.

“It puts you in a compromised position mainly because we’re going to be the most vulnerable to any caution situations, which happened today as expected,” he told Feeder Series.

“That being said, there isn’t much you can do, actually. There have been attempts, and we made some attempts, to jump a few cars and improve our situation, but the bottom line is that it doesn’t really help enough to be able to anticipate any red flags or yellow flag situation, which compromised our qualifying result. With that respect, you’re a bit of a sitting duck and a bit of a victim to what this session brings to you.”

VAR decided to send Smith out of sequence to the others, pitting him for new tyres earlier and sending him out while the others were in pit lane. But the Australian driver’s best time remained his first flying lap from his first run, which ultimately put him 25th in the session and last of the 26 cars overall.

“That was a team decision, [but] even for maybe a bit of a different strategy in that sense, it didn’t quite help his situation. In the end, he again fell victim of the nature of the track and the fact that we’re the last team in pit lane,” Giannone explained.

“We go for the more practical option, which is we try to get a lap time set regardless of the circumstances and to stick with the flow, which is again, given our pit lane position, to stick with the flow of cars ahead of you. When in the pack, priority number one is to try and get a lap time in, and the second one would be to try and start in sequence with the cars in front of you.”

Fellow Dutch team MP have a much more advantageous position in that regard. Their trio of Armstrong, Boya and Hauger usually led the queue of cars around the circuit, though that meant that the lead driver went without a slipstream.

“It’s useful that we can go out and command the circuit. It worked well. It depends when the othe teams go out as well, of course. It can also bite you where you’re on a portion you stand a chance of getting traffic on the flip side. But it worked out okay,” team manager Jeremy Cotterill explained to Feeder Series.

“The first couple or three places [on pit lane] you’re a bit more. It’s no huge advantage. Staying out of the walls is a better advantage.”

MP is the only team besides Hitech to have all three of its cars starting in the top ten tomorrow, with Armstrong fifth, Hauger eighth, and Boya tenth. Both Armstrong and Cotterill still target victory in the main event as a three-team contest between MP, Hitech and Theodore Prema begins to take shape.

“You’ve got to finish it, but you’ve also got to make some progress. You’ve got to be brave, but you’ve also got to be clever,” he said. As for qualifying: “Coulda, shoulda, woulda been better. But I guess if you speak to the other 23 drivers, they’ll all say the same – apart from maybe one.”

The qualifying race is set to start at 15:50 local time (7:50 GMT), 10 minutes before the scheduled start of qualifying for F1’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.

Header photo credit: Macau Grand Prix Organizing Committee