Luke Browning took a commanding lights-to-flag victory in the qualifying race Saturday for the FIA F3 World Cup at the Macau Grand Prix, but perhaps the bigger story of the day was his Hitech Pulse-Eight teammate Alex Dunne’s second-place finish in his first race in F3 machinery. Feeder Series spoke to the top three drivers after the race.

By Michael McClure

Saturday at the Guia Circuit had a noticeably different atmosphere, with touring car and GT races frontloaded on the schedule as F3 closed out the day’s running in the afternoon.

A sizable accident for Adderly Fong after the exit of Mandarin Bend in the FIA GT World Cup qualification race brought out the red flag as barrier repairs were necessary, which pushed back the entire day’s running. This meant that the F3 race got underway 25 minutes later than planned, though with no less fanfare given the high excitement around the F3 event’s long-awaited return.

Drivers had 10 laps around the Guia Circuit to get a final read on tyre performance, race pace, and areas for improvement ahead of the main race on Sunday, which will be 15 laps in duration.

Williams junior Browning, starting from pole position, made a strong getaway to ease into a lead of more than two seconds over Theodore Prema driver Gabriele Minì by the end of the first lap. The pair had run side by side through Mandarin Bend entering Lisboa before Minì backed off in the braking zone, but the big mover was Alex Dunne, who had leapfrogged three cars to be third in the queue.

The safety car was then deployed for a crash between Ugo Ugochukwu and Dan Ticktum, for which the former received a 10-second post-race penalty converted into a three-place grid drop. A restart beckoned at the end of lap four, and Browning would have to tackle Lisboa all over again from the front, without the aid of slipstream.

After Reservoir, he moved left, then right, then left, then right to try to break the tow Minì was getting before the Italian driver succeeded in pulling to his outside exiting Mandarin. Their separation allowed Dunne to get the slipstream off Browning and dive to the right for what would become the inside into Lisboa.

The cars briefly went three-wide, but Browning braked latest while Dunne followed him through the right-hander. That was ultimately the deciding move in the race, as the top three never again got close enough to one another for anyone to attempt an overtake while Browning pounded in consecutive fastest laps.

“That was pretty sketchy. It was not easy out there, really wasn’t easy to stay focused,” Browning said in the post-session press conference. “All the walls are coming at you so quickly, and that three-wide moment into T3 was definitely eye-opening, to say the least. I broke as late as I could. I put it all on the line and it was as much as I was willing to risk, and it was just enough.”

Browning, who had a snap of oversteer at the final corner on the restart, said that the three-wide moment on lap 5 was spurred by unpredictability.

“You’re not sure how you’re going to level up by the end of the straight, whether one of us is running lower than the other and therefore has slightly more top speed or one’s running more wing than the other. But it seems that we were more or less completely even, and it was enough to keep on the inside, which is obviously the prominent position going into T3.”

Dunne had gone past Beganovic on the opening lap using the slipstream, but that was on the outside of the straight before Lisboa. The second time around, he took the opposite line in setting up the move.

“I managed to nail the restart. Got a really good run out the last corner and then I slipstreamed up to the top two and then three-wide into T3 but I didn’t risk it all on the brakes. Wanted to keep my nose clean,” he said.

“Two weeks ago, I didn’t even know if I was going to be doing the race, and now, to be here in my first F3 race and finishing on the podium is a special feeling.”

Dunne’s achievement – a podium on debut in an F3 car at Macau of all places – calls to mind a similar accomplishment at the 2010 edition of the event by Daniel Abt, who finished third in that year’s qualifying race. Abt was driving the Dallara F308 car for the first time at the race after having driven the previous generation F306 to second place in the German Formula Three Championship, but even then the difference in machinery was not as stark as what Dunne faced in jumping from GB3’s Tatuus MSV-022 to the Dallara F3 2019.

Minì might have wanted to keep second place at the restart, but try as he might, forcing a move around the outside at Lisboa would have had deleterious consequences, he said.

“Today we were probably not the quickest, but I still tried to overtake Luke into turn 1 twice – turn 1, 2 and 3 – both at the start and at the restart,” Minì said.

“Luke left the door a bit open for Alex, so then I just didn’t want to be the guy three wide on the outside in turn 3, which Is never going to end up well. So I just lifted a bit earlier and let them by. [I] didn’t have the pace to overtake them today.”

Minì knows better than perhaps anyone on the grid how to defeat the Hitech cars, having raced in one himself this past season in F3.

“I know very well how the car is working,” he told Feeder Series. “Coming into [Macau], I knew they were going to be tough to beat. Until yesterday and two days ago, we were pretty close to each other.

“We were probably the quickest in qualifying. in the second qualifying. We were very similar and today they were just very, very quick. As I said, we will try and keep working today to see what we can improve, what I can improve myself in the driving.”

From laps five to 10 of the qualifying race, there were no safety car interventions or red flags, giving drivers their first proper chance at doing a long run around Macau to evaluate tyre performance. The top three told Feeder Series about how they found the warming and degradation to be.

“The micro-macro around here, being the two ways that you can describe the track surface, is super low. It’s one of the smoothest circuits we race on on the calendar, and therefore having the medium tyre here was a pretty sensible option,” Browning said.

“Especially with the walls being so close, having a lot of deg might have been pretty tough, and we didn’t have that today, so I think Pirelli did a really good job. We had some overheating but we weren’t through the tread depth at all. I have to say it was a thoroughly enjoyable feeling, the grip through them, and it was enough to propel me today.”

Dunne raced on Pirellis this year in GB3, but the F3 tyre comes with its own challenges, with which he was less familiar given he only had one rain-affected F3 test day before the Macau round.

“I’d say I went into that race a little bit blind. I never really experienced it fully before, but I think the car was good, and with the car being good, it makes my life a little bit easier with the deg,” he said.

“I think the deg here is definitely a lot lower than you would see at other tracks in F3, which is probably helping me a little bit for it being my first race. But I think the car was good, and I managed it pretty well.”

Minì said, “In the end, we were expecting much more degradation, to be honest, than what we had today. We did all the laps in a row, and we never suffered by a real graining or degradation.

“Of course, it was not easy to put them up to temperature. I remember that during the safety car [I was] wheelspinning still in third gear before restarting, which of course is never ideal going into the first lap, but in the end, it was not an issue.

“The same thing – we just had a bit of overheating, but no big degradation. Of course, tomorrow will be different with new tyres and with hopefully a few more laps without the safety cars, but we’ll see how it goes.”

The main race gets underway Sunday at 15:30 local time (7:30 GMT).

Header photo credit: Macau Grand Prix Organizing Committee