FIA Formula 3 put on a show in the championship’s first race of the season. After 19 laps full of fun battles and risky moves, it was Formula 4 graduate Arvid Lindblad who took his maiden F3 win on his debut. The Brit displayed great overtaking prowess and good racecraft, a perfect recipe that helped him both the win and the championship lead. Together with selected media, Feeder Series talked to today’s winner right after the opening race of the year.

By Daniele Spadi

In what was perhaps the most exciting opening race in the championship’s short history, Lindblad stayed with the leading pack after a tricky start that saw him drop by one place down to fifth. By the halfway point, he began making his way through the field, and it was clear that he had the chance to fight for the win. When he took the lead from Nikola Tsolov at the start of lap 15, he never looked back.

“[It’s a] really good result, really happy to win on debut,” he said after his efforts in the sprint race. “I’m quite inexperienced compared to those around me, so I knew going into this year it was going to be really challenging. But yeah, we started off on the right foot, so hopefully, we can try to continue like this.”

Perfect tyre management

Right after the start, Lindblad was wise to let his rivals battle it out in the first few laps, concentrating on saving his tyres instead, a tactic he already had in mind ahead of the race. “There’s a lot of degradation here in Bahrain, so I knew it was going to be important to manage them well, especially in the first few laps,” he said.

“So yeah, I tried to manage as best I could. I wasn’t too worried when [the guys in front] got away a little bit but obviously didn’t want the pickup to get too big because the DRS is so powerful, so I knew I needed to stay really close.”

With so many on-track battles, it was clear that some of the drivers would struggle with tyre wear at the end of the race. Lindblad could have been one of them after some of his overtaking attempts did not go to plan and resulted in a couple of lockups. However, the Prema rookie did not seem to be affected by them and built a five-second gap in the final five laps of the race.

“The few lockups are definitely not ideal,” the Prema driver told Feeder Series. “It didn’t help the tyres. I felt immediately after each lock up a little bit of loss of performance on the front, but it didn’t seem to affect me too much.”

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency