Formula 3’s Spanish round marked both the halfway point of the 2024 season, and it brought a first-time winner on home soil and a change atop the championship standings after the 100th race. Feeder Series examines the main takeaways of the weekend in Barcelona.

By Tori Turner

Boya’s maiden victory

Every driver with a home race on the calendar dreams about winning it, but only some can turn that dream into a reality. Home hero Mari Boya was able to do just that during Saturday’s sprint race.

Boya’s qualifying result of 10th put him third on the grid for the sprint. With a good start off the line, he maintained his position on the opening lap as several drivers battled behind him. But luck fell the Spaniard’s way when the Trident duo of Sami Meguetounif and Santiago Ramos collided in front of him on the third lap of 21, promoting him to the race lead as the safety car came out. 

Whilst Boya could have cruised to victory, MP Motorsport’s Alex Dunne didn’t make it easy for him in the closing stages of the race. Having piled pressure on him over several laps, Dunne executed a dummy manoeuvre to trick him going into Turn 1 on lap 16, but Boya was quick to defend his position. Another safety car in the last three laps meant Boya could breathe a sigh of relief knowing that there would be no further overtake attempts from Dunne.

The sprint race win was a fairytale moment for Boya. The feature race didn’t go quite as well, for he lost an eighth-place finish when he earned a 10-second time penalty for exceeding track limits too many times. He leaves the round ninth in the standings on 40 points.

Campos’ success on home soil

Mari Boya’s sprint race win meant Campos had three wins in three successive seasons in Barcelona with a Spanish driver after Pepe Martí took the feature race win from pole last season and David Vidales won the sprint in 2022. And whilst Boya’s victory may have been the highlight of the weekend for the Spanish team, their other two drivers also put out strong performances across the weekend.

By finishing third and fourth, Oliver Goethe retained his impressive statistic of being the only driver to have scored points in every race this season. Starting eighth on the grid for the sprint race, he was able to gain three positions on the opening lap, enabling him to move up to third after the incident between the Tridents. 

Even though he finished the feature race with a strong result of fourth, Goethe could have had more if it weren’t for a poor start that dropped him to eighth on the opening lap. Still, he recovered and finished fourth, one position higher than he started.

Despite not scoring points in either race, Sebastián Montoya also deserves praise for making up positions across both the sprint and feature races. The Colombian set a time of 1:28.748 in qualifying that was originally enough for ninth, but he was demoted to 27th on the grid for the two races after he was found to have violated track limits on that lap.

Nevertheless, Montoya showed that pace in the two races, making up a total of 30 positions on track, including 12 in the first three laps of the sprint. The highest position he reached in both races was 12th, although he collided with Minì in the sprint while attempting an overtake on lap 18 and crashed out at Turn 5. He finished 12th on Sunday, narrowly missing out on another points finish for the team.

Lindblad’s second win

Having previously won the opening race of the season in Bahrain, Prema’s Arvid Lindblad took his second win of the season during Sunday’s feature race, the 100th race in the series’ history. The victory made him the only driver across 10 races this season to win two races so far.

The British driver set a 1:28.499 in qualifying, putting him second for the feature and giving him his best qualifying result of the season. While he was unable to overtake polesitter Christian Mansell off the line, Lindblad waited until he could close the gap down to half a second before setting up his next move.

Having sat behind Mansell for five laps, the Red Bull junior snatched the lead away from the Australian driver on lap 5 by going around the outside at Turn 1. He pulled away and got a gap of more than six seconds over Mansell in the closing laps before cruising to the chequered flag in first, 4.447 seconds ahead. 

With his results this weekend – which also included a ninth-place finish in the sprint – Lindblad has emerged as a potential championship contender after cutting his gap to the championship lead from 28 to 13. If he can pick up more podium finishes, the series’ highest-placed rookie might just be able to close the gap even further.

Other title contenders struggle

Consistency has always been crucial in F3, with a single race having the ability to change a championship’s result completely. Many title contenders discovered that fact this weekend as the championship opened up even more.

Though their Prema teammate Lindblad qualified on the front row, Dino Beganovic and then–championship leader Gabriele Minì qualified only 14th and 15th, leaving them with ground to make up in both races to reach the points positions. Even though they were halfway down the grid, they were only five tenths off pole in what was one of the closest sessions in the series’ history.

Before coming to Barcelona, Minì had only failed to score points this season on one occasion in Monaco, when he finished 11th, but left the Spanish round with a further two non-points finishes. After retiring from the sprint because of the collision with Montoya, Minì only went backwards in the feature, ending up 21st by the end of the race.

Beganovic was able to gain seven points across the two races, but his two eighth-place finishes still weren’t enough to stop him from losing a position to Lindblad in the championship. 

As a result of the Prema duo’s misfortune and seventh- and third-place finishes of his own, Leonardo Fornaroli reclaimed the championship lead having previously taken it in his home race back in Imola. Despite not winning a race yet this year, the ever-consistent Italian has 84 points, ahead of Luke Browning on 79, Minì on 72, Lindblad on 71, Beganovic on 65, Goethe on 63 and Mansell on 58.

The championship order is changing with every round, and the race for the 2024 title is heating up as the season’s second half begins this weekend in Spielberg.

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency