Van Amersfoort Racing’s Santiago Ramos beat polesitter Rafael Câmara to victory in the Formula 3 feature race at Imola after the championship leader fell away in the closing laps and came home third behind Trident teammate Noah Strømsted.

By Tori Turner

Ramos appeared a threat to Câmara’s hopes of a hat-trick from the beginning of the 22-lap race. The Mexican driver, starting second, headed into Turn 1 beside him before braking later and passing him around the outside of the next corner. The two drivers remained close throughout the opening two laps as they broke away from the rest of the field.

Once Câmara gained DRS at the start of the third lap, he brought the fight back to Ramos and easily made the move heading into Tamburello on lap four. The Trident team told him he was ‘doing an excellent job’ but noted that the DRS was ‘extremely powerful’ – which he came to realise later in the race.

In the meantime, Strømsted passed Rodin’s Louis Sharp for fourth on lap six. The Mercedes junior, who started third, had lost positions to Tuukka Taponen and Sharp on the opening lap of the race but regained them both by lap 10, when he passed Taponen at Tamburello.

The first and only virtual safety car of the race came out on lap 12 after VAR’s Ivan Domingues pulled off at Turn 4 with damage from contact with AIX’s Brad Benavides on the previous lap. 

The VSC period was short but critical. When green-flag conditions resumed on lap 13, Câmara remained ahead in first, but Ramos got a good jump and used it to stay close to the Ferrari junior. It took Ramos another six laps to make a move on Câmara, but when he did on lap 19, he executed the race-winning overtake at Tamburello. 

The win slipped even further from Câmara as he ran wide for the second time at Acque Minerali, giving teammate Strømsted the chance to pass him and take second. As Trident ordered Câmara not to fight his teammate, Strømsted hunted down Ramos in the final three laps of the race but ultimately fell short.

While Strømsted did not have enough laps to make the overtake, the gap between him and Ramos at the end of the race was just 0.277 seconds. Ramos’ margin of victory was the smallest in an F3 race since Zak O’Sullivan won by 0.219s in the 2023 Melbourne sprint race.

The 21-year-old, who took his maiden victory in this year’s Melbourne sprint race, also secured Van Amersfoort’s first feature race win in F3. He joined current Alpine F1 driver Franco Colapinto as the only other VAR F3 driver to win twice in a season, with the Argentine doing so in the Imola and Monza sprint races in 2022. 

Though he missed out on a podium, Taponen achieved his fourth points finish in a row with fourth ahead of Mari Boya, who drove an impressive race from 10th to fifth. Saturday’s sprint winner Tim Tramnitz also made up five positions to finish sixth. Both he and Alessandro Giusti in seventh passed Roman Bilinski on the penultimate lap.

From the third row of the grid, Bilinski managed only eighth and Sharp finished 12th in the points despite running as high as fourth early on. Nikola Tsolov finished ninth, aided by a last-second overtake on Noel León just before the virtual safety car, while Laurens van Hoepen took 10th for his first points finish of the 2025 season.

Câmara leaves the round with 73 points in the drivers’ championship, 21 points more than second-placed Strømsted. Trident have a 59-point advantage over MP Motorsport in the teams’ standings.

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency